Hacker News Reader

Comment by clanky | Hacker News Reader

A lot of these things Trump doesn't want to actually do, and knows are totally infeasible, so he just throws them out there as a way to score points without actually spending any political capital. We just saw it today with the promise of $2,000 stimulus checks at the same time he's going out of his way to make sure people can't get SNAP benefits, even with state assistance.

View on HN

That isn't what happened at all. The SNAP funds have to be appropriated by Congress. Congress has not appropriated the funds. Some groups sued and some judge was asking the Executive Branch to break the law using some emergency fund or funds from WIC or other pots of money that aren't truly earmarked for SNAP. The Judiciary way overstepped there. Then, when a percentage of funds were made available via some mechanism, a few blue states jumped the line and took 100% of them, leaving most states high and dry sans funds. So that looks pretty bad--instead of an even allocation of a percentage, most people get nothing.

SNAP should be audited and there needs to be a way to limit the number of recipients because there's no way 42M Americans need it that bad. If they all do, then we're pretty far gone as a country.

As far as the $2k checks go, I have no idea. Sigh... Dumb dumb dumb! I just want the national debt paid down and the US Govt. to have a budget and live within its means without deficits. Is that so hard?

I do think Trump sends up trial balloons that exist solely to distract the media.

> SNAP should be audited and there needs to be a way to limit the number of recipients because there's no way 42M Americans need it that bad. If they all do, then we're pretty far gone as a country.

I might have some bad news for you. Come let me drive you around Louisiana.

The SNAP contingency funds probably are earmarked for SNAP. Whether they can properly be spent on benefits if there isn't a budget appears to be a harder question to answer. I see arguments being made in both directions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com