Beat me to it. I almost thought of auto posting the exact same thing right after I read it, but I continue to hold to good etiquette of reading the whole article before commenting. There is, indeed, plenty of news that isn't necessary to consume maximally, and it's good to have sites like this that act as a cleaning filter.
Maybe "instaposting" would have been better--simply to immediately make that comment after reading that first paragraph, without reading anything else.
Yeah I try to keep up with the important stuff with the shutdown but yeah there is absolutely zero need to read the “tiger beat on the Potomac” day to day articles.
By the way, I can’t remember who came up with “Tiger beat on the Potomac” to describe Mark Halperin’s work but bravo to you as it has stayed with me ever since and yes impacts my news reading habits. Such a revelation to me how much daily political reporting (think Politico especially) is just not different than celebrity gossip magazines. The difference is the latter is under no delusion that they are providing profound insights about the world or their own self importance.
I can't believe I'm playing devil's advocate here because you're describing a conclusion I reached myself many years ago, but my rough sense is that the celebrity-gossip level stuff actually does (or at least did, especially pre-McConnell) matter a fair bit as to how the sausage gets made. The issue with "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" isn't that the subject matter is entirely vapid ephemera (though doubtless most if not a supermajority of it is), it's that it's *indistinguishable from vapid ephemera from the perspective of its readers.* If you can't exercise any agency over the day to day bullshit then it is just a celebrity gossip rag.
To use an analogy: if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marital status were inexplicably tied to whether SNAP benefits continued, but your degree of personal interaction and influence over them were unchanged relative to the present day universe, then the only thing that matters (other than for stock trading and prediction markets) is the single bit of information are they / aren't they divorced. You still shouldn't buy the Hollywood Reporter.
Yeah I'm being a little bit extreme in my opinion for sure. Mark Halperin turning out to be a giant POS and yet also being held up as the great sage of political reporting is definitely influencing my dismissive opinion of this type of journalism. I agree, it turns out politicians can be petty and like their egos boosted (shocker I know) and this can influence whether bills pass. Trump takes this pettiness and need for ego boosting to an absurdist degree, but yeah it did actually turn out that there a bills they may have died or at least were more difficult to pass because a particular congressman or senator was butt hurt about their seating placement at a state dinner.
I think my dismissive attitude to this journalism is also a function of the fact that this was sort the entirety of political journalism when I was like 16/17 and started actually reading the news carefully. If there are any younger commentators on here, I wish they knew how important people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias were to bringing actual data and intellectual rigor to political analysis. Like, it's almost banal to point this out now, but it was actually revelatory at the time to point out that most "Independents" are not actually "Independents" but partisans who for quirky reasons didn't register as one party or the other (this was me by the way. Registered "Independent" while also actively working for Democratic campaigns).
It reminds a ton of the dismissive attitudes old baseball heads had to analytics back in like 2001-2004. What is the crazy new fangled statistical crap? I know baseball, unlike these pointy headed nerds! Now, pointing out that On base percentage is more important than batting average in judging a hitter is almost dull because it's so obvious to everyone. At the time? Actually controversial.
By the way, I don't think I'm making a particular profound point to say it's not a mistake that data driven political journalism became a thing at the same time advanced analytics became more important in sports.
Back before kids ~3 years ago, I would read the physical copies of the Economist because getting news weekly felt so much better than daily (or faster). Oftentimes a story would develop on Monday and be irrelevant by Wednesday and The Economist wouldn't even cover it. Maybe I need to re-subscribe...
I still have my Times subscription, but I feel dirty for paying them. Their headlines make me nauseous, and their palace intrigue stories miss as often as they hit.
My volume of Times reading has cratered in the SB era and I feel no
less informed. Other than when there is an election or a presidential debate, I don’t follow the news cycle anymore.
Make whatever criticism you want about the times, but they have a huge budget and the resources to report out news stories that other outlets cannot. For someone like me, who is in the business of reading news, that makes it a must subscribe.
When I lived in Texas, my feeling was that Austin was massively overrated and Houston was massively underrated, and that I enjoyed visiting both equally.
Determinations about being overrated are overrated because you have to make two simultaneous and orthogonal assertions -- how good is something and how good do others perceive it to be.
I feel like hating on the Nytimes is kinda of a clout thing, it's a fine news source, reading it is good, but as always it probably shouldn't be your only news source. Opinion sections are always going to be opinion sections.
Yeah, the Times is pretty good, for the most part. Upholding journalistic ethics and objectivity is a difficult pursuit, but they put in a solid effort. Their news reporting covers the major stories, and while they definitely skew liberal on the opinion side, they provide space for conservative viewpoints as well.
Also, their Cooking and Games sections are top-notch.
Their non political stories are still really good journalism. But relative to a few years ago I can't stomach much of their front page. I'm not even sure that's their fault, or is it just the subject matter --- the abhorrent shit show that is our current politics.
If you are stupidly paying full freight for the Times sub like I was, if you click on "cancel my subscription," they immediately offer you $1/week for another year. Follow me for more tips and tricks lol
That's for sure -- who wants to read story after story that takes seriously the talking points of the parties, and doesn't incessantly point out that the entire shutdown is a charade that's happening because the Republicans who control Congress value preserving the filibuster more than funding the government. And Democrats who play along and would rather take credit for the shutdown so they appear to be "fighting" than just pointing out that all of this is the responsibility of the party that controls Congress, not the party that doesn't.
Yeah, I have to tell people not to tell me news these days, I really don’t like talking about it. Basically all of my news consumption is filtered through Slow Boring and the comments here, which is at least somewhat detached because we discuss policy more than the news cycle and it’s less emotional. My life is the best it’s ever been and paying too much attention to the news is a good way to turn gratitude into hopelessness.
To me guarantee of sufficient food is the kind of moral imperative that a society as wealthy as ours can't ignore. It also demonstrates the dangerous game the Republicans have played by empowering someone so fundamentally callous. Trump isn't a risk free decision, even in red America. I'd like to think some of the grumbling we've heard about it, even on the right, is maybe a sign that deep down there's some understanding of just how bad this, and the cut of the ACA subsidies is, not just from a policy standpoint but for the national character. Not that I'm holding my breath for any kind of reassessment of priorities on their part anytime soon, but it's telling that you don't hear a lot of standing up for it on the merits.
Anyway Matt's aside on just how wealthy the US makes me want to re-share part of my comment yesterday on the open/question thread, which was: "The north star [of left wing politics] is probably still something like ensuring fairness and that the wealth of our society is distributed such that everyone has a reasonable standard of living. But it also has to deal with the fact that we probably aren't ever going back to a mass employment industrial economy, that technology is increasingly going to result in fewer low skill (and at some point high skill as well) living wage jobs, and that the organized labor movement has run its course as a force for progress."
I think SNAP is one of the better operationalized programs to that end, and it's worth defending as such, even as other ideas probably need to fall by the wayside. It's flexible, portable, and has a universal kick-in which should be the model for as much as possible.
My biggest problem with SNAP is that the subsidies are designed to support agricultural producers and the inclusion of some products (soda) is really just a handout to the corn lobby.
It doesn’t mean we should end the program, we just need to be a bit more paternalistic.
I learned recently that the dairy lobby has successfully gotten schools to require milk in all school lunches. And over 40% of that milks gets thrown away!
Animal breeding has made cows to productive that farmers don’t know what to do with all the excess dairy. It is a really cut throat business where you can see how productivity gains drive prices down.
We should switch to the Canadian system. Yes, it means milk is a bit more expensive. But we have enough money to make sure everyone can obtain milk. It's far less wasteful.
Yes my son will drink milk at every meal but my daughter never will so u are basically handing her trash to throw away. School lunch nutrition requirements are good and important and should be totally free of lobbying influence.
Milk is such a terrible way for kids to get calories and fat. Consume some dairy...on a salad! Or in a main course! This is like, my number one advice for people with small children who ask why my kids eat everything: we really, really try not to give them milk. They still got/get it in daycare and then in school, obviously, and I'm sure genetics play a role here, and I'm also sure that I'll be humbled here eventually, but there's just so many picky kids and I wish they weren't drinking so many of their calories through milk and juice. Water is good!
It’s truly amazing how much money the US government pays in corn subsidies. I feel like some costal state blue-populist politician could definitely make an issue of trying to end corn subsidies for mix of “those are your tax dollars going to big agri-businesses” and MAHA-vibes “we’re subsidizing food that kills people” arguments. Or maybe the corn lobby is too strong…
I wouldn't put e15 fuel in a classic car or bike, but the fact that we can grow gasoline in Iowa more cheaply than pumping it out of the ground is pretty cool.
In one of my "half glass" full takes; I do wonder if moving the Democratic primary schedule so that the Iowa caucus is no longer the first primary state may actually result in a Democratic Presidential candidate willing to challenge corn subsidies. Because I don't think I'm going too much on a limb to suggest that one reason corn subsidies have not been challenged is Iowa being the first caucus state (in fact if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure this a plot line in one of the later West Wing episodes with Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits).
The other thing is there is probably not one policy in America that's more skewed by the rural bias in our electoral system than the Farm bill (I'd say gun control is number 2). I suspect the subsidies would have been phased out a long time ago if rural Midwest voters were not overrepresented in Congress (especially the Senate). Again, to be glass half full. Part of why this dynamic existed historically is there used to be plenty of farm state congressmen and senators; Ben Nelson, Tom Harkin and Tom Daschle spring to mind (the last of whom was senate majority leader!). As someone who hopes Dan Osborn can win Nebraska, if Dems have to "cool it" regarding ending corn subsidies to help make sure Osborn wins and he actually wins, so be it. The trade off is probably worth it. But if Dems really can win the senate without any Midwest farm state representation? Yeah, maybe that's the moment to do something about this ridiculous subsidy.
I'm always open to ways things could be done better and there is clearly a larger issue to how Americans eat in play. I guess I just also don't personally lose a lot of sleep over whether or not some junk ends up being subsidized, if it's the price of the more important imperative.
Exactly. I’m one of the ones here calling for greater punishment of misdemeanor crimes like shoplifting, but the moral justification of laying the law down wrt shoplifting depends heavily on the fact that we have SNAP as a backstop, there’s no excuse for the Jean Valjeans of today to steal bread from Kroger because we have (had) a prosocial way of providing food to the hungry.
Sure, because we have SNAP as a backstop. Also, shoplifting seems to have decreased quite a bit due to grocery stores hiring armed security and closing problematic stores, at least locally.
I think this is mostly true, but a friend of mine watched, during some of the 2020 riots, a looter carrying several packages of diapers out of a Target. So at least sometimes, the thieves are probably stealing stuff they mean to use rather than resell....
Is it better for them to be temporary rather than permanent? I don’t particularly care what someone supposed years ago - I just care what is actually better.
I'm not fine with any policy that makes healthcare unaffordable for wide swaths of the population. I think adopting that position is both bad policy and *terrible* politics.
That’s why I’d like to reform healthcare to remove all the profit centers and make it as efficient as national healthcare is here in the US and every other country where it’s implemented.
Other countries healthcare systems also have many problems. They control costs by rationing care. They also pay their healthcare professional a LOT less.
The average doctor in the UK makes $170k a year, the average doctor in the US makes $260k.
Convincing that doctor to take a $90k a year pay cut seems unlikely...
What we need to do is mandate prices be posted online and stop price discrimination by providers. Then focus on boosting healthcare supply faster than demand and watch total costs come down like they do in every other industry
I don’t think the difference between $170k and $250k salaries per year is the reason I’m spending 2x more than the UK for mediocre insurance that requires me to pay for most things out of pocket (until I reach my huge “out of pocket deductible”.) I’m also pretty sure UK doctors don’t graduate with six figures of medical debt, which probably makes their salaries more bearable.
As far as “rationing care” have you tried to find a doctor in a major city recently? Healthcare has gone from “too expensive to basically fine” to “extortionate and go pay $200 to see a PA at some urgent care if you want an appointment before March.”
I agree guaranteeing access to basic nutrition is a good thing to guarantee, particularly for children. I am less sure how well SNAP is calibrated to that goal.
Seems to me like food (unlike shelter and medicine and dental work), is very cheap and most poor people are overweight so is hunger really their problem like it was in the past? How many people go hungry in the US (other than, like, heroin addicts)?
This was in the 1990s, so ancient history in some respects, but the programs have not gotten much more generous since.
My wife went hungry sometimes as a child. Your parent has to actually sign up for the benefits, which poorly-functioning parents sometimes don't. To be fair, her mom *was* a hard drug addict. But hard drug addicts have innocent kids. It's complicated.
I absolutely believe that neglected children of drug addicts sometimes go hungry, but that’s from horrible parenting not the cost of bread. I don’t think SNAP is mostly spending on such recipients and not sure how much it helps such kids (I like universal free lunch for this reason).
"and that the organized labor movement has run its course as a force for progress."
I'm curious what political organization is going to ensure that progress still occurs. (And a bit frightened that SNAP is the biggest idea we have for this brave new world where most people won't have jobs.)
I only agree with the "industrial" "organized labor" parts.
AI is subject to comparative advantage just like countries in international trade are. At whatever level, it rearranges the relative prices of different kinds of skills (including skill in interacting with AI). And"kinds" does not mean "high income" and "low income." The _pace and structure_ of change in AI means that flexibility people have in moving between different skills will be a determing factor in both the aggregate benefits of AI (as with international trade) as well as their distribution.
Comparative advantage in AI matters only until the transaction costs of dealing with humans exceed, and/or the surplus extractable from their comparatively-advantaged labor ceases to exceed, the costs of their upkeep and wellbeing. We do, in fact, have many fewer horses today than a century ago.
There are still employed horses, just like there are still employed dogs, and mules, and even a few dolphins. It’s just nowhere near the employment numbers they had a bit over a century ago.
I think that’s likely. And it’s a more optimistic future for us than the one with actual superintelligence, where we are no longer particularly relevant for anything! (The fact that humans, as intelligent as we are, still find use for dogs and horses not just for companionship, but for the use of their distinctive physical intelligences, is one reason I think the concept of “general intelligence” that leads to superintelligence is misguided.)
