Such juvenile and stupid thinking. What makes people believe complex problems that many smart people have worked on have such simple solutions. I expect this level of thinking uneducated idiots, not a college grad.
Apart from the human dignity aspect of forcing limited choices on people just because they are poor, your system will be more expensive and will not work as well. It is economically less efficient than foodstamps. Let me humor you.
We switch to foodbanks and that will make abuse disappear. how? why? If we define abuse as taking benefits that you really don't need and therefore shouldn't qualify for. What about food banks will change that? A creative fraudstar will just go to the foodbank, collect non-perishable items in bulk e.g. canned foods. He will then proceed to the parking lot of the neighborhood grocery store. And sell those canned foods at half price for cash. He is still making a profit (since he got it for free), and the buyer is still getting a deal, they are buying it cheaper than they would at the grocery store. Basically, all you end up doing is exchanging trade of foodstamps for trade in canned goods. There will still be shady indivually owned corner stores stocking their shelves with food bought from food-bank resellers. You haven't reduced fraud one teeny bit. You have just succeeded in changing the form.
How about the program administration cost? It will definitely increase! How? changing to foodbanks doesn't change the cost of determining who should and shouldn't be eligible for how much. So that part of the cost stays the same. But here is where the increase comes from. For food banks, you have new logistics cost (i.e. the cost of making sure the right goods are available at the right locations at the right time). Right now, grocery stores shoulder the cost of logistics because that's their business. Giving out foodstams means government just doesn't have to do with food logistics. Switching to foodbanks entirely, creates a whole new cost structure.
So recap, we get new additional costs (mostly from logistics) without any decrease in eligibility determination cost, and no tangible decrease in fraud. Basically, a program that does less, costs more and wastes more. What a stupid solution. Go back and think some more. Half-baked idiotic ideas won't cut it.
