You've raised two very important points. The first being that food stamps are not intended to provide complete nutrition for an adult, but rather they are intended as a supplement.
The second point, and an extremely important one, is that those who stay on food stamps long term come mainly from a sub-population that is widely observed to habitually make bad choices in numerous areas of life. This business of making bad choices goes back to one's education, or lack of it, and is culturally influenced, I believe. If it is desirable to reduce the number falling into this category, and I think it is, then one has to start looking at causes and not be content to aim the bulk of government programs at treating symptoms. This has the effect of putting portions of the population into holding patterns that tend to persist over generations..
Practically speaking, it is going to be unproductive to spend much additional time and money on adult remediation -- a holding pattern may be the best that can be achieved for this cohort without incurring a very unfavorable cost/benefit ratio. Where the effort and time needed to treat causes should be focused,in my opinion, is in pre-K, primary and secondary schooling, and that is where massive changes are needed.
In its forty-eight year existence, the efficacy of headstart has been statistically evaluated, nearly continuously, in numerous studies. While most have concluded that there are statistically significant benefits, not all studies have, including one that has received a great deal of coverage in the media, e.g., Fox News. One 2007 study that looked critically at many other studies concluded that the benefits, though small and fading with time, nevertheless pass cost benefit criteria. Regardless, headstart and its parallel State sponsored pre-school programs, along with public education in general, demand close scrutiny with an eye to improving them where there is an indication that the cost benefit ratio can be improved. see for example, http://www.nber.org/papers/w12973.pdf?new_window=1
A well known Maryland study, the only one of its kind, concluded that racial integration in schools had little impact on student achievement compared with socioeconomic integration. The latter was found to have a large, statistically significant impact on student achievement of minorities. This might partially explain the significant benefit of State pre-school programs relative to those found for headstart, as the State programs incorporate, in general, greater socioeconomic integration, as well as having greater emphasis on cognitive skill development and better trained teachers compared with typical headstart programs. The latter programs are focused almost entirely on the indigent population, and out of necessity distribute effort among cognitive development, nutrition, parenting and mental health and social services.
Interestingly, the cost to the taxpayers of the recent government shutdown was estimated at about 24 billion, or about three times what the U.S. government spends on headstart each year.
