No matter what you say this will cost $1000's in gov't money and yes gov't employees time IS worth money. $1000's that could spent on GUARANTIED FOOD!!!! Not a chance at food from hunting in the OFF season.
Well - lets look at that. Lets say a guy has a 50/50 chance of getting an animal. (that's actually pretty low, off season and all. It's probably higher).
So - on average you're talking about half an animal per person.
A good sized deer provides maybe, what, 100 lbs of meat? That's pretty reasonable, right?
SO - 50 lbs of meat on average per person. That's for burger, roasts, steaks, etc. In the store, that meat would likely run something like an average of about 5 bucks a lb at least, with burger being less and roasts being more. And i'm probably being pretty generous there too - you get more roasts etc than you do burgers.
So about 250 bucks of meat per applicant. It will take likely about an hour max to process each applicant - explain what is needed, reveiw it, issue the tag. Then deduct the cost of the guy actually hunting. Fuel etc. Lets call that 50 bucks, which is probably fairly generous. I suspect most who take advantage of this will be fairly close to decent deer areas.
Including benefits and such, that's probably going to cost about 35 bucks of manpower for the gov't and 50 bucks for the end user.
So - end of day - we're talking about a net benefit of about 165 bucks. A hundred and sixty five bucks worth of groceries that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
To a guy who's not quite getting by, who's barely making ends meet or maybe just under, that's a godsend. he winds up on average with 200 bucks worth of meat for an out of pocket cost of 50 bucks. And it's good healthy stuff.
And frankly - i erred on the side of 'caution' with those numbers. I doubt it'll take an actual man hour to process it - i suspect the success rate for those who bother to apply will be higher. And there are lots of deer out there that produce more than 100 lbs of meat.
And none of this touches on the benefit of having someone feel like they earned their food instead of having to accept a charity handout. Self worth and depression issues can be severe when a guy is feeling like he's not providing for his family. At least this way if he can't be working or is working but not making enough money, he can feel like he did something for his food instead of feeling like a charity case.
So i'm not sure how you're calculating that somehow this is going to produce a net loss for people. I think you just don't like the idea that people will be out hunting and possibly getting animals you would have gotten - but lets face it, a guy having enough food for his family takes precedent over that.