"Not dying" seems like a sufficient incentive for any organism. They lacked capabilities, not incentive, and but weren't in control of the physical world they inhabited whereas smarter, more capable organisms without a use for them were.
Not necessarily. Comparative advantage is premised on labor or time being limited, the classic example is that a lawyer who types faster than his secretary should still have his secretary type so he can have more time to do legal work. But if you had an AI that wasn’t subject to those time constraints I don’t see how comparative advantage would apply. Imagine the lawyer had a super-intelligent AI that would just type his thoughts down perfectly as he has them, why would he need a secretary then?
Exactly and AI is a physical system that does have constraints. [The lawyer probably does not need a secretary, today,either.] The secretary and their AI would need to find things that AIs can’t do alone. Even if we postulate that in principle AI could do any task better than a human, AI cannot in fact do everything.
BTW, I’m not claiming that for some skill sets this might not be really hard and that some people could suffer, just that AI will not lead to mass immissrration. [Power looms really did make weaver skills less valuable.]
What I don't understand about this analysis is the part where competitive advantage continues to exist for humans. For this to be true, we have to assume (1) AGI has limited capability, or (2) AGI has limited supply (i.e., there's a bounded amount of compute, so it's cheaper to use humans.) Failing that (or some other constraint), human labor will be fairly valued at a price similar around the lowest price that AGI can do the job for, which (based on our understanding of the tech) could be exceptionally low.
All of these analogies around power looms implicitly rely on the idea that humans are able to find other employment that they can do better or more cheaply than machines. In the era of power looms that was true! What makes AGI special as a concept is that this may not be possible.
I think I undertnd your argument, whihc makes perfect sense in any one task. But AI in the agregate at any time will be limited. As it sustitues for labor in on task it is creatng value > the labor it displaced and that is an income that will raise the wage or price of something else in the economy that is supplied by humans more cheapley than it could be by AI.
At the risk of being flippant about something very important, I did enjoy that the image Matt chose to represent “bare minimum survival ration of dried legumes” was organic, artisanal lentils.
No, that makes sense, fermenting seems like it can do a lot to deactivate allergens (e.g. my Celiac girlfriend can theoretically eat non-"gluten-free" soy sauce as it somehow neutralizes the gluten, or something like that).
Edit: C-man’s half-understood mechanics of fermentation are not medical advice. Please consult a medical professional for all allergy-related questions.
The microbes digest the relevant protein so you don’t have to.
Some fraction of lactose intolerant people are fine with cheeses!
My partner has a mild coconut allergy (so I have an excuse to fight him off of my coconut chutney when we get masala dosa) but when it’s cooked he has no bad reaction at all.
I had the same thought! You can get them for $2 per 1lb bag at a normal grocery store. I think if the government was distributing huge amounts something under $1/lb would be feasible. Which is amazing and why dried legumes are the greatest food. 2000 calories achieved with under $4 by my estimation.
I reacted badly too until I looked more closely at that listing and saw farther down bags of 18 and 25 pounds with a price per pound of around $2.89. Which is a pretty good price for organic beans and would be even lower for similar quantities of non-organics. So there’s your “giant sacks of dried legumes,” it’s just too bad they weren’t highlighted instead of the 10-pounder, which is merely big.
That's basically what I lived on in grad school. Everyone kept telling me how good my food smelled. I was also spending about an hour a day at the gym, about 1/2 of it spent doing resistance training, so I was the proof that you could be a vegetarian and still eat delicious cheap meals and be extremely fit.
The fact that there seems to be large numbers of Republicans (not just DJT) who seem to think that SNAP benefits only go to “Those people” living in big cities is just a depressing umpteenth example that way too many GOP politicians get their info on a variety of topics from right wing propaganda outlets as opposed to actual research they could read at their fingertips. I honestly think large numbers of these pols don’t know there a significant numbers of voters who receive SNAP who voted for them and Trump.
Reminds me of that Oklahoma governor debate where the GOP candidate was genuinely incredulous that Crime and murder could be higher in Oklahoma than in NYC. It’s like “dude where are you getting your info from?! It’s one thing for a ‘normie’ voter to believe this stuff but for a supposed informed politician to believe this nonsense is disturbing”
Conservatives fundamentally see certain kinds of people as virtuous, and have a view of the rural yeoman as the perfect American- the notion that these could be meth-infested dumps, riddled with crime punches a hole in that theory. They consider crime to really only exist among people who live in ways they disapprove of, like in cities.
I mean I'm sure it's some of both. When someone like Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis repeats some idiotic Trump talking point I'm like 90% positive these guys know the real truth*. Politicians stretching the truth or coming up with a good line that may resonate with voters that may not actually be strictly factually accurate is as old as democracy itself (I'm sure an expert in ancient Greek history can find some primary source document of an Athenian politician hyping up and exaggerating the threat from Sparta to justify a war). And it's hardly like Democrats are immune to this stuff. When Bernie Sanders says 60% of people live "paycheck to paycheck", the writer of this substack pushed back to say this wasn't really true or at best an exaggeration by stretching the meaning of "paycheck to paycheck".
But I gave this specific Bernie example for a reason as it actually ties in to the topic of this post. Bernie's 60% number regarding how many people live "paycheck to paycheck" is at best exaggerated. But his deeper point I think has real truth to it; there are significant numbers of people who really do struggle with their finances. And that a lot of Americans are probably unaware of how many people really do struggle and yes how many Americans rely on SNAP. And no it's not just "Those people" or illegal immigrants, but significant numbers of working class white voters who voted for Trump.
I think the difference is a) the number of GOP politicians who just blatantly lie with no connection to reality (This is the Trump effect I think) b) the number of GOP politicians who likely genuinely believe the lie. Like it's just a blatant lie to say that SNAP benefits are going disproportionately to illegal immigrants. Like I'm sure there are a handful of illegal immigrants who are gaming the system, but there is no evidence this is some significant part of SNAP benefit costs. And yet I think I'm right in saying a disturbing number of House and Senate GOP politicians likely believe this*.
* Like a lot of people I'm fascinated and don't know what to think of MTG's political turn lately. If you told me 6 months ago Bill Maher's audience would be cheering an MTG answer to a question, my head would have exploded. But my (for now) theory is that MTG was/is an actual true believer in Trumpism. Like believed the QANON stuff and "witch hunt" nonsense. But also on some level believed he was an actual champion of the working class "Sams Club Republicans". I really do wonder if she feels a genuine sense of betrayal here.
Blaming illegal immigrants is like the killer app for these guys. It mainly reminds me of how in the L.A. Confidential movie, the bad guys twice get away with murder by making false reports that suspicious black men were seen in the area.
We saw a version of this in the aftermath of the 2008 crash when conservatives formulated an argument that the real estate bubble was caused by Carter-era laws banning discrimination on mortgage loans, causing lots of unqualified black people to default on their mortgages. We also saw it earlier this year when the plane crashes happened - it was all because of the incompetent black air traffic controllers hired through DEI. Not sure if blaming things on illegal immigrants has more juice than blaming things on black people, but they seem to be acting as if it does.
They don't care. Dress it up any way you want, talk about whether they are "their voters" or not, at a fundamental level the Republican party believes that poor people's suffering is a result of their own moral failings. Relieving that suffering can be OK either as an act of charity or political calculus, but it is not a requirement of basic goodness, and failing to do so does not diminish one's virtue.
I keep seeing a similar thing where unrelated programs that give benefits to illegals are justification for cutting benefits for Americans. So, like, because NYC paid $12 a day to house and feed migrants as part of their sanctuary city stuff, the federal government should cut SNAP. I can't tell you how much I've come across that reasoning on reddit and shit. It's making no sense.
Exactly this... When you fundamentally see people like yourself as good and everyone else as an "other", it makes it impossible to govern and actually do what's best for everyone. Or these people think that the cuts will only ever affect bad people and not themselves. A lot of conservatives I've met are definitely part of "The Only Moral Abortion, Tax Break or benefits" are the ones I need and no one else...
Oh for sure. Take any group of 435 people completely at random, even if just limiting to college graduates, there is a decent possibility by shear chance a few will be absolute idiots. Or there will be a few who will be reasonably well informed about the very narrow field they studied..and literally nothing else.
I think though, the number of GOP politicians who are "true believers" in conspiracies and straight up ridiculously easily disprovable lies is higher today than it would have been even 15 years ago for either party. I've brought up before, but there was an Alex Pareene article from 2017 that really has stayed with me. Pareene is well to the left of most of us commentating on this substack (he probably hates Matt as a neoliberal sell out), but his observations about what happened on the right between say 1995 to 2016 was astute. Namely, that for a long time a lot of GOP politicians sort of treated right wing radio and later Fox News and later right conspiracy websites almost as "useful idiot" tools. These sources of propaganda were great at getting middle and working class people to vote GOP, but meanwhile the "elites in charge" would continue to get "real news" from Wall Street Journal or National Review (and yes even New York Times) and continue to implement Reagan agenda and still be somewhat grounded in reality. But what the GOP didn't count on is the propaganda machine being almost too good. Those Fox News viewers wouldn't just be voters, but would challenge incumbents and win nominations for the House over the establishment politicians. The ultimate obviously being DJT. But the part that Pareene didn't go into, is how many of the supposed "adults" would also "drink the propaganda kool aid". My go to example here is Mike Lee. It's sort of forgotten now, but Mike Lee was originally considered one of the more informed and smarter senators. But now? Good lord talk about someone who has gone off the deep end into the most deranged conspiracy theory nonsense.
I never saw the Pareene piece (and I missed your earlier reference to it) but having watched the parties’ political trajectories since the early 90s, I think this is exactly right. Remember Eric Cantor?!
The "limited to healthy food" paternalist program is WIC. (Which is extremely high-value spending, and thankfully not shut down.)
One thing I note with SNAP benefits. I live in a fairly poor city, and routinely see people buying groceries with SNAP. And the thing is seems they are always buying is school lunch and school snack food - lunchables, packs of applesauce/fruit/yogurt, and the like. Limiting to unprepared food would really not work well in my observation.
(One way to think about American poverty is that we spent most of our increase in wealth making it easier and more common to be a single mother.)
Arkansas just changed its program earlier this year to allow purchases of hot rotisserie chicken (and disallow certain sugary foods). Seems like a pretty good idea, though it might also have something to do with Tyson being headquartered there…
I think the basic idea is not to turn SNAP into "use the grocery buffet as a daily restaurant" program on the grounds that this looks a little bit too much like allowing making caviar and champagne SNAP-eligible, and a relatively easy and non-intrusive way to try to draw that distinction was cold vs. hot food.
I don't think the reasoning is bizarre in and of itself, but I agree that the conceptual juice doesn't seem worth the implementation squeeze.
I see what you're saying, and I wouldn't be surprised if the caviar and champagne example was actually used by a Republican congressman at some point, but it is funny the two examples here are both things usually served cold.
The program was conceptualized to help housewives afford groceries to prepare meals. In those days, allowing it to be used to get prepared hot meals would have been seen as an extravagance. Between the last 60 years of social change and much more diverse food options available now, it results in some really dumb situations.
Which sucks because if anyone could use the efficiencies from economies of scale in cooking low-cost consumables rather than cooking at home, it’s poor people! It would be great if people on really low incomes could live in housing units without kitchens and eat cheap prepared food, it’s a much cheaper way to live than paying for the sqft of kitchen in your home that’s used at most once per day. Except such housing units don’t exist and apparently people can’t purchase such food with SNAP anyways.
Having been a checker a few decades ago this was my experience... the white trash come in with their SNAP benefits loading up on Gatorade and tv dinners and the illegals come in with giant baskets full of fresh produce, baking products, etc and pay in cash. Even at the age of sixteen I was developing Views about different kinds of LHCs.
I believe Zvi Mowshowitz observed a while back that given the enormous economies of scale involved with food production it's kind of weird that it's still so much cheaper to eat at home, but it's also undeniably true.
I've read (but can't confirm with any specific experience) this may be less true in Singapore (maybe other parts of SE Asia too) where eating at food stalls in lieu of cooking is much more of a day to day thing and you have a lot more of the capital and labor efficiencies passed on to the consumer.
When I've lived in different parts of Asia, I was often coming out ahead financially when eating out vs. cooking, especially when you consider the cost of food waste and how cheap a lot of local restaurants were.
Is that true when you put a value on the time necessary to cook? In the example of rotisserie chicken, it seems hard to think that total prep and cooking time would make it cheaper to do at home than simply pick one up at the grocery store.
I'm going to do some back of the envelope math using Washington DC as an example. According to Apartments.com the average studio apartment here costs $1836/mo and is 470 sqft. That's $3.90/sqft/mo. If we assume the kitchen takes up maybe 150 sqft, that's $585/mo, about $20 a day.
I think with most of the existing restaurant options, you're right that at best this is probably a break-even proposition. But if there were more people living in such housing units there'd be a much broader market (see conversation below about SE Asia) for cheap, simple foods. Rotisserie chickens are a great example- $8 for 1600 calories (2 adult meals). With more options like that, I think there's a very easy path to substantial savings by dropping the home kitchen.
Last thing I'll mention on this is that cooking has an obvious opportunity cost. Every hour one spends cooking, is an hour of work with no wage. A lot of low-income folks are un(der)-employed, but still worth a mention.
Yet WIC does this and the signals for it are fairly obvious at grocery stores. I understand that labels and Excel spreadsheets might be confusing to some to operationalizes, but they are difficult concepts for retailers to employ.
Just an observation my wife made when teaching in Texas---the teachers would take turns monitoring the (free) lunch cafeteria time. My wife was appalled at the amount of food waste, kids would eat the junkiest part of the meal and throw away vegetables, fruit, pints of milk, etc. The teachers would haul garbage bags full of perfectly good food to the dumpster every day.
Let's also face it: considering how low the budgets are for school lunches, the vegetables are never actually tasty for an adult palette, never mind a kid's tastes. I don't remember ever thinking "wow, that was really good" when eating a vegetable at school. We were mostly just happy when the mashed potatoes didn't bounce and nobody found an eraser in their food.
Canned vegetables are decidedly unpalatable... though with a bit of bacon and pepper green beans aren't absolutely horrible. Good luck getting that in an elementary school cafeteria though.
