Because what poor people really can’t afford is dignity
By 
The Trump administration is proposing to save billions in the coming years by giving low-income families a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month instead of food stamps.
White House OMB Director Mick Mulvaney on Monday hailed the idea as one that kept up with the modern era, calling it a “Blue Apron-type program” — a nod to the high-end meal kit delivery company that had one of the worst stock debuts in 2017 and has struggled to hold onto customers. Mulvaney said the administration’s plan would not only save the government money, but also provide people with more nutritious food than they have now. . .
Kevin Concannon, who oversaw SNAP during the Obama administration, was aghast when he saw the proposal.
“Holy mackerel,” said Concannon, who said it reminded him of when poor people had to line up and wait for local officials to dole out food and other welfare benefits. “I don’t know where this came from, but I suspect that the folks when they were drawing it up were also watching silent movies.”
Other anti-hunger advocates said the concept was reminiscent of wartime rations or soup lines during the Great Depression. The Food Research and Action Center, a prominent nonprofit group, called the harvest box idea “a Rube-Goldberg designed system” that would be “costly, inefficient, stigmatizing, and prone to failure.”
George Orwell:
In London, he said, parties of Society dames now have the cheek to walk into East End houses and give shopping-lessons to the wives of the unemployed. He gave this as an instance of the mentality of the English governing class. First you condemn a family to live on thirty shillings a week, and then you have the damned impertinence to tell them how they are to spend their money.
Leaving aside that we can safely assume that any program of this type coming out of the Trump administration is likely to be a pure grift, the fantastic inefficiency of forcing people to eat what you choose to give them as opposed to letting them choose what to eat themselves should be self-evident. But far worse is the idea that the poor don’t deserve to be allowed to make choices, apparently because they’ve chosen to be poor.
I hate these people so much.