Tax-Funded Ads for Food Stamps?

Seems Glenn Beck caught a radio ad singing the praises of food stamps, and Becket Adams, a long-term member of Team Beck, thinks the ad inspired one of Beck's best TV routines:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/watch-becks-epic-radio-segment-after-hearing-taxpayer-funded-food-stamp-ads/

I can't watch the video here, so I can't comment on that part of the story. Instead, I'll address an issue some other commenters have brought up: "If food stamps could be used to buy diapers, the diapers would be resold for cash."

Likely they would. And when food stamps are used to buy food--whether it's junkfood, or "good healthy food," or the kind of healthy food, e.g. whole-wheat bread or whole milk, that's actually more harmful to some bodies than junkfood is--that food is likely to be resold or bartered, too.

It's just human nature: Even when people are reduced to begging for food handouts, they have this nasty human tendency to feel that they need other things as well as food. Soap, shoes, gas, help moving furniture or removing poison ivy from their yard, a sparkly new white dress for a granddaughter to wear in a church program on Easter. The only way to make sure they eat the kind and amount of food you've deemed appropriate for them, and get nothing else whatsoever, is to take the time to deliver the food and then sit down and watch them eat it. Otherwise, you run the risk that they're going to decide that, in any given month, there may be something else they need more than they need some of that food.

Alternatively, of course, you could try to get some help for that control fixation. Breathe deeply. Why do you think you need to control what other people do? Breathe. What part of your life seems to be out of control right now, creating this unbalanced compulsion to control someone else's life? Breathe. Feel your fear. Breathe. Face your fear. Breathe. Maybe you need to call for help, but you can release that clutch on other people's lives and choices. Breathe. Maybe those who have less than you actually know more about what they want and need than you do. Breathe. You can live with that possibility.

The tighter we clutch at control of what people do with any form of welfare, the more creative fraud we push people into. The whole idea of food stamps is based on thinking, "We're willing to give this person food, but we don't trust this person with actual money." Why not? Maybe there is a valid reason for that kind of thinking; maybe the person needs to be in some sort of drug rehab program. Or maybe the person is as competent to handle actual money as we are, but just happens not to have enough of it. If so, why are we trying to limit that person's opportunities to earn more money on his or her own initiative? Maybe we need to get out of the way, overlook a little chicanery at the outset, and give the person a chance to start doing more legitimate work.

There is, occasionally, a welfare recipient--even a welfare cheat--who actually prefers honest work to welfare-cheating, and will do honest work if not prevented from doing it. If reselling unwanted handouts is someone's first move toward honest work, how bad is that?