Florida Republican Socialists Piss Off Los Angeles Over Food Stamps

By Melissa McCart Tue., Jan. 31 2012 at 10:16 AM

Florida Sen. Ronda Storms is causing an uproar all the way to L.A. -- as seen in today's Los Angeles Times -- with her proposal to forbid Florida food stamp recipients from using the program money to buy junk food.

Storms' bill was approved by the Senate Committee on Children, Families, and Elderly Affairs, a result of concern over the health of poor children in particular, she claims. That, and it's just not fair: "If we're going to be cutting services across the board," she said, "then people can live without potato chips, without store-bought cookies, without their sodas."

And yet. According to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, almost 1 million individuals who are eligible for SNAP in Florida have not applied for assistance, which translates to $417.3 million in funding for food assistance that goes unused.

When a fellow legislator pointed out that if passed, Storms' legislation would prohibit a mother from buying her kid a birthday cake with food stamps, she said, "They can have cake. You can buy flour, eggs, and sugar, and that makes a cake. I make my kids their own cakes."

The L.A. Times rails against this "socialistic" legislation in today's editorial.
"The notion that poor people have any more time to cook from scratch than other Americans who rely on prepared supermarket 'junk' food is clearly absurd, and infantilizing them by restricting their choices in this way is demeaning." The paper is critical of the Big Brother approach over providing nutritional information.

Florida joins California, Illinois, and a handful of states in states trying to restrict food stamp purchases. Forty-six million Americans were on food stamps in 2011, up from 26 million in 2008.

Tags:

food stamps, junk food

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Daniel

Ronda can kiss my ass. I'll be buying myself a nice big chocolate cake this weekend with my EBT card. Suck on it, hag.

Tired of it

Go get your FREE cake, choke on it and go to the doctor FREE, and get the cavities fixed for FREE also. Anything I forgot? We are tired of paying for your lazy butt!

Frogger_love

Thing about this is they say to make home but when people do that it cuts their food stamps down extremely leaving them without enough food for the month I myself have food stamps and have done home made meals with everything and the last week an a half of the month I am without food because of how expensive ask those ingredients are to prepare the meals yeah cake may not be to expensive to make but meals for everyday of the month do get very expensive its easy for the ones that have the money and time to say make or from scratch but remember what we get in food stamps is ask that we have for the month even without buying junk sometimes its still not enough and we are the ones that have to go to a food pantry to get free food to be able to feed or children for the rest of the month just because we ask can't mask 100000 grand a year does not mean we should not be able to drink a pop or eat a candy bar once in awhile not everyone buys that stuff ask the time some times every once in awhile isn't going to hurt juice is considered healthy but most of it had more sugar in it than some pop or candy just because society thinks they know what's best for people does not mean it I'd right ppl with diabetes some times need that sugar to get it to go higher so what are you going to tell them when they can't get it with their food stamps but also don't have the money to buy it themselves obviously of they are getting assistance they don't have money most of us have just enough to get buy on or bills but if this padres why don't you tell the ppl that do screw the system that if they are getting help and can't afford any thing then they need to stop walking around with 500 dollar purses and to of the line name brand clothes and shoes but we can't do that can we let's not worry about the real problems with ppl and the system let's just mess with the ppl that have not done any thing wrong

Vicky

They specifically said that they wouldn't pass it unless the junk food restrictions were stripped out; maybe if you bothered to spent 10 minutes researching your work you wouldn't be so bad at what you do.