OTOH, this is part of being a very rich country. It is probably cheaper to give all the kids the vegetables, milk, etc., than to soend more labor making sure each child gets only what they plan to eat and making sure they mostly do eat it.
If you gave your kids the same food, spent no time monitoring their eating, and gave them no direction at all about what they were doing, how much of a school lunch would your kids eat even at home?
Yes, but it's not a complete solution. School lunch is free here. But children are picky, or they need a snack which school doesn't provide, or the lunch is just not enough calories, or...
Even though my children can get school lunch free, we usually send some food with them as well. And most parents - even parents with tight budgets - seem to do the same.
I really really like that SNAP is non paternalistic and easy to understand. WIC is nice but I have seen videos of people using it and it basically seems impossible to navigate without an app.
I'm sympathetic that at the lowest end of the distribution we're trying to work with mothers who might be illiterate but gosh this just seems hard to believe (or IL is doing a good job getting the word out and supporting WIC and stores to label WIC eligible items).
But it's pretty darn simple, if an item hits this summary it's covered: A WIC EBT card to purchase special healthy foods - like fruits & vegetables, milk, juice, eggs, cheese, cereal, whole grains, dry beans or peas, and peanut butter.
If you read the Victorians—or even a twentieth-century writer like Orwell—they believed that only the threat of hunger could compel the lower strata of the working class to work. They were, in a way, right: working sixty-five hours a week for bare subsistence absolutely sucks. One of the lessons of modernity, though, is that most people will work for cars and iPhones and bigger apartments and carnival cruises. But there’s still that bottom sixth. Even if their values and sexual decisions are dubious, their kids should get enough food to have fully developed brains. A couple of hungry weeks won’t kill anyone, but we’re playing with fire here.
Democrats might do well to make their support for poor people contingent on poor people supporting them. I feel a bit taken advantage of when I vote for social programs I’ll never use, and their beneficiaries feel rich enough—or culturally alienated enough—to ignore their economic interests and vote Republican.
It doesn’t work that way in India. There, welfare benefits are direct and visible—bags of rice, free gas cylinders, cash transfers—and people know exactly which party or politician delivered them. The poor turn out to vote in huge numbers, and their loyalty is reinforced by tangible reciprocity. In the United States, by contrast, aid is faceless and bureaucratic. The whole transaction is depersonalized, so nobody earns political loyalty from it.
Poor people voting Republican is going to break support for the welfare state politically—lots of Democratic voters are starting to resent paying benefits for people who vote for a fascistic party. “Let them touch stove” is a common refrain these days. Democrats will just figure out how to do some of these welfare state things locally and stop funding red areas.
This may just be my perception but I see more Republicans going in the populist direction (e.g. Josh Hawley) than Democrats going in the libertarian direction.
I see a lot more lip service to the welfare state from Republicans, but have they gotten more generous? The welfare state is bigger than a generation ago (Medicare Part D did pass under Bush), but Republican politics seems more reactive to changes in the welfare state than trying to change them in a visionary way.
Has Josh Hawley actually spearheaded legislation around redistribution in an interesting way?
Occasionally a Republican will do something to legitimately benefit the working to middle class, especially if it can be coded as a tax break rather than a transfer. Sometimes this will be something smart and wonkish (IIRC letting excess 529 funds roll over into a Roth IRA was a Republican idea?), sometimes this will be something dumb and populist ("no tax on tips").
But when you get to the truly poor, who have almost no taxes to cut, this breaks down. Even the smarter and less actively vicious Republicans find it anathema to actually write the poor a check.
“Democrats might do well to make their support for poor people contingent on poor people supporting them.”
Believe me, I’m sympathetic to your point of view, but where this breaks down for me is supporting children, who are innocent and didn’t choose to be born to SNAP recipients who vote for Trump because woke.
What can I say? Ever since giving birth, I’ve become much more sensitive to the thought of any children being neglected or hurt. It just breaks my heart. I don’t want to be like “yeah, screw those kids, their parents voted for Trump, so they deserve to suffer.”
Then I would avoid judgements about the harm done by not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or if it even is coming, even for a couple of weeks.
do i not get to think about medicaid policy if i haven’t been on Medicaid? not get to think about defense policy if Ive never been to war?
this is close to tent shrinking. i don’t want anyone to go hungry, but i also want my experience minimized by pedants who valorize poverty while shaming me
Policy is one thing. Dismissive judgements on the effects of poverty are another. One reason Trump has such staying power is the perception that people who have enough don't understand-more importantly, don't care about-the struggle of people who chronically do not. Blithely minimizing the effects of food insecurity is exhibit A here.
“A couple weeks of hunger won’t kill anyone” isn’t dismissive. If I saw an
emaciated figure walking down my street that looked like it belonged in Galway circa 1847, i’d bring bread and milk. But we are nowhere near that and your alarmism is wretched.
How much genuine hunger exists in the US? It's not the Great Depression anymore. I think the foodstuffs people are allowed to buy with SNAP should be restricted to 'healthy' food. I'm rather surprised people are allowed to buy junk food with these benefits.
I recognise this is from the CATA website, but this seems totally reasonable:
"A second reform option is to end subsidies for junk food. Senator Marco Rubio’s bill to eliminate purchases of soda and prepared desserts in SNAP is one approach. Another approach would be to replace the subsidize-all-foods method of SNAP with a fruits-and-vegetables-only program, which would save taxpayers about $100 billion a year. Nutritionists disagree about many things, but they all agree that fruits and vegetables are essential. Some people argue that restricting SNAP purchases is paternalistic. But any government program that supplies food benefits must have rules, such as the current SNAP rules banning alcohol purchases. Of course, people are free to purchase whatever foods they choose with their own money. But if we are to have a taxpayer-funded program, it does not make sense to subsidize products, such as sugary drinks, that health experts widely agree are counter to SNAP’s purpose of promoting healthy diets."
I think harmonizing SNAP with WIC so there is more overlap would help. Many stores denote what is WIC eligible on shelves already. SNAP shouldn’t be subsidizing low quality calories.
As I said in a parenthetical in my top level comment, when someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is capable of being in charge on what the government determines to be healthy eating, I'll take a hard pass on that.
*Sigh* Well, ackshually, this is at least arguably true for certain worms at certain times / infection rates. Endemic helminth infection is strongly negatively correlated with autoimmune issues like food allergies.
Note that the "savings" for the fruits and vegetables option described there is just cutting off all SNAP spending on everything else (even the lentils Matt showed).
Saying "all your calories from fruits and vegetables" is stacking the deck. 1 dollar of apples and 1 dollar of bananas will provide about 500 to 600 calories.
Now add in 1 dollar of eggs and 1 dollar of potatoes and you've gotten over the halfway point. Add 50 cents to 1 dollar of rice and you're set. We've hit the calorie marker and can add 1 dollar of broccoli for nutrition's sake.
Maybe not MAGA per se, but straight up libertarian and downright hostile to government interventions. Of course they'll cherry pick their stats to prove the point they want to.
Cato does some of the best economic work around anywhere and in this case you're complaining that they're saying basically the same thing Matt is saying in the OP. SNAP is not an efficient nutrition program. It's part food, part leaky, back-door cash transfer.
I'm sure Cato and Matt would argue about the desirability and design merits of the cash transfer aspect, but they're in agreement about what SNAP is doing.
Clearly you have some privileged views that align well with CATO and are impervious to appeals to try and think about it from a different viewpoint. Not worth the time to try and discuss this with a stone. CYA
YMMV but that number sounds pretty reasonable to me, 12% of people have an IQ below 80 and 16% of people have an “significant” disability according to the WHO. At that point you might have trouble holding down a job.
Ah, maybe so. I’ve just been seeing a lot of takes going around Twitter in the vein of “I can’t believe this many people are on food stamps there must be widespread fraud or tens of millions of illegals we don’t know about”…
This is a good point. "Everyone" is middle class and not super interested in transferring income to low-income people. The issue should be tranferring income to people in low-income situations (which they are in only temporarily) That is, social insurance should not be and inter-"class" thing but an inter "circumstance" thing. The tricky part is that social insurance benefits can incentivize behaviors that prevent emergence from the insured circumstance or make the "need" for the benefit greater. This can never go away but people who want to improve the lives of low income people need to graple with this fact and politically BE SEEN AS grappling.
Annoying as the phrase type is, the "exeriencing X" gets at a vital distinction.
One of the hardest issues I can think of is how do we give generous benefits to low income kids (who have done nothing wrong to deserve their plight) without incentivizing poor people from having more kids.
Evidence around the world suggests that even paying people to have kids doesn't really do much of anything. I'm pretty skeptical that the kind of income redistribution the US does has any noticeable impact on the number of kids born to people who will fall below the poverty line at some point.
To that, being poor isn't a fixed state. People go up and down the income ladder through their whole lives. The welfare state is more about being a safety net than propping up a permanent underclass.
We should separate social insurance paid for with _flat_ comsumption tax, the VAT, from redistribution down the income scale and providing public goods wiht a _progressive_ consumption tax.
We are never going to give people, especially poor people, enough money that it is rational to have more kids in order to receive more benefits. The cost of having a child is not just the cash outlay needed to feed, clothe, and house them. Even the dumbest poor person in the world knows that instinctively.
To be fair, lots of people have never been to DC or only went during that school trip. The White House is a distant image of an edifice rather than a real thing to many people.
My guess is that it is not the slam dunk you think it is. Democrats skew wealthier and more educated, which suggests that they are less likely to be related to, or live next to, people who use SNAP or Medicaid on a long-term basis. It's undercounting the guy who goes to work every day and watches his cousin and three of his neighbors abuse the system. For a party that values lived experience, there is a lot of knee-jerk rejection of that kind of lived experience. I spend a lot of time on construction sites, and the prevailing attitude so far seems to be "it's about time". That may change over the next few weeks or so, but so far that's the vibe.
This is what I was thinking although I couldn't find the way to express it. The only times I've heard people I know talk about it from a place of direct experience it was people complaining about their loser cousin or some other deadbeat they have a personal connection to.
It could well be that those who have a positive experience are less likely to bring it up, but that's what I've heard.
If you preach that your brand of politics is morally superior because of how it treats typical Americans, but at the same time you regularly disparage typical Americans that can come across as very discordant, if not outright hypocritical.
But I don't and how many people do "disparage ordinary Americans" [compared to the number, which, let it be stipulated that one is one too many, who _are accused of_ "disparaging ordinary Americans?"
And while my personal morality does hold that my positions are correct, I try to argue on narrow utilitrian grounds, not their "moral superiority."
Hey Ben, not sure if this or a direct message is the quickest way to get to you, but it appears Give Directly just posted in the SB chat. Thought you might want to pin it to the top.
I do think that in the minds of many people, those two things are connected, though. At least on the surface, it seems to be very indicative of Trump's priorities.
Its one of those things that is just the perfect visual metaphor for everything wrong with the administration. Just a picture of the demolition process says more than 1000 think pieces on policy.
Letting readers know: so far we've enrolled 10,000+ of the lowest-income SNAP families to receive emergency cash, and first payments are being sent today. We are sending payments daily: give now and your donation will be delivered ASAP. GiveDirectly.org/snap
> I assume that you, like me, are reading stories every day about the back-and-forth between congressional leaders.
Has anyone ever gotten meaningful information out of back-and-forth between congressional leaders? I specifically avoid reading that stuff, or publications that put it at the top.
I suppose my question is why aren't SNAP payments made every two weeks? I can understand monthly when they were distributed by actual stamps. Distribution is time consuming and there is a cost. Now that benefits are distributed electronically onto debit-like cards, why keep with monthly payments?
What employer pays their employees on a monthly basis?
I'd also argue every other week vs bimonthly (i.e. twice a month). Food is consumed daily, so distribution should be based on days (i.e. 14 days). Months have different number of days. So, if its December there are 31 and February is 28. That's a 10% swing. Now, except for February, all other months are 30/31 days, so not a big deal. But, I also tend to think individuals have shopping days, so supplying EBT benefits on or near shopping days would be a helpful convenience.
As an aside, if it were rent assistance, then monthly would be fine.
I assume you're making this on soft paternalism grounds - if you have less than sterling budgeting abilities, giving half as much twice as often will reduce the odds you go hungry towards the end of the month.
I don't object to that argument in principle. But if the average recipient only gets $187/month, maybe you also need to consider volume. If you have less than $100 to work with, you might not buy the large package even if it's a much better deal per meal. (Yes, you could stagger which non-perishables you buy in bulk which weeks, but the ability to map out larger purchases and track inventory probably correlates with general fiscal prudence!)
I believe those are very good arguments. In addition, perhaps two trips to the Costco is more expensive from a gas/time perspective so people are worse off. An A/B test at a state/local level could help with find the 'right' answer.
I suppose I wasn't coming from a paternalistic, government knows better perspective. Just human nature and the ease of projecting over two weeks vs 30 days. If someone misses their projection by 10%, that's 1.4 days on a two week basis. A 10% projection miss on 30 days is 3 days. A much bigger impact.
Note this assumes we're starting at 0. If your cupboard has a baseline of non-perishable food, then this missed projections can be offset by raiding the pantry.
Kevin Williamson at the Dispatch has done some great reporting on life in the most destitute parts of Appalachia and has an interesting piece on SNAP in these communities.
Apparently because cash is so rare, people will use SNAP to load up on Pepsi and Mountain Dew and then the cases of soda are a type of currency for all types of illicit activity, drugs, prostitution, etc.
I think he bundled all his Appalachia writings into a book called “Big White Ghetto”. It’s worth checking out.
Just to point out, Appalachia includes Pittsburgh, Asheville, Knoxville, Hagerstown, Charlottesville, Blacksburg, etc.
My family is Appalachian born and bred. More of them work in some type of higher ed than anything else, up to and including Ivies. Zero of them are meth heads.
Kevin Williamson is kind of notable for an apparently irrational hatred of rural people.
Appalachia is a large region with a rich culture that has been important to the US. It’s not a random punching bag.
My family wasn’t from the university/resort towns either, although several live in places like that now. They were from a small farming town in southwest Virginia.
Do you know where Nobel Prize winner John Nash, the Beautiful Mind guy, was from?
