Bet. Let's see YOU live on a SNAP budget eating nothing but bread, water and rice. Now food turns into a luxury item like government cheese from cooper cheese.
I asked ChatGPT how much money my family would receive from SNAP per month, and it's ~50% higher than our actual grocery budget. I have no idea if the numbers ChatGPT gave me were accurate or how my state compares to others, but it's all I have to go off of. I lost my job a couple months ago (not a big deal as I'd been expecting it for a while, plus I have another one lined up for next month and my wife makes good money), so I've been very focused on shopping smart and was pretty surprised at how far I could make our money go, even with current inflation levels.
Rice and beans are healthy and cheap, and there are a lot of different ways to prepare them using various vegetables and seasonings. A common meal I make for my family is to cook an onion in a drizzle of olive oil, add in 3 cans of black beans, 3 cans of kidney beans, 2 cans of diced tomatoes, and then season with cumin, black pepper, chili powder, paprika, and garlic powder. Serve that over 2.5-3 cups of rice, and sprinkle with a bit of shredded cheese if desired. The beans, onion, and tomatoes add up to about $9, everything else is hard to estimate the price of because I use such a small amount of the container (and buy the rice in 20 pound bags, I have a large family), but altogether I'd say it costs between $11 and $13 on the high end. It fills an extra deep 9" x 13" glass pan, is very filling, and gives maybe 10-12 full meal servings on average depending on who is eating it exactly. It's healthy, and very filling, much more so than junk food.
We also got a cheap bread machine from Walmart, and usually make a loaf of fresh bread every day - with only 6 easy to pronounce ingredients as a baseline. I bake banana muffins and cookies for the kids to take in their lunches every week as well, and while those things aren't exactly health food, it's still cheaper and healthier than buying them from the store, in addition to tasting way better and being more filling.
Anyway, my point with all that is for somebody willing to put in the effort to cook, a SNAP budget seems like it can pretty easily provide healthy meals with some good desserts as well for a "luxury". Junk food is made to be both addictive and not very filling, and is generally more expensive per ounce, so even though the actual price tag looks cheap, eating it ends up costing people way more than the healthier options. I think that asking for a bit of effort from people who are living off of the tax dollars of other people is completely reasonable.
