Comment Re:Fail-safe (Score 1) 305
My thought was that allowing up to $50 is certainly not enough for a typically grocery trip, but that if the outage was of a short duration (measured in hours rather than days), that it might be sufficient. It's at least a system in place today rather than one that would ostensibly need to clear numerous political hurdles.
I think some of the other threads have covered that EBT is run more like debit than credit, so that the fundamentals of the system are different. Furthermore, if it were set up to behave more like credit cards with automatically approving purchases in the event of an outage, someone will be liable for the difference (the retailers? the states?), and each has large negatives associated with it.
EBT is also a political lightning rod, so any changes that may improve the system from one perspective may be viewed as unconscionable from another. However the numbers shake out, a vulnerable population was hurt, but preventing it again in the future may not be as simple as one would hope.