Bluefield, WV. Which is a town of about 10,000, in Appalachia. Not a university town. Not a resort town. Just one more example.
Appalachia has a LOT of brilliant people, who get overlooked in the stereotype.
“the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston”
“The relative ease of life for the well-off and connected here makes it easy to overlook the real unpleasant facts of economic life, which helps explain why Booneville has a lovely new golf course, of all things, but so little in the way of everyday necessities.”
He doesn’t hate rural people and he’s not saying they’re all dumb.
You're citing what he wrote as if he was spitting out facts and not just his opinions.
"or if they stay they try to lord it over as local elites"
That kind of stuff is about, and really everything you're referencing, is about as Op-Ed as it gets, and it does strongly suggest he looks down on the area and its current inhabitants.
Saying there’s a new golf course in Booneville but hard to find basic necessities is a factual claim, not an opinion, and one that appears to be true based on Googling. And is it really factually disputed that many people move away and “be a big fish in a small pond” is a big part of the appeal to stay?
Except that actually is not true in the way he describes it. Many people do move away, often extremely reluctantly, as globalization narrowed job opportunities.
The smart ones who stay, and I have relatives who did just that, actually don’t generally lord it over others.
Williamson’s bigoted and hateful screed is not remotely an accurate representation of the area. My relatives are not ignorant, nor are they religious fanatics. There is a surprisingly large number of recreational, cultural, and educational options in the area. You can order online and supplement local retail, and Starlink exists.
But please, do go ahead and Substack-splain my own culture to me. I’m sure you understand it better than I do.
You said yourself that a bunch of your family members left, and John Nash didn’t do his work in Appalachia either. The issue isn’t jobs—there are plenty of doctor jobs but the residency classes at programs in Appalachia below the state-flagship tier are mostly from foreign countries because there aren’t enough local students who want to stay. And in any event there are local elites in Appalachia, who are going to the golf courses and fancy resorts like the Greenbrier—why don’t they create more jobs for the locals?
"Kevin Williamson is kind of notable for an apparently irrational hatred of rural people."
I make no claim to be a Kevin Williamson expert, but this defies what I've read of him. My perception has been that he is very much from these areas and so is more intimately familiar with their flaws.
As for the broader Appalachia discussion, its true that there are some very nice areas in the region, but also it has higher crime and poverty rates with lower economic results than most of the nation.
Williamson dislikes Appalachia and takes an excessively negative view of the region. I don’t doubt that he had bad early experiences, but his loathing is beyond excessive.
Appalachia has a lower crime crime rate than the US average, not a higher one.
Appalachia as a whole has a lower income than the US average. It also has a lower cost of living than the US average. Poverty is generally higher in the remote rural areas and lower in less remote areas. It includes wealthy areas, and has seen a 6.8% increase in regional average income.
Good correction on the lower crime rate. My memory was conflating drug use with crime rate.
My comparison with Appalachia is that its similar (but different!) than the Deep South. Some areas of incredible growth and prosperity, but generally under performing. In the former its due more to poverty, corruption, drug abuse, while the latter is more about racism, violence/crime rate, corruption, etc.
Appalachia in general has been extremely hard hit by globalization, as much of its economy was based on small to mid size farming, resource extraction and manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs dropped about 29% since 2000. Small farms have been hard hit by consolidation. Climate change has also had a big impact, as coal mining, fracking, and timber harvesting are all targeted for reduction.
Corruption is pretty site specific - WV and KY have had issues, but I don’t think the Appalachian regions of other states have had more corruption than average. Remember, Appalachia includes all of WV plus part of NY, PA, OH, MD, VA, KY, TN, SC, GA, NC, AL, and MS.
Drug deaths are higher in Appalachia, primarily in young poor males. I’m not sure the rate of use is actually higher. In US rural areas in general, drug use is lower but drug deaths are higher, and I had assumed the same pattern would hold, but I can’t find regional specific numbers and I don’t want to claim without data.
Williamson has some good qualities and some very bad qualities, but yes he is not out there doing dispassionate policy analysis.
It's interesting how J.D. Vance was very much a Williamson-style conservative back in the Hillbilly Elegy days before coming under the sway of other very different right-wing "thinkers" post-2016. Genuinely weird how a guy in his 40s can make such abrupt and sweeping philosophical shifts.
I don't know that JD Vance's philosophy has shifted. My read is that Vance is flexible and sees the Trump/RETVRN brand of conservatism as his route to the Oval Office.
I admit Williamson is a great writer-his insights into the causative factors of a lot of American social dysfunction often seem very on target. But his casual, arrogant dismissal of the misery it causes is pretty off putting and tin eared.
Milton Friedman famously connected most recessions in developed, capitalist economies to a drop in money supply. That sounds like a too-cute-by-half explanation that a five year old would come up with, but it makes sense when you think about it.
If person A is low on cash, and so is person B, it's hard for them to transact with one another. There isn't very much cash flowing into poorer parts of rural America. What there is a lot of, is in-kind transfers. It's not as useful as cash, but thanks to Gresham's Law of "bad" money displacing "good" money, that's what gets circulated, as people hold onto cash for when they're in a tighter spot.
Well money velocity drops during recession due to a claw back credit and reduction in speeding and we all know from Locke that this is a determinant of the money supply.
>That sounds like a too-cute-by-half explanation that a five year old would come up with, but it makes sense when you think about it.<
I think it makes perfect sense. It does indeed sound cute—or highly simplistic—but the basic problem that characterizes recessions is indeed "a shortage of money."
I get what you're saying, I was thinking more like... don't people in Appalachia have bank accounts and ATMs where they can withdraw cash as needed? Do they literally not have ATMs in small-town Appalachia?
I guess the thought is that if a significant amount of your earnings comes in the form of SNAP or other restricted benefits, then you hold onto your bank account money and cash and payday checks and so on for the kinds of expenses that require liquid money (like rent, mortgage, medical expenses) and for everything that can be settled informally, like paying friends back after they’ve helped you, or paying the babysitter or whatever, you see if you can use goods that can be bought with SNAP.
There's a lot of people talking past each other here with different ideas of what "Appalachia" and "Rural America" mean.
Of course they have ATMs in small-town Appalachia in general, but once you reach a certain combination of "small" and "poor" or "depressed" they may not have ATMs.
Certain areas of Appalachia, especially NE Kentucky and Southern WV might have more of those "too small and poor" areas than many other regions, but they probably aren't especially typical even there.
For obvious reasons, I've been reticent to say precisely where I work and live, but it is in Appalachia. "Maybe" it was true 12+ years ago that in the deepest of the boondocks people bought soda with their EBT cards and traded that in a black market for drugs and sex, but...the restaurant I worked at for several years was created by someone who moved out for decades, working on 6 continents, then moved back home to the unincorporated area she grew up in to repurpose an old building into the casual-fine dining restaurant she envisioned.
What he's describing reminds me far more of homeless encampments then Appalachian small towns.
Sorry for the National Review links. These were when they were a bit heterodox and Never Trump was their ethos. Not a surprise that KW has moved onto The Dispatch. Though NR still has some underlying anti-Trump writers, it has largely capitulated to reality on that side. It was usually been a somewhat beneficial counter to my usual diet of The Atlantic, NYT, Vox (back in the day) articles.
I thought of those articles too when I was reading this. Didn't Matt say that he had a neighbor on SNAP benefits who would trade him Diet Coke for cigarettes?
Can I take a minute and thumb my nose at the middle class? I'm not running for office, I'm not going to say any of this stuff out loud, but I'm annoyed by their (our?) moral impulses.
I've been seeing a whole bunch of memes on social media about "HoW cOmE pEoPlE oN sNaP gEt LoBsTeR fOr DiNnEr?" Ok, how restrictive do you want to make this program? If we get rid of lobster I already know you're going to find the next most luxurious food available on SNAP and get pissed about that. You're really mad about $177/month in benefits? "ThEy DiDn'T wOrK fOr It." Ok why don't you just advocate abolishing the program? Do you want there to be no food assistance for poor kids? "No." Ok, then either SNAP or some similar program is going to exist, so get over it.
Then, on the the rich people side of things, I think Matt is correct about elected Republicans' priorities, but average MAGA Republicans are just like Democrats in that they have zero problem raising taxes on people richer than them. But of course, just raising taxes on billionaires won't raise enough money to do anything, so again, "tax the rich" is just moral posturing.
Funny enough, the SNAP program would probably be more sustainable if everybody paid some 0.01% SNAP tax and the program was framed more as something akin to unemployment benefits that we would all use if we fell on hard times. I wouldn't like the sense of entitlement that would create, but it does seem to be the dynamic.
To tie it with the shutdown more broadly, I think that it's a humiliation ritual. People should be made to feel bad about being poor. It's the "common sense" notion of "spare the rod, spoil the child," which doesn't actually work, but sounds like it should to most people. The poor are infantilised, and in need of discipline, according to this logic. It's not to give them support they may need, but about control.
More broadly, Trump and his Republican allies don't need Democratic support to open the government. They could pass it on their own. Trump has spent months taking over the power of the purse, and Republicans and the courts have largely let him. But for Trump it's not about that. He has to assert dominance. He has to make Democrats get kicked in the teeth and agree to get kicked in the teeth. Like with the folk wisdom of "spoiling" people one sees as lesser. I don't think that it's likely to work, but the logic is stubborn.
It's both possible to want there to be SNAP, and to not want people to spend it on things like Soda and other junk food. If people think they money is being wasted they are less likely to support it.
It's bad faith. As soon as we get rid of lobster, the next nicest thing will go viral, and that would repeat until the SNAP recipients are forced to eat nutriloaf.
As for soda I guess I agree, but I'm with Matt here. It would be better to give people cash and if we're concerned about people being unhealthy, tax junk food or whatever.
It’s also heavily location dependent. If you live somewhere where lobster is extremely expensive I could see SNAP recipients blowing their whole wad on an expensive luxury item immediately then not having enough for the rest of the month being a legitimate problem. Where I live though, lobster tails regularly go on sale for 6 or 7 bucks, a lobster dinner with baked potato and a vegetable is cheaper than eating at McDonald’s. Banning SNAP from being spent on lobster here would accomplish little beyond virtue signaling.
Okay, but the tax junk food part will never happen (even though I agree it should). So given that, I think it's a reasonable idea to limit SNAP. WiC seems like overkill (if Matt's 2021 article is anything to go by), but I feel like there's a middle ground where we cut out pop and chips and cookies.
I'd like to ask the critics what they want SNAP to pay for and if they can't come up with a list, let's just stick with whatever it's currently paying for.
A bit ironic that the sea bugs went from "this is what the poors eat, because they can't afford mutton" to "how dare you have that delightful, expensive crustacean in your cart", right?
I lowkey worry that Dems get the blame of stopping SNAP “IT IS DEMS WHO SHUTDOWN” and that becomes the perception of low propensity voters - am I too paranoid?
Thanks for this breakdown, Matt. I have been very curious about SNAP ever since the threat of it being shut down started to loom, as I was having a difficult time conceptualizing just how much impact it's had. I agree with Matt that in an ideal world, I would roll SNAP into some sort of straight cash benefit, homey, thinking of his excellent case against coupon government [https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-against-coupon-government], demonstrated by hawking for GiveDirectly at the top and bottom of this article. (Hard pass on the in kind program, though, especially considering what the current government considers healthy eating after reading another article on RFK Jr.'s nonsense woo.) But I also had an instinct that there should be good reason to be cautious against disrupting the status quo, and this article lays out why.
This will be a fascinating (even while bad) experiment to see how SNAP beneficiaries get by. We all need food to live, and food is miraculously abundant in these days. But will they get it via private charity, via cash or in kind? Or will they get the money by cutting back on other spending, including on some other essentials like housing or utilities? And what adverse effects will follow from that? FAFO, as they say...
Yes. In blue states-even in tiny Maine here-state governments are doing their best to make people whole. Haven't heard much of that coming from Mississippi or Arkansas. Voters their have bitten the hands that literally in this case would feed them.
> I agree with Matt that in an ideal world, I would roll SNAP into some sort of straight cash benefit, homey, thinking of his excellent case against coupon government
I think there's room for a little more paternalism to encourage more nutritious choices, but it can easily tip over into absurdity as that article shows.
I don't think we can go any further beyond perhaps soda pop before we enter very dicey questions as to what is considered "nutritious", and whether the purpose should go beyond just keeping people away from deep hunger.
Matt writes: "I assume that you, like me, are reading stories every day about the back-and-forth between congressional leaders."
That sounds awful, and I hope very few of my fellow readers are doing this.
But to each his own, I guess.
Yeah I pay Matt big bucks every year to do that shit for me!
Beat me to it. I almost thought of auto posting the exact same thing right after I read it, but I continue to hold to good etiquette of reading the whole article before commenting. There is, indeed, plenty of news that isn't necessary to consume maximally, and it's good to have sites like this that act as a cleaning filter.
What is "auto posting"?
Maybe "instaposting" would have been better--simply to immediately make that comment after reading that first paragraph, without reading anything else.
clicked 'like' after the first two words of this comment
I will acknowledge occasionally doing that, although I do try to be somewhat careful on being too hair trigger.
I do that more frequently than I like to admit.
Yeah, that line made me laugh - I’m most definitely not doing this.
Yeah I try to keep up with the important stuff with the shutdown but yeah there is absolutely zero need to read the “tiger beat on the Potomac” day to day articles.
By the way, I can’t remember who came up with “Tiger beat on the Potomac” to describe Mark Halperin’s work but bravo to you as it has stayed with me ever since and yes impacts my news reading habits. Such a revelation to me how much daily political reporting (think Politico especially) is just not different than celebrity gossip magazines. The difference is the latter is under no delusion that they are providing profound insights about the world or their own self importance.
I can't believe I'm playing devil's advocate here because you're describing a conclusion I reached myself many years ago, but my rough sense is that the celebrity-gossip level stuff actually does (or at least did, especially pre-McConnell) matter a fair bit as to how the sausage gets made. The issue with "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" isn't that the subject matter is entirely vapid ephemera (though doubtless most if not a supermajority of it is), it's that it's *indistinguishable from vapid ephemera from the perspective of its readers.* If you can't exercise any agency over the day to day bullshit then it is just a celebrity gossip rag.
