Laundering With Soda Pop

Kevin Williamson has an interesting essay on "The White Ghetto". It's about Appalachia, which is a huge span of countryside, which is sort of the opposite of what ghetto usually means. But, you know what he means. And it's a very depressing take, but I was quite struck by an interesting form of food-stamp laundering:

"Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda... Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash..."

Of course, this raises a puzzle: that family of four is still actually going to need some food.

The food stamp launderer must have known:
you cannot live on soda alone.