re: This is Why Groceries and Health Care Prices Are So High

This is what Republicans should be saying about healthcare:

Food stamps are also a corporate handout. You are really giving your tax dollars to the Walton’s

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If anyone wants free food it should be coming from their family, friends, church, and community. It has never been, is never, and will never be the responsibility of the government to give anyone welfare.

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It is, her dad's free cokes are coming from her (his family).

Should be a deep audit and force everyone to reapply to allow welfare programs

this is your people stealing…

big as she is drinking purple top Milo's? that is basically tea syrup.

now yellow top Milos?

EBT can't buy dignity. And without dignity she is useless in the eyes of society....she just doesn't know it.

Ozempic will solve that crap......

SNAP does not cause food inflation, for reasons spelled out below. I'll tell you what will cause food inflation, however - if you restrict SNAP purchases to the ole govt cheese and things like that, then SNAP will be confined to a lot fewer items and that means demand for those items goes up. Cheese, milk, and meat would probably go up 10% overnight. Then everyone on the internet would complain about those prices.

I've pointed out before that restricting SNAP will backfire and it will lead us down a road to less freedom. There are people that get mad at these videos and it's a righteous anger. There are also people that think various food restrictions should apply due to public health. It's only a matter of time before they seek to restrict these items for everyone in the name of public health. If you support SNAP restrictions, you are empowering those that will look to take away your freedoms later on.

Food is high because of covid, which was meant to destroy the nation and came pretty close to doing that. Walmart, Amazon and others made record profits during covid. Supply chains got smaller. More bottlenecks etc. That is causing the continued food inflation. We need more competition. We have foreign companies with large amounts of control in food processing. Trump should end that, split them up, transfer them to US owners, and prices will come down.

The truth is that inflation is causing SNAP benefits to rise. Before covid people often got less than $200 per month. It's now about $300. The CBO has projected that SNAP expenditures will increase beyond expectations in the future due to inflation. Not the other way around.

SNAP benefit is just under $300 per month. You see people with huge carts and receipts because the benefits are coming in for multiple people. Numbers I find indicate the typical person not on SNAP accounts for about $350 per month. Most of the time these numbers are by household (close to $900 per month), so individual numbers are interpolated. It's not possible for a minority that spends less than the average to cause inflation.

Right after covid hit, food went up over 10% in one year. USDA says that from 2020 to 2024 food went up about 24% - anyone that's been in a grocery store knows that is complete BS. It's way higher than that. Yet in that amount of time SNAP benefit totals have come down from about $120B/yr to about $100B/yr. When you look at food inflation by year and SNAP costs by year, you'll see a big jump in food inflation prior to increases in SNAP costs. And despite SNAP coming down almost 18% or so, food inflation still continues. What I see is food inflation is 2.5%, 2.7%, and 3.1% the last three years with 2025 being the highest. This is from usinflationcalculator.com. If SNAP was so impactful, for an 18% reduction, we would see deflation in food prices, yet they still go up.This past year, food inflation was highest in the past three years yet SNAP was the lowest. SNAP is not causing food inflation.

It's not mathematically possible for SNAP to be causing food inflation. The biggest thing we could do to lower food costs is to get more competition.

This is an excerpt from a 2023 article looking at consolidation of meat processors in the US:
In the cattle processing industry, spatial competition in the Eastern Mountain region (Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina) has fallen dramatically from an average of 59.9 “neighbor” processors within a 150-mile radius in 1991 to just 18.2 “neighbors” in 2021. This pattern is also true—though to a lesser extent—for the Great Lakes region (Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio), where the average number of other processing plants within a 150-mile radius has fallen from 14.5 in 1991 to 8.5 in 2021, and in the Northern Plains region (Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota), where the number of neighboring processors has fallen from 22.5 to 13.6 over the 30-year period of analysis. The “all plants” analysis in Table 2 shows similar patterns also exist for swine processing in the Northwest (Washington, Oregon, and Idaho) and Southern (Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) regions. In
these regions, spatial competition has fallen from an average of 19.4 and 20.5 neighbors, respectively, in 1991 to just 7.9 and 11.2 neighbors in 2021.
Conclusions with regard to regional competition are similar when we limit the analysis to the largest 100 plants for each species. For example, in the Northwest U.S., a cattle plant faced an average of three other plants within a 150-mile radius in 1991. As of 2021, such a cattle plant faced less than two competing plants.


We need more competition and a more decentralized food supply.

First off, how entitled do you have to feel to post that video of wasting taxpayer money for cokes and little Debbie's.

2nd, who the frick does she thinks is going to believe she's so busy she forgets to eat.

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SNAP does not cause food inflation,

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SNAP

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