To use an analogy: if Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's marital status were inexplicably tied to whether SNAP benefits continued, but your degree of personal interaction and influence over them were unchanged relative to the present day universe, then the only thing that matters (other than for stock trading and prediction markets) is the single bit of information are they / aren't they divorced. You still shouldn't buy the Hollywood Reporter.
Yeah I'm being a little bit extreme in my opinion for sure. Mark Halperin turning out to be a giant POS and yet also being held up as the great sage of political reporting is definitely influencing my dismissive opinion of this type of journalism. I agree, it turns out politicians can be petty and like their egos boosted (shocker I know) and this can influence whether bills pass. Trump takes this pettiness and need for ego boosting to an absurdist degree, but yeah it did actually turn out that there a bills they may have died or at least were more difficult to pass because a particular congressman or senator was butt hurt about their seating placement at a state dinner.
I think my dismissive attitude to this journalism is also a function of the fact that this was sort the entirety of political journalism when I was like 16/17 and started actually reading the news carefully. If there are any younger commentators on here, I wish they knew how important people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias were to bringing actual data and intellectual rigor to political analysis. Like, it's almost banal to point this out now, but it was actually revelatory at the time to point out that most "Independents" are not actually "Independents" but partisans who for quirky reasons didn't register as one party or the other (this was me by the way. Registered "Independent" while also actively working for Democratic campaigns).
It reminds a ton of the dismissive attitudes old baseball heads had to analytics back in like 2001-2004. What is the crazy new fangled statistical crap? I know baseball, unlike these pointy headed nerds! Now, pointing out that On base percentage is more important than batting average in judging a hitter is almost dull because it's so obvious to everyone. At the time? Actually controversial.
By the way, I don't think I'm making a particular profound point to say it's not a mistake that data driven political journalism became a thing at the same time advanced analytics became more important in sports.
Seriously, if you're doing this and not being paid for it... go touch grass.
I will NOT, sir!
Urbanism in a nutshell.
Back before kids ~3 years ago, I would read the physical copies of the Economist because getting news weekly felt so much better than daily (or faster). Oftentimes a story would develop on Monday and be irrelevant by Wednesday and The Economist wouldn't even cover it. Maybe I need to re-subscribe...
I still have my Times subscription, but I feel dirty for paying them. Their headlines make me nauseous, and their palace intrigue stories miss as often as they hit.
My volume of Times reading has cratered in the SB era and I feel no
less informed. Other than when there is an election or a presidential debate, I don’t follow the news cycle anymore.
The New York Times is very overrated.
Make whatever criticism you want about the times, but they have a huge budget and the resources to report out news stories that other outlets cannot. For someone like me, who is in the business of reading news, that makes it a must subscribe.
Overrated does not mean bad!
When I lived in Texas, my feeling was that Austin was massively overrated and Houston was massively underrated, and that I enjoyed visiting both equally.
Determinations about being overrated are overrated because you have to make two simultaneous and orthogonal assertions -- how good is something and how good do others perceive it to be.
I feel like hating on the Nytimes is kinda of a clout thing, it's a fine news source, reading it is good, but as always it probably shouldn't be your only news source. Opinion sections are always going to be opinion sections.
Yeah, the Times is pretty good, for the most part. Upholding journalistic ethics and objectivity is a difficult pursuit, but they put in a solid effort. Their news reporting covers the major stories, and while they definitely skew liberal on the opinion side, they provide space for conservative viewpoints as well.
Also, their Cooking and Games sections are top-notch.
Their science coverage is very good.
Yet somehow their tech coverage is uniquely awful.
Uniquely? I suspect they have a lot of competition on this.
The only thing I kept from them is my Games subscription, lol
I'll play Wordle because my family does, but I can find lots of other similar games out there on the grand ol' internet.
Sedecordle ftw
Wow that was wild, I though Quordle was intense enough, now square that!
For sure. Someday I'll look, maybe.
Their non political stories are still really good journalism. But relative to a few years ago I can't stomach much of their front page. I'm not even sure that's their fault, or is it just the subject matter --- the abhorrent shit show that is our current politics.
If you are stupidly paying full freight for the Times sub like I was, if you click on "cancel my subscription," they immediately offer you $1/week for another year. Follow me for more tips and tricks lol
That's for sure -- who wants to read story after story that takes seriously the talking points of the parties, and doesn't incessantly point out that the entire shutdown is a charade that's happening because the Republicans who control Congress value preserving the filibuster more than funding the government. And Democrats who play along and would rather take credit for the shutdown so they appear to be "fighting" than just pointing out that all of this is the responsibility of the party that controls Congress, not the party that doesn't.
Me. I do.
Yeah, I have to tell people not to tell me news these days, I really don’t like talking about it. Basically all of my news consumption is filtered through Slow Boring and the comments here, which is at least somewhat detached because we discuss policy more than the news cycle and it’s less emotional. My life is the best it’s ever been and paying too much attention to the news is a good way to turn gratitude into hopelessness.
Same here! I would have to admit Slow Boring basically is my only news source.
I love reading stories about the back-and-forth between congressional leaders!
Found Chuck Schumer's 'nym account!
To me guarantee of sufficient food is the kind of moral imperative that a society as wealthy as ours can't ignore. It also demonstrates the dangerous game the Republicans have played by empowering someone so fundamentally callous. Trump isn't a risk free decision, even in red America. I'd like to think some of the grumbling we've heard about it, even on the right, is maybe a sign that deep down there's some understanding of just how bad this, and the cut of the ACA subsidies is, not just from a policy standpoint but for the national character. Not that I'm holding my breath for any kind of reassessment of priorities on their part anytime soon, but it's telling that you don't hear a lot of standing up for it on the merits.
Anyway Matt's aside on just how wealthy the US makes me want to re-share part of my comment yesterday on the open/question thread, which was: "The north star [of left wing politics] is probably still something like ensuring fairness and that the wealth of our society is distributed such that everyone has a reasonable standard of living. But it also has to deal with the fact that we probably aren't ever going back to a mass employment industrial economy, that technology is increasingly going to result in fewer low skill (and at some point high skill as well) living wage jobs, and that the organized labor movement has run its course as a force for progress."
I think SNAP is one of the better operationalized programs to that end, and it's worth defending as such, even as other ideas probably need to fall by the wayside. It's flexible, portable, and has a universal kick-in which should be the model for as much as possible.
My biggest problem with SNAP is that the subsidies are designed to support agricultural producers and the inclusion of some products (soda) is really just a handout to the corn lobby.
It doesn’t mean we should end the program, we just need to be a bit more paternalistic.
I learned recently that the dairy lobby has successfully gotten schools to require milk in all school lunches. And over 40% of that milks gets thrown away!
Animal breeding has made cows to productive that farmers don’t know what to do with all the excess dairy. It is a really cut throat business where you can see how productivity gains drive prices down.
We should switch to the Canadian system. Yes, it means milk is a bit more expensive. But we have enough money to make sure everyone can obtain milk. It's far less wasteful.
i mean you can always get rid of more dairy by reducing the price. they just don't want to do that, right?
Cows are a slow to adjust fixed capital asset that are often bought on leverage.
Basically you are telling a lot of producers to go bankrupt, which is something they don’t want to do.
yeah we agree they don't want to
If they made them all chocolate milk, then more of it would be consumed.
My daughter alone could keep big chocolate milk in business lol.
But then they'd have to replace all the existing cow stock with brown cows!
Isn't cacao considerably more expensive right now though?
Yes my son will drink milk at every meal but my daughter never will so u are basically handing her trash to throw away. School lunch nutrition requirements are good and important and should be totally free of lobbying influence.
Jesus. That is a horrific level of waste!
I remember they would force milk on me in school even when I lied and said I was lactose intolerant! (I just hate milk. I take calcium supplements.)
Milk is gross.
Milk is such a terrible way for kids to get calories and fat. Consume some dairy...on a salad! Or in a main course! This is like, my number one advice for people with small children who ask why my kids eat everything: we really, really try not to give them milk. They still got/get it in daycare and then in school, obviously, and I'm sure genetics play a role here, and I'm also sure that I'll be humbled here eventually, but there's just so many picky kids and I wish they weren't drinking so many of their calories through milk and juice. Water is good!
It’s truly amazing how much money the US government pays in corn subsidies. I feel like some costal state blue-populist politician could definitely make an issue of trying to end corn subsidies for mix of “those are your tax dollars going to big agri-businesses” and MAHA-vibes “we’re subsidizing food that kills people” arguments. Or maybe the corn lobby is too strong…
GWB’s ethanol blending mandate is insanely bad policy
"Let's burn diesel and waste water just so we can put more corn in our gas tanks!"
I wouldn't put e15 fuel in a classic car or bike, but the fact that we can grow gasoline in Iowa more cheaply than pumping it out of the ground is pretty cool.
In one of my "half glass" full takes; I do wonder if moving the Democratic primary schedule so that the Iowa caucus is no longer the first primary state may actually result in a Democratic Presidential candidate willing to challenge corn subsidies. Because I don't think I'm going too much on a limb to suggest that one reason corn subsidies have not been challenged is Iowa being the first caucus state (in fact if I remember correctly, I'm pretty sure this a plot line in one of the later West Wing episodes with Alan Alda and Jimmy Smits).
The other thing is there is probably not one policy in America that's more skewed by the rural bias in our electoral system than the Farm bill (I'd say gun control is number 2). I suspect the subsidies would have been phased out a long time ago if rural Midwest voters were not overrepresented in Congress (especially the Senate). Again, to be glass half full. Part of why this dynamic existed historically is there used to be plenty of farm state congressmen and senators; Ben Nelson, Tom Harkin and Tom Daschle spring to mind (the last of whom was senate majority leader!). As someone who hopes Dan Osborn can win Nebraska, if Dems have to "cool it" regarding ending corn subsidies to help make sure Osborn wins and he actually wins, so be it. The trade off is probably worth it. But if Dems really can win the senate without any Midwest farm state representation? Yeah, maybe that's the moment to do something about this ridiculous subsidy.
I'm always open to ways things could be done better and there is clearly a larger issue to how Americans eat in play. I guess I just also don't personally lose a lot of sleep over whether or not some junk ends up being subsidized, if it's the price of the more important imperative.
My issue is less with the consumer end and rather the distorting incentives on the production end.
>It doesn’t mean we should end the program, we just need to be a bit more paternalistic.<
Let poor people enjoy the simple pleasure of a Coke or an Orange Crush. Seriously. And obesity is now declining.
Exactly. I’m one of the ones here calling for greater punishment of misdemeanor crimes like shoplifting, but the moral justification of laying the law down wrt shoplifting depends heavily on the fact that we have SNAP as a backstop, there’s no excuse for the Jean Valjeans of today to steal bread from Kroger because we have (had) a prosocial way of providing food to the hungry.
And shoplifters aren’t stealing bread. They’re stealing meat and cheese then trying to sell it out of coolers.
Sure, because we have SNAP as a backstop. Also, shoplifting seems to have decreased quite a bit due to grocery stores hiring armed security and closing problematic stores, at least locally.
I think this is mostly true, but a friend of mine watched, during some of the 2020 riots, a looter carrying several packages of diapers out of a Target. So at least sometimes, the thieves are probably stealing stuff they mean to use rather than resell....
Diapers are expensive and resell well actually.
Sure, it was terrible in 2020. But since then the grocery stores in Seattle have beefed up security
They have also gotten rid of baskets and then put the scan receipts to exit like they have in Europe.
Those extra ACA subsidies were supposed to be temporary.I'm fine with cutting them.
Is it better for them to be temporary rather than permanent? I don’t particularly care what someone supposed years ago - I just care what is actually better.
If it was temporary at first, then you're not allowed to make it permanent under the No Backsies Clause of the Constitution.
I'm not fine with any policy that makes healthcare unaffordable for wide swaths of the population. I think adopting that position is both bad policy and *terrible* politics.
Sure giving out tons of money is always popular. But somehow the tax increases never are, unless those tax increases are on someone else.
That’s why I support taxing foreign countries for our domestic largesse. America First!
That’s why I’d like to reform healthcare to remove all the profit centers and make it as efficient as national healthcare is here in the US and every other country where it’s implemented.
Other countries healthcare systems also have many problems. They control costs by rationing care. They also pay their healthcare professional a LOT less.
The average doctor in the UK makes $170k a year, the average doctor in the US makes $260k.
Convincing that doctor to take a $90k a year pay cut seems unlikely...
What we need to do is mandate prices be posted online and stop price discrimination by providers. Then focus on boosting healthcare supply faster than demand and watch total costs come down like they do in every other industry
Porque no los dos
I don’t think the difference between $170k and $250k salaries per year is the reason I’m spending 2x more than the UK for mediocre insurance that requires me to pay for most things out of pocket (until I reach my huge “out of pocket deductible”.) I’m also pretty sure UK doctors don’t graduate with six figures of medical debt, which probably makes their salaries more bearable.
As far as “rationing care” have you tried to find a doctor in a major city recently? Healthcare has gone from “too expensive to basically fine” to “extortionate and go pay $200 to see a PA at some urgent care if you want an appointment before March.”
I agree guaranteeing access to basic nutrition is a good thing to guarantee, particularly for children. I am less sure how well SNAP is calibrated to that goal.
Seems to me like food (unlike shelter and medicine and dental work), is very cheap and most poor people are overweight so is hunger really their problem like it was in the past? How many people go hungry in the US (other than, like, heroin addicts)?
I’d like to know more about this than I do.
This was in the 1990s, so ancient history in some respects, but the programs have not gotten much more generous since.
My wife went hungry sometimes as a child. Your parent has to actually sign up for the benefits, which poorly-functioning parents sometimes don't. To be fair, her mom *was* a hard drug addict. But hard drug addicts have innocent kids. It's complicated.
I absolutely believe that neglected children of drug addicts sometimes go hungry, but that’s from horrible parenting not the cost of bread. I don’t think SNAP is mostly spending on such recipients and not sure how much it helps such kids (I like universal free lunch for this reason).
Kids need to be fed during summer and school breaks, and also weekends. Universal lunch covers about 50% of the days of the year
So I shouldn’t support it, you are saying?
