zimmerman8k said:
So they end up with slightly less. It's not hard to find certain goods that are easily resealable at very close to their market value. So they are only discouraged slightly.
Think about it, what is more likely, that a drug addict sells food stamps to buy drugs, or that they find it too difficult to sell the food stamps and they significantly reduce their drug consumption?
Furthermore, as I pointed out, there are administrative costs to the taxpayer, increasing the welfare bill for a policy with no proven benefits.
From a quick read of google results, seems America is starting to use a debit card instead of actual stamps. That still increases adminstration costs, although I'd say less than physical stamps would, at least long term.
Sri Lanka seems to have had (some) success with a food stamp program,
this study implies that increased nutritional benefit is seen with changes to food stamp benefits compared to simply throwing a bit more money at those on welfare. There are others that show that toddlers from families on the food stamp program (in the US) receive better nutrition than those not on the program, ditto for the elderly.
This study states that roughly 80-85% (scanned the first few pages, this number is based on the two initial nutrients mentioned) of participants on the program are reaching an acceptable nutritional level (based off of RDI). 50% of participants experienced some kind of food insecurity, of this 5% was classified as 'with severe hunger'.
There was also one on Jamaica but I either had to download it to read it or I couldn't access it, meh.
It seems that there are proven benefits though. America has the advantage of having had a food stamp scheme in place since 1964, however Sri Lanka adopted a program in the 70's and is saw fairly significant benefits over the first decade, the only failure of the scheme being it failed to reach the bottom 8% (who would need the assistance most). Australia implementing a scheme
should study other programs from around the world and try to avoid their shortcomings.
If there are other sources that totally descredit all this, I'll be happy to cop it. This was only a quick look through google scholar.