Kaus on "Food Stamps and the English Language" is just so good that I'm going to quote at length:

The editorial board of the New York Times declares:

In fact, food stamps are not welfare, not even charity, but a nutrition program that helps the poor buy food.

I love the bogus, whistling-past-the-graveyard authority of "In fact." ... Of course food stamps are welfare, under virtually all definitions of the term. The most common definition -- and my definition -- would define "welfare" as assistance that a) helps people get what they need to live and b) that's available to poor recipients even if they don't work. Despite some spotty "work requirements" decreed over the years, food stamps remain largely available to poor workers and shirkers alike.



It doesn't matter, then, that food stamps aren't cash -- they readily substitute for cash and can be traded for cash. It doesn't matter that, as the Times notes, many food stamp recipients actualy do some work -- many recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (the successor program to the hated Aid to Families with Dependent Children) work also. Indeed, the Times could just as easily have claimed that TANF itself is "not welfare, not even charity, but a financial assistance program that helps the poor buy food and housing." (Isn't housing and clothing as important as food?) But if TANF isn't welfare, what is? Like TANF and AFDC, the food stamp program is stigmatized, and rightly so, not because nobody on food stamps works, but because you don't have to work to get the aid ...



It's a measure of the Times' distance from the citizenry that they would think the average American might conceivably be bullied into agreeing that "food stamps are not welfare." ... (If you adopt a broader definition of "welfare" occassionally used by both liberals and conservatives -- in which any means-tested program qualifies -- food stamps are still welfare.)

And it's even more bizarre that the Times insists food stamps are "not even charity." Can't something be "a nutrition program" and charity/welfare? Or are soup kitchens just "nutrition programs?" Is something not charity if the government does it? Baffling.

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