You shouldn't view it as a substitute for SNAP.
"and that the organized labor movement has run its course as a force for progress."
I'm curious what political organization is going to ensure that progress still occurs. (And a bit frightened that SNAP is the biggest idea we have for this brave new world where most people won't have jobs.)
"Even" in red America? Mostly in red America, you mean.
I only agree with the "industrial" "organized labor" parts.
AI is subject to comparative advantage just like countries in international trade are. At whatever level, it rearranges the relative prices of different kinds of skills (including skill in interacting with AI). And"kinds" does not mean "high income" and "low income." The _pace and structure_ of change in AI means that flexibility people have in moving between different skills will be a determing factor in both the aggregate benefits of AI (as with international trade) as well as their distribution.
Comparative advantage in AI matters only until the transaction costs of dealing with humans exceed, and/or the surplus extractable from their comparatively-advantaged labor ceases to exceed, the costs of their upkeep and wellbeing. We do, in fact, have many fewer horses today than a century ago.
The horses had no effective incentive to find new ways to earm their hay. :)
There are still employed horses, just like there are still employed dogs, and mules, and even a few dolphins. It’s just nowhere near the employment numbers they had a bit over a century ago.
Fast forward to an AI forum in 2125 noting the same thing about humans....
I think that’s likely. And it’s a more optimistic future for us than the one with actual superintelligence, where we are no longer particularly relevant for anything! (The fact that humans, as intelligent as we are, still find use for dogs and horses not just for companionship, but for the use of their distinctive physical intelligences, is one reason I think the concept of “general intelligence” that leads to superintelligence is misguided.)
But how hard are they looking for work? :) Are they training for new roles? What is their fertiluty rate? :)
"Not dying" seems like a sufficient incentive for any organism. They lacked capabilities, not incentive, and but weren't in control of the physical world they inhabited whereas smarter, more capable organisms without a use for them were.
Not necessarily. Comparative advantage is premised on labor or time being limited, the classic example is that a lawyer who types faster than his secretary should still have his secretary type so he can have more time to do legal work. But if you had an AI that wasn’t subject to those time constraints I don’t see how comparative advantage would apply. Imagine the lawyer had a super-intelligent AI that would just type his thoughts down perfectly as he has them, why would he need a secretary then?
Extend this to: if you have a super-intelligent AI, why do you need the lawyer?
Or litigants, or the courts, or the various professions or diversions of life.
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
Well, the only ones doing the thinking would be the AIs, the humans having been surplus to requirements....
Exactly and AI is a physical system that does have constraints. [The lawyer probably does not need a secretary, today,either.] The secretary and their AI would need to find things that AIs can’t do alone. Even if we postulate that in principle AI could do any task better than a human, AI cannot in fact do everything.
BTW, I’m not claiming that for some skill sets this might not be really hard and that some people could suffer, just that AI will not lead to mass immissrration. [Power looms really did make weaver skills less valuable.]
What I don't understand about this analysis is the part where competitive advantage continues to exist for humans. For this to be true, we have to assume (1) AGI has limited capability, or (2) AGI has limited supply (i.e., there's a bounded amount of compute, so it's cheaper to use humans.) Failing that (or some other constraint), human labor will be fairly valued at a price similar around the lowest price that AGI can do the job for, which (based on our understanding of the tech) could be exceptionally low.
All of these analogies around power looms implicitly rely on the idea that humans are able to find other employment that they can do better or more cheaply than machines. In the era of power looms that was true! What makes AGI special as a concept is that this may not be possible.
I think I undertnd your argument, whihc makes perfect sense in any one task. But AI in the agregate at any time will be limited. As it sustitues for labor in on task it is creatng value > the labor it displaced and that is an income that will raise the wage or price of something else in the economy that is supplied by humans more cheapley than it could be by AI.
Like what, prostitution?
At the risk of being flippant about something very important, I did enjoy that the image Matt chose to represent “bare minimum survival ration of dried legumes” was organic, artisanal lentils.
Also, lentils are Good, Actually!
I’m allergic to lentils and most beans, so I’m never really confident about how much they cost. But that did strike me as expensive!
Aw man, I'm sorry to hear that. Lentils/beans are, or at least can be, good!
Does that make it hard to eat in Taiwan (given the amount of fermented bean products in seasonings, etc.)?
And yes, basic lentils are pretty cheap.
Fermented bean is totally ok! It’s a very strange allergy
No, that makes sense, fermenting seems like it can do a lot to deactivate allergens (e.g. my Celiac girlfriend can theoretically eat non-"gluten-free" soy sauce as it somehow neutralizes the gluten, or something like that).
Edit: C-man’s half-understood mechanics of fermentation are not medical advice. Please consult a medical professional for all allergy-related questions.
The microbes digest the relevant protein so you don’t have to.
Some fraction of lactose intolerant people are fine with cheeses!
My partner has a mild coconut allergy (so I have an excuse to fight him off of my coconut chutney when we get masala dosa) but when it’s cooked he has no bad reaction at all.
What's your verdict on stinky tofu.
I buy meat for less, even these days.
Yeah $4 a pound isn’t cheap for dried legumes.
It's one lentil Michael, what could it cost? $10?
“Shouldn’t have given up animation rights.”
The USDA's latest Weekly Bean, Pea, and Lentil Market Review (!) says you can get a 100 lb bag of lentils for $22.
"Weekly Bean, Pea, and Lentil Market Review"
Do they have an annual swimsuit issue?
This should have been the document they stole in Trading Places.
It's amazing how they chose the one product that would immediately date the movie to the 1980s.
Futures are still available! https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/future/oj00
Frozen OJ might come back in style with how ridiculous fresh OJ prices are nowadays.
I had the same thought! You can get them for $2 per 1lb bag at a normal grocery store. I think if the government was distributing huge amounts something under $1/lb would be feasible. Which is amazing and why dried legumes are the greatest food. 2000 calories achieved with under $4 by my estimation.
I reacted badly too until I looked more closely at that listing and saw farther down bags of 18 and 25 pounds with a price per pound of around $2.89. Which is a pretty good price for organic beans and would be even lower for similar quantities of non-organics. So there’s your “giant sacks of dried legumes,” it’s just too bad they weren’t highlighted instead of the 10-pounder, which is merely big.
https://plantbasedfolk.com/lebanese-lentil-soup/
My family eats this like once every two weeks. It's like $3 to feed a family of four.
That's basically what I lived on in grad school. Everyone kept telling me how good my food smelled. I was also spending about an hour a day at the gym, about 1/2 of it spent doing resistance training, so I was the proof that you could be a vegetarian and still eat delicious cheap meals and be extremely fit.
Looks good! I often make a lentil bolognese that's pretty good, and likewise cheap as hell.
MattY’s “let them eat cake” moment. Except it is high fiber and healthy.
"The people have no Hot Pockets!"
I also liked that even artisanal lentils come in a burlap bag, albeit a nice one - I guess that's just part of the vibe.
I guess if you figure you're paying in part for the bag, with you can reuse for various purposes...
Palouse lentils are amongst the best. They even have a lentil festival.
The fact that there seems to be large numbers of Republicans (not just DJT) who seem to think that SNAP benefits only go to “Those people” living in big cities is just a depressing umpteenth example that way too many GOP politicians get their info on a variety of topics from right wing propaganda outlets as opposed to actual research they could read at their fingertips. I honestly think large numbers of these pols don’t know there a significant numbers of voters who receive SNAP who voted for them and Trump.
Reminds me of that Oklahoma governor debate where the GOP candidate was genuinely incredulous that Crime and murder could be higher in Oklahoma than in NYC. It’s like “dude where are you getting your info from?! It’s one thing for a ‘normie’ voter to believe this stuff but for a supposed informed politician to believe this nonsense is disturbing”
Conservatives fundamentally see certain kinds of people as virtuous, and have a view of the rural yeoman as the perfect American- the notion that these could be meth-infested dumps, riddled with crime punches a hole in that theory. They consider crime to really only exist among people who live in ways they disapprove of, like in cities.
Is it that they don't know, or that they don't care?
I mean I'm sure it's some of both. When someone like Ted Cruz or Ron DeSantis repeats some idiotic Trump talking point I'm like 90% positive these guys know the real truth*. Politicians stretching the truth or coming up with a good line that may resonate with voters that may not actually be strictly factually accurate is as old as democracy itself (I'm sure an expert in ancient Greek history can find some primary source document of an Athenian politician hyping up and exaggerating the threat from Sparta to justify a war). And it's hardly like Democrats are immune to this stuff. When Bernie Sanders says 60% of people live "paycheck to paycheck", the writer of this substack pushed back to say this wasn't really true or at best an exaggeration by stretching the meaning of "paycheck to paycheck".
But I gave this specific Bernie example for a reason as it actually ties in to the topic of this post. Bernie's 60% number regarding how many people live "paycheck to paycheck" is at best exaggerated. But his deeper point I think has real truth to it; there are significant numbers of people who really do struggle with their finances. And that a lot of Americans are probably unaware of how many people really do struggle and yes how many Americans rely on SNAP. And no it's not just "Those people" or illegal immigrants, but significant numbers of working class white voters who voted for Trump.
I think the difference is a) the number of GOP politicians who just blatantly lie with no connection to reality (This is the Trump effect I think) b) the number of GOP politicians who likely genuinely believe the lie. Like it's just a blatant lie to say that SNAP benefits are going disproportionately to illegal immigrants. Like I'm sure there are a handful of illegal immigrants who are gaming the system, but there is no evidence this is some significant part of SNAP benefit costs. And yet I think I'm right in saying a disturbing number of House and Senate GOP politicians likely believe this*.
* Like a lot of people I'm fascinated and don't know what to think of MTG's political turn lately. If you told me 6 months ago Bill Maher's audience would be cheering an MTG answer to a question, my head would have exploded. But my (for now) theory is that MTG was/is an actual true believer in Trumpism. Like believed the QANON stuff and "witch hunt" nonsense. But also on some level believed he was an actual champion of the working class "Sams Club Republicans". I really do wonder if she feels a genuine sense of betrayal here.
No argument there.
Blaming illegal immigrants is like the killer app for these guys. It mainly reminds me of how in the L.A. Confidential movie, the bad guys twice get away with murder by making false reports that suspicious black men were seen in the area.
We saw a version of this in the aftermath of the 2008 crash when conservatives formulated an argument that the real estate bubble was caused by Carter-era laws banning discrimination on mortgage loans, causing lots of unqualified black people to default on their mortgages. We also saw it earlier this year when the plane crashes happened - it was all because of the incompetent black air traffic controllers hired through DEI. Not sure if blaming things on illegal immigrants has more juice than blaming things on black people, but they seem to be acting as if it does.
They don't care. Dress it up any way you want, talk about whether they are "their voters" or not, at a fundamental level the Republican party believes that poor people's suffering is a result of their own moral failings. Relieving that suffering can be OK either as an act of charity or political calculus, but it is not a requirement of basic goodness, and failing to do so does not diminish one's virtue.
I keep seeing a similar thing where unrelated programs that give benefits to illegals are justification for cutting benefits for Americans. So, like, because NYC paid $12 a day to house and feed migrants as part of their sanctuary city stuff, the federal government should cut SNAP. I can't tell you how much I've come across that reasoning on reddit and shit. It's making no sense.
Exactly this... When you fundamentally see people like yourself as good and everyone else as an "other", it makes it impossible to govern and actually do what's best for everyone. Or these people think that the cuts will only ever affect bad people and not themselves. A lot of conservatives I've met are definitely part of "The Only Moral Abortion, Tax Break or benefits" are the ones I need and no one else...
The Bayesian prior should be that there is an extremely large chance a politician is just dumb especially if the issue concerns understanding numbers.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/06/mps-and-peers-do-worse-than-10-year-olds-in-math-and-english-sats
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/uk-19801666.amp
Oh for sure. Take any group of 435 people completely at random, even if just limiting to college graduates, there is a decent possibility by shear chance a few will be absolute idiots. Or there will be a few who will be reasonably well informed about the very narrow field they studied..and literally nothing else.
I think though, the number of GOP politicians who are "true believers" in conspiracies and straight up ridiculously easily disprovable lies is higher today than it would have been even 15 years ago for either party. I've brought up before, but there was an Alex Pareene article from 2017 that really has stayed with me. Pareene is well to the left of most of us commentating on this substack (he probably hates Matt as a neoliberal sell out), but his observations about what happened on the right between say 1995 to 2016 was astute. Namely, that for a long time a lot of GOP politicians sort of treated right wing radio and later Fox News and later right conspiracy websites almost as "useful idiot" tools. These sources of propaganda were great at getting middle and working class people to vote GOP, but meanwhile the "elites in charge" would continue to get "real news" from Wall Street Journal or National Review (and yes even New York Times) and continue to implement Reagan agenda and still be somewhat grounded in reality. But what the GOP didn't count on is the propaganda machine being almost too good. Those Fox News viewers wouldn't just be voters, but would challenge incumbents and win nominations for the House over the establishment politicians. The ultimate obviously being DJT. But the part that Pareene didn't go into, is how many of the supposed "adults" would also "drink the propaganda kool aid". My go to example here is Mike Lee. It's sort of forgotten now, but Mike Lee was originally considered one of the more informed and smarter senators. But now? Good lord talk about someone who has gone off the deep end into the most deranged conspiracy theory nonsense.
I never saw the Pareene piece (and I missed your earlier reference to it) but having watched the parties’ political trajectories since the early 90s, I think this is exactly right. Remember Eric Cantor?!
They probably just haven’t updated their views on this since the elder Bush administration
The "limited to healthy food" paternalist program is WIC. (Which is extremely high-value spending, and thankfully not shut down.)
One thing I note with SNAP benefits. I live in a fairly poor city, and routinely see people buying groceries with SNAP. And the thing is seems they are always buying is school lunch and school snack food - lunchables, packs of applesauce/fruit/yogurt, and the like. Limiting to unprepared food would really not work well in my observation.
(One way to think about American poverty is that we spent most of our increase in wealth making it easier and more common to be a single mother.)
As a matter of fact, the current restrictions prevent snap recipients from buying the cheap rotisserie chickens you can get.
