Wisconsin Republicans Would Spend Millions To Micromanage Poor People’s Shopping
Wisconsin would have to spend millions of dollars to realize a Republican scheme to restrict how poor people shop for food, state fiscal analysts revealed Wednesday.
The measure would prohibit stores from accepting food stamps to pay for any form of shellfish and put a new limit on how much a food stamps recipient could spend on a long list of other foods including dry beans, spaghetti sauce, and cooking spices. It provoked outrage from Democrats in the legislature, who used a recent committee hearing on the bill to point out bizarre foibles in the list of foods that Rep. Robert Brooks (R) proposes to constrain.
But at the time of that hearing, no one was able to say how much it would cost the state to implement Brooks’ idea. Now the state’s official bean counters have made their perspective on the bill publicly available, giving opponents more ammunition.
While exact costs are impossible to guess, the analysts wrote, “costs for Wisconsin would total several million dollars.” They base that estimate on very different SNAP programs in other states that required similar overhauls of cash registers and state computer systems. The analysis notes that the expenses would be too large for existing departmental budgets to absorb, meaning that the state would have to come up with new money for implementing the grocery store constraints at a time when the state is expecting zero revenue growth and Gov. Scott Walker (R) is proposing enormous cuts to the state budget.
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http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/05/07/3656326/wisconsin-food-stamps-restriction-cost-millions/
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