The Senate has voted to end a special food allowance stateside that was conceived 14 years ago primarily to avoid more news reports of military families using food stamps. On that original goal, it failed miserably.
The idea behind the Family Subsistence Supplemental Allowance (FSSA) was to offer junior enlisted with large families an alternative to food stamps, in fact to make them financially ineligible for such assistance.
In doing so Congress affirmed that American society, and particularly its politicians, associate food stamps with poverty and, in the most negative sense, with government handouts.
Indeed seven years after enacting FSSA to try to separate military families from the food stamp program, Congress tried to reduce the stigma of food stamps by rebranding it as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP.
For financially distressed military families, however, food stamps or SNAP is much preferred over the FSSA, as the Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission explained in its final report. The Senate now has embraced report recommendations to accept a more realistic approach to military food assistance, and to make a first-ever commitment to track the true number of military households using food stamps.
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