Arkansas just changed its program earlier this year to allow purchases of hot rotisserie chicken (and disallow certain sugary foods). Seems like a pretty good idea, though it might also have something to do with Tyson being headquartered there…
What about alcoholic chicken?
The cold ones are SNAP eligible. It’s just the hot ones that are ineligible.
The reasoning behind the hot ones being ineligible is bizarre.
I think the basic idea is not to turn SNAP into "use the grocery buffet as a daily restaurant" program on the grounds that this looks a little bit too much like allowing making caviar and champagne SNAP-eligible, and a relatively easy and non-intrusive way to try to draw that distinction was cold vs. hot food.
I don't think the reasoning is bizarre in and of itself, but I agree that the conceptual juice doesn't seem worth the implementation squeeze.
I see what you're saying, and I wouldn't be surprised if the caviar and champagne example was actually used by a Republican congressman at some point, but it is funny the two examples here are both things usually served cold.
Sadly, I believe that Revenge is also not SNAP-eligible.
The program was conceptualized to help housewives afford groceries to prepare meals. In those days, allowing it to be used to get prepared hot meals would have been seen as an extravagance. Between the last 60 years of social change and much more diverse food options available now, it results in some really dumb situations.
Which sucks because if anyone could use the efficiencies from economies of scale in cooking low-cost consumables rather than cooking at home, it’s poor people! It would be great if people on really low incomes could live in housing units without kitchens and eat cheap prepared food, it’s a much cheaper way to live than paying for the sqft of kitchen in your home that’s used at most once per day. Except such housing units don’t exist and apparently people can’t purchase such food with SNAP anyways.
Make boarding houses great again
A lot of this depends on knowing how to cook. AKA why lots of poor immigrant families eat better than lots of middle class families.
Having been a checker a few decades ago this was my experience... the white trash come in with their SNAP benefits loading up on Gatorade and tv dinners and the illegals come in with giant baskets full of fresh produce, baking products, etc and pay in cash. Even at the age of sixteen I was developing Views about different kinds of LHCs.
It’s generally not cheaper when you factor in the cost of labor. And most people use their kitchens much more than once a day.
I believe Zvi Mowshowitz observed a while back that given the enormous economies of scale involved with food production it's kind of weird that it's still so much cheaper to eat at home, but it's also undeniably true.
I've read (but can't confirm with any specific experience) this may be less true in Singapore (maybe other parts of SE Asia too) where eating at food stalls in lieu of cooking is much more of a day to day thing and you have a lot more of the capital and labor efficiencies passed on to the consumer.
When I've lived in different parts of Asia, I was often coming out ahead financially when eating out vs. cooking, especially when you consider the cost of food waste and how cheap a lot of local restaurants were.
Is that true when you put a value on the time necessary to cook? In the example of rotisserie chicken, it seems hard to think that total prep and cooking time would make it cheaper to do at home than simply pick one up at the grocery store.
Prepared rotisserie chickens in particular are often sold at a loss for grocery stores to get customers in the stores.
I'm going to do some back of the envelope math using Washington DC as an example. According to Apartments.com the average studio apartment here costs $1836/mo and is 470 sqft. That's $3.90/sqft/mo. If we assume the kitchen takes up maybe 150 sqft, that's $585/mo, about $20 a day.
I think with most of the existing restaurant options, you're right that at best this is probably a break-even proposition. But if there were more people living in such housing units there'd be a much broader market (see conversation below about SE Asia) for cheap, simple foods. Rotisserie chickens are a great example- $8 for 1600 calories (2 adult meals). With more options like that, I think there's a very easy path to substantial savings by dropping the home kitchen.
Last thing I'll mention on this is that cooking has an obvious opportunity cost. Every hour one spends cooking, is an hour of work with no wage. A lot of low-income folks are un(der)-employed, but still worth a mention.
How much time do poor people have? They generally aren't working a full-time job, but I'm not sure what other demands are on their time.
But in many states soda can be bought with EBT
Seems hard to micromanage what food should be allowed vs. not in a reasonable way.
Yet WIC does this and the signals for it are fairly obvious at grocery stores. I understand that labels and Excel spreadsheets might be confusing to some to operationalizes, but they are difficult concepts for retailers to employ.
Free school lunch is such an obviously good policy, we should have it nationwide
Just an observation my wife made when teaching in Texas---the teachers would take turns monitoring the (free) lunch cafeteria time. My wife was appalled at the amount of food waste, kids would eat the junkiest part of the meal and throw away vegetables, fruit, pints of milk, etc. The teachers would haul garbage bags full of perfectly good food to the dumpster every day.
IMO, anyone who can get kids to enjoy eating vegetables deserves a nobel prize
Let's also face it: considering how low the budgets are for school lunches, the vegetables are never actually tasty for an adult palette, never mind a kid's tastes. I don't remember ever thinking "wow, that was really good" when eating a vegetable at school. We were mostly just happy when the mashed potatoes didn't bounce and nobody found an eraser in their food.
Canned vegetables are decidedly unpalatable... though with a bit of bacon and pepper green beans aren't absolutely horrible. Good luck getting that in an elementary school cafeteria though.
The French
And the Chinese.
OTOH, this is part of being a very rich country. It is probably cheaper to give all the kids the vegetables, milk, etc., than to soend more labor making sure each child gets only what they plan to eat and making sure they mostly do eat it.
If you gave your kids the same food, spent no time monitoring their eating, and gave them no direction at all about what they were doing, how much of a school lunch would your kids eat even at home?
You don't give them the same food, you give them what you know they'll eat because you're their parent.
Yes, but it's not a complete solution. School lunch is free here. But children are picky, or they need a snack which school doesn't provide, or the lunch is just not enough calories, or...
Even though my children can get school lunch free, we usually send some food with them as well. And most parents - even parents with tight budgets - seem to do the same.
It doesn't need to be a complete solution to be a good policy.
I really really like that SNAP is non paternalistic and easy to understand. WIC is nice but I have seen videos of people using it and it basically seems impossible to navigate without an app.
I'm sympathetic that at the lowest end of the distribution we're trying to work with mothers who might be illiterate but gosh this just seems hard to believe (or IL is doing a good job getting the word out and supporting WIC and stores to label WIC eligible items).
But it's pretty darn simple, if an item hits this summary it's covered: A WIC EBT card to purchase special healthy foods - like fruits & vegetables, milk, juice, eggs, cheese, cereal, whole grains, dry beans or peas, and peanut butter.
It’s just very specific number of ounces and brands. This women does a good show of showing how specific it can be https://www.instagram.com/jordanlexallen?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
If you read the Victorians—or even a twentieth-century writer like Orwell—they believed that only the threat of hunger could compel the lower strata of the working class to work. They were, in a way, right: working sixty-five hours a week for bare subsistence absolutely sucks. One of the lessons of modernity, though, is that most people will work for cars and iPhones and bigger apartments and carnival cruises. But there’s still that bottom sixth. Even if their values and sexual decisions are dubious, their kids should get enough food to have fully developed brains. A couple of hungry weeks won’t kill anyone, but we’re playing with fire here.
The politics of this issue are murky. I wrote before that Medicaid recipients probably cost Harris the election, https://open.substack.com/pub/davidabbott/p/medicaid-recipients-cost-harris-the?
Democrats might do well to make their support for poor people contingent on poor people supporting them. I feel a bit taken advantage of when I vote for social programs I’ll never use, and their beneficiaries feel rich enough—or culturally alienated enough—to ignore their economic interests and vote Republican.
It doesn’t work that way in India. There, welfare benefits are direct and visible—bags of rice, free gas cylinders, cash transfers—and people know exactly which party or politician delivered them. The poor turn out to vote in huge numbers, and their loyalty is reinforced by tangible reciprocity. In the United States, by contrast, aid is faceless and bureaucratic. The whole transaction is depersonalized, so nobody earns political loyalty from it.
Poor people voting Republican is going to break support for the welfare state politically—lots of Democratic voters are starting to resent paying benefits for people who vote for a fascistic party. “Let them touch stove” is a common refrain these days. Democrats will just figure out how to do some of these welfare state things locally and stop funding red areas.
This may just be my perception but I see more Republicans going in the populist direction (e.g. Josh Hawley) than Democrats going in the libertarian direction.
I see a lot more lip service to the welfare state from Republicans, but have they gotten more generous? The welfare state is bigger than a generation ago (Medicare Part D did pass under Bush), but Republican politics seems more reactive to changes in the welfare state than trying to change them in a visionary way.
Has Josh Hawley actually spearheaded legislation around redistribution in an interesting way?
Occasionally a Republican will do something to legitimately benefit the working to middle class, especially if it can be coded as a tax break rather than a transfer. Sometimes this will be something smart and wonkish (IIRC letting excess 529 funds roll over into a Roth IRA was a Republican idea?), sometimes this will be something dumb and populist ("no tax on tips").
But when you get to the truly poor, who have almost no taxes to cut, this breaks down. Even the smarter and less actively vicious Republicans find it anathema to actually write the poor a check.
“Democrats might do well to make their support for poor people contingent on poor people supporting them.”
Believe me, I’m sympathetic to your point of view, but where this breaks down for me is supporting children, who are innocent and didn’t choose to be born to SNAP recipients who vote for Trump because woke.
What can I say? Ever since giving birth, I’ve become much more sensitive to the thought of any children being neglected or hurt. It just breaks my heart. I don’t want to be like “yeah, screw those kids, their parents voted for Trump, so they deserve to suffer.”
Yeah, the kids should be fed, but in the foster care system - we shouldn’t really be letting Trump supporters be parents
Doesn't that assume a rationality and understanding of causal relationships that's just much less common than it would need to be?
causation is illusory.
The Venezuelan migrants to Denver said something similar -- you voted for whichever party came by and gave you money.
Clearly you've never been hungry for a couple of weeks.
Correct, I’m a lawyer and my mother or her parents always worked.
Then I would avoid judgements about the harm done by not knowing where your next meal is coming from, or if it even is coming, even for a couple of weeks.
do i not get to think about medicaid policy if i haven’t been on Medicaid? not get to think about defense policy if Ive never been to war?
this is close to tent shrinking. i don’t want anyone to go hungry, but i also want my experience minimized by pedants who valorize poverty while shaming me
Policy is one thing. Dismissive judgements on the effects of poverty are another. One reason Trump has such staying power is the perception that people who have enough don't understand-more importantly, don't care about-the struggle of people who chronically do not. Blithely minimizing the effects of food insecurity is exhibit A here.
“A couple weeks of hunger won’t kill anyone” isn’t dismissive. If I saw an
emaciated figure walking down my street that looked like it belonged in Galway circa 1847, i’d bring bread and milk. But we are nowhere near that and your alarmism is wretched.
How much genuine hunger exists in the US? It's not the Great Depression anymore. I think the foodstuffs people are allowed to buy with SNAP should be restricted to 'healthy' food. I'm rather surprised people are allowed to buy junk food with these benefits.
I recognise this is from the CATA website, but this seems totally reasonable:
"A second reform option is to end subsidies for junk food. Senator Marco Rubio’s bill to eliminate purchases of soda and prepared desserts in SNAP is one approach. Another approach would be to replace the subsidize-all-foods method of SNAP with a fruits-and-vegetables-only program, which would save taxpayers about $100 billion a year. Nutritionists disagree about many things, but they all agree that fruits and vegetables are essential. Some people argue that restricting SNAP purchases is paternalistic. But any government program that supplies food benefits must have rules, such as the current SNAP rules banning alcohol purchases. Of course, people are free to purchase whatever foods they choose with their own money. But if we are to have a taxpayer-funded program, it does not make sense to subsidize products, such as sugary drinks, that health experts widely agree are counter to SNAP’s purpose of promoting healthy diets."
https://www.cato.org/briefing-paper/snap-high-costs-low-nutrition
Everyone claims to be "anti-bureaucracy" until they see poor people buy a bag of Doritos at Walmart
I think harmonizing SNAP with WIC so there is more overlap would help. Many stores denote what is WIC eligible on shelves already. SNAP shouldn’t be subsidizing low quality calories.
As I said in a parenthetical in my top level comment, when someone like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is capable of being in charge on what the government determines to be healthy eating, I'll take a hard pass on that.
"Worms are a healthy part of a balanced diet. Don't look at my brain."
Roger Waters already sung about what I know is going on there...
Don't laugh, it's supported by this influential medical treatise: https://www.amazon.com/How-Fried-Worms-Thomas-Rockwell/dp/0440445450
I never realized that first came out in 1953.
*Sigh* Well, ackshually, this is at least arguably true for certain worms at certain times / infection rates. Endemic helminth infection is strongly negatively correlated with autoimmune issues like food allergies.
Lol!!
Note that the "savings" for the fruits and vegetables option described there is just cutting off all SNAP spending on everything else (even the lentils Matt showed).
Fruits and vegetables only seems bizarre. It would be quite expensive to get all your calories from fruits and vegetables…
I get what you’re saying, but if potatoes count as vegetables, that would help a lot. The really tough part would be getting enough protein.
Adding beans and lentils to the list seems like an obvious improvement. Maybe even tinned fish!
Fuck, I need to make that tuna salad before the celery goes limp.
Saying "all your calories from fruits and vegetables" is stacking the deck. 1 dollar of apples and 1 dollar of bananas will provide about 500 to 600 calories.
Now add in 1 dollar of eggs and 1 dollar of potatoes and you've gotten over the halfway point. Add 50 cents to 1 dollar of rice and you're set. We've hit the calorie marker and can add 1 dollar of broccoli for nutrition's sake.
Yes, the Cato Institute is definitely a well known nonpartisan think tank with no skin in the game here.
Cato, in fact, remains non-MAGAfied.
Maybe not MAGA per se, but straight up libertarian and downright hostile to government interventions. Of course they'll cherry pick their stats to prove the point they want to.
Cato does some of the best economic work around anywhere and in this case you're complaining that they're saying basically the same thing Matt is saying in the OP. SNAP is not an efficient nutrition program. It's part food, part leaky, back-door cash transfer.
I'm sure Cato and Matt would argue about the desirability and design merits of the cash transfer aspect, but they're in agreement about what SNAP is doing.
CATO provides good counter arguments but can be deceptive (like excluding payroll taxes when discussing the progressivity of federal taxes.)
Clearly you have some privileged views that align well with CATO and are impervious to appeals to try and think about it from a different viewpoint. Not worth the time to try and discuss this with a stone. CYA
Is this clown new around here or have I simply been fortunate enough to avoid the displeasure?
"privileged views" - what a slimy ad hominem.
Shoot the messenger so you don’t have to bother understanding what is actually communicated or argued.
They aren't maga, but they do share the libertarian loathing for the poor.
OK J.D.
I assume a big part of why there isn't genuine hunger is because of SNAP (and WIC) though?
"Why do we need the Clean Air Act if our air is cleaner since the 1970s?"
Paternalism is good
It’s kinda crazy that the White House ballroom controversy seems to have gotten just as much media coverage as the SNAP expiration.
I think this is a winning issue for Dems though. It's flashy and it shows that Trump really doesn't care about the material interests of voters.
Maybe? Tbh I’ve given up on determining what’s a winning issue.
If the factoid about 12% of the population being on SNAP gets much coverage, the reaction might not be what we expect.
YMMV but that number sounds pretty reasonable to me, 12% of people have an IQ below 80 and 16% of people have an “significant” disability according to the WHO. At that point you might have trouble holding down a job.
His point was 12% may be an acceptably small number to many voters.
Ah, maybe so. I’ve just been seeing a lot of takes going around Twitter in the vein of “I can’t believe this many people are on food stamps there must be widespread fraud or tens of millions of illegals we don’t know about”…
12% sounds right. But lots more than that have been on food stamps temporarily in the past
This is a good point. "Everyone" is middle class and not super interested in transferring income to low-income people. The issue should be tranferring income to people in low-income situations (which they are in only temporarily) That is, social insurance should not be and inter-"class" thing but an inter "circumstance" thing. The tricky part is that social insurance benefits can incentivize behaviors that prevent emergence from the insured circumstance or make the "need" for the benefit greater. This can never go away but people who want to improve the lives of low income people need to graple with this fact and politically BE SEEN AS grappling.
Annoying as the phrase type is, the "exeriencing X" gets at a vital distinction.
One of the hardest issues I can think of is how do we give generous benefits to low income kids (who have done nothing wrong to deserve their plight) without incentivizing poor people from having more kids.
Evidence around the world suggests that even paying people to have kids doesn't really do much of anything. I'm pretty skeptical that the kind of income redistribution the US does has any noticeable impact on the number of kids born to people who will fall below the poverty line at some point.
To that, being poor isn't a fixed state. People go up and down the income ladder through their whole lives. The welfare state is more about being a safety net than propping up a permanent underclass.
Until you get programs with hard cutoffs, which I don’t think SNAP has
We should separate social insurance paid for with _flat_ comsumption tax, the VAT, from redistribution down the income scale and providing public goods wiht a _progressive_ consumption tax.
We are never going to give people, especially poor people, enough money that it is rational to have more kids in order to receive more benefits. The cost of having a child is not just the cash outlay needed to feed, clothe, and house them. Even the dumbest poor person in the world knows that instinctively.
>Even the dumbest poor person in the world knows that instinctively.
Then why do poor countries have much greater fertility than rich countries? Is it all just opportunity cost?
Does it? Would it be bad if it did?
Get most of those 12% to vote Democratic next election and we're set.
Turnout strongly tracks income levels. If that 12% regularly voted at high levels it might not even be an issue right now.
I'll take the under on "20% of American adults are aware that the White House East Wing was demolished for a ballroom and other stuff."
To be fair, lots of people have never been to DC or only went during that school trip. The White House is a distant image of an edifice rather than a real thing to many people.
I'm registered online on the position that blowing up the east wing for a very large, very big, very golden ballroom is Good, Actually!
Nobody cares about the East Wing. It didn't even get a network show. Sad.
My guess is that it is not the slam dunk you think it is. Democrats skew wealthier and more educated, which suggests that they are less likely to be related to, or live next to, people who use SNAP or Medicaid on a long-term basis. It's undercounting the guy who goes to work every day and watches his cousin and three of his neighbors abuse the system. For a party that values lived experience, there is a lot of knee-jerk rejection of that kind of lived experience. I spend a lot of time on construction sites, and the prevailing attitude so far seems to be "it's about time". That may change over the next few weeks or so, but so far that's the vibe.
This is what I was thinking although I couldn't find the way to express it. The only times I've heard people I know talk about it from a place of direct experience it was people complaining about their loser cousin or some other deadbeat they have a personal connection to.
It could well be that those who have a positive experience are less likely to bring it up, but that's what I've heard.
Which is pathetic if it's taken some people a decade to get this very basic aspect of Trumpism.
If you preach that your brand of politics is morally superior because of how it treats typical Americans, but at the same time you regularly disparage typical Americans that can come across as very discordant, if not outright hypocritical.
But I don't and how many people do "disparage ordinary Americans" [compared to the number, which, let it be stipulated that one is one too many, who _are accused of_ "disparaging ordinary Americans?"
And while my personal morality does hold that my positions are correct, I try to argue on narrow utilitrian grounds, not their "moral superiority."
I was replying to Late Blooming.
Is this meant to be a description of Trump or his opponents? I can easily see it applying equally to each.
In this case, Late Blooming, but yes it could apply to Trump.
I’ll take the other side of that bet.
Hey Ben, not sure if this or a direct message is the quickest way to get to you, but it appears Give Directly just posted in the SB chat. Thought you might want to pin it to the top.
I do think that in the minds of many people, those two things are connected, though. At least on the surface, it seems to be very indicative of Trump's priorities.
Its one of those things that is just the perfect visual metaphor for everything wrong with the administration. Just a picture of the demolition process says more than 1000 think pieces on policy.
The ballroom is also the type of mix of corrupt and weird that can drive clicks.
I don't think so. Two sides of the same coin.
Letting readers know: so far we've enrolled 10,000+ of the lowest-income SNAP families to receive emergency cash, and first payments are being sent today. We are sending payments daily: give now and your donation will be delivered ASAP. GiveDirectly.org/snap
> I assume that you, like me, are reading stories every day about the back-and-forth between congressional leaders.
Has anyone ever gotten meaningful information out of back-and-forth between congressional leaders? I specifically avoid reading that stuff, or publications that put it at the top.
The political news that I feel is among the most dreadful is arguments over what congressional leaders are doing.
Hard to be sure but that line might have been intended as tongue-in-cheek by Matt.
I suppose my question is why aren't SNAP payments made every two weeks? I can understand monthly when they were distributed by actual stamps. Distribution is time consuming and there is a cost. Now that benefits are distributed electronically onto debit-like cards, why keep with monthly payments?
What employer pays their employees on a monthly basis?
I'd also argue every other week vs bimonthly (i.e. twice a month). Food is consumed daily, so distribution should be based on days (i.e. 14 days). Months have different number of days. So, if its December there are 31 and February is 28. That's a 10% swing. Now, except for February, all other months are 30/31 days, so not a big deal. But, I also tend to think individuals have shopping days, so supplying EBT benefits on or near shopping days would be a helpful convenience.
As an aside, if it were rent assistance, then monthly would be fine.
I assume you're making this on soft paternalism grounds - if you have less than sterling budgeting abilities, giving half as much twice as often will reduce the odds you go hungry towards the end of the month.
I don't object to that argument in principle. But if the average recipient only gets $187/month, maybe you also need to consider volume. If you have less than $100 to work with, you might not buy the large package even if it's a much better deal per meal. (Yes, you could stagger which non-perishables you buy in bulk which weeks, but the ability to map out larger purchases and track inventory probably correlates with general fiscal prudence!)
I believe those are very good arguments. In addition, perhaps two trips to the Costco is more expensive from a gas/time perspective so people are worse off. An A/B test at a state/local level could help with find the 'right' answer.
I suppose I wasn't coming from a paternalistic, government knows better perspective. Just human nature and the ease of projecting over two weeks vs 30 days. If someone misses their projection by 10%, that's 1.4 days on a two week basis. A 10% projection miss on 30 days is 3 days. A much bigger impact.
Note this assumes we're starting at 0. If your cupboard has a baseline of non-perishable food, then this missed projections can be offset by raiding the pantry.
Kevin Williamson at the Dispatch has done some great reporting on life in the most destitute parts of Appalachia and has an interesting piece on SNAP in these communities.
Apparently because cash is so rare, people will use SNAP to load up on Pepsi and Mountain Dew and then the cases of soda are a type of currency for all types of illicit activity, drugs, prostitution, etc.
I think he bundled all his Appalachia writings into a book called “Big White Ghetto”. It’s worth checking out.
Just to point out, Appalachia includes Pittsburgh, Asheville, Knoxville, Hagerstown, Charlottesville, Blacksburg, etc.
My family is Appalachian born and bred. More of them work in some type of higher ed than anything else, up to and including Ivies. Zero of them are meth heads.
Kevin Williamson is kind of notable for an apparently irrational hatred of rural people.
Appalachia is a large region with a rich culture that has been important to the US. It’s not a random punching bag.
Williamson isn’t talking about the university/resort towns.
My family wasn’t from the university/resort towns either, although several live in places like that now. They were from a small farming town in southwest Virginia.
Do you know where Nobel Prize winner John Nash, the Beautiful Mind guy, was from?
Bluefield, WV. Which is a town of about 10,000, in Appalachia. Not a university town. Not a resort town. Just one more example.
Appalachia has a LOT of brilliant people, who get overlooked in the stereotype.
Sure, and Williamson explicitly talks about how the brilliant people move away, or if they stay they try to lord it over as local elites: https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2013/12/16/left-behind-2/
“the best and brightest long ago packed up for Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or Memphis or Houston”
“The relative ease of life for the well-off and connected here makes it easy to overlook the real unpleasant facts of economic life, which helps explain why Booneville has a lovely new golf course, of all things, but so little in the way of everyday necessities.”
He doesn’t hate rural people and he’s not saying they’re all dumb.
You're citing what he wrote as if he was spitting out facts and not just his opinions.
"or if they stay they try to lord it over as local elites"
That kind of stuff is about, and really everything you're referencing, is about as Op-Ed as it gets, and it does strongly suggest he looks down on the area and its current inhabitants.
Saying there’s a new golf course in Booneville but hard to find basic necessities is a factual claim, not an opinion, and one that appears to be true based on Googling. And is it really factually disputed that many people move away and “be a big fish in a small pond” is a big part of the appeal to stay?
Except that actually is not true in the way he describes it. Many people do move away, often extremely reluctantly, as globalization narrowed job opportunities.
The smart ones who stay, and I have relatives who did just that, actually don’t generally lord it over others.
Williamson’s bigoted and hateful screed is not remotely an accurate representation of the area. My relatives are not ignorant, nor are they religious fanatics. There is a surprisingly large number of recreational, cultural, and educational options in the area. You can order online and supplement local retail, and Starlink exists.
But please, do go ahead and Substack-splain my own culture to me. I’m sure you understand it better than I do.
You said yourself that a bunch of your family members left, and John Nash didn’t do his work in Appalachia either. The issue isn’t jobs—there are plenty of doctor jobs but the residency classes at programs in Appalachia below the state-flagship tier are mostly from foreign countries because there aren’t enough local students who want to stay. And in any event there are local elites in Appalachia, who are going to the golf courses and fancy resorts like the Greenbrier—why don’t they create more jobs for the locals?
"Williamson’s bigoted and hateful screed"
sounds like you haven't spent much time reading him.
"Kevin Williamson is kind of notable for an apparently irrational hatred of rural people."
I make no claim to be a Kevin Williamson expert, but this defies what I've read of him. My perception has been that he is very much from these areas and so is more intimately familiar with their flaws.
As for the broader Appalachia discussion, its true that there are some very nice areas in the region, but also it has higher crime and poverty rates with lower economic results than most of the nation.
Williamson dislikes Appalachia and takes an excessively negative view of the region. I don’t doubt that he had bad early experiences, but his loathing is beyond excessive.
Appalachia has a lower crime crime rate than the US average, not a higher one.
Appalachia as a whole has a lower income than the US average. It also has a lower cost of living than the US average. Poverty is generally higher in the remote rural areas and lower in less remote areas. It includes wealthy areas, and has seen a 6.8% increase in regional average income.
A good detailed look is a available at https://www.arc.gov/about-the-appalachian-region/the-chartbook/income-and-poverty-in-appalachia/ which includes maps showing just how large Appalachia is. It’s not primarily rural hollers.
Good correction on the lower crime rate. My memory was conflating drug use with crime rate.
My comparison with Appalachia is that its similar (but different!) than the Deep South. Some areas of incredible growth and prosperity, but generally under performing. In the former its due more to poverty, corruption, drug abuse, while the latter is more about racism, violence/crime rate, corruption, etc.
Appalachia in general has been extremely hard hit by globalization, as much of its economy was based on small to mid size farming, resource extraction and manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs dropped about 29% since 2000. Small farms have been hard hit by consolidation. Climate change has also had a big impact, as coal mining, fracking, and timber harvesting are all targeted for reduction.
Corruption is pretty site specific - WV and KY have had issues, but I don’t think the Appalachian regions of other states have had more corruption than average. Remember, Appalachia includes all of WV plus part of NY, PA, OH, MD, VA, KY, TN, SC, GA, NC, AL, and MS.
Drug deaths are higher in Appalachia, primarily in young poor males. I’m not sure the rate of use is actually higher. In US rural areas in general, drug use is lower but drug deaths are higher, and I had assumed the same pattern would hold, but I can’t find regional specific numbers and I don’t want to claim without data.
I'm not sure Kevin Williamson would be my go-to for a nonideological take here.
Williamson has some good qualities and some very bad qualities, but yes he is not out there doing dispassionate policy analysis.
It's interesting how J.D. Vance was very much a Williamson-style conservative back in the Hillbilly Elegy days before coming under the sway of other very different right-wing "thinkers" post-2016. Genuinely weird how a guy in his 40s can make such abrupt and sweeping philosophical shifts.
The Naval Obsevatory is well worth a Mass, er, I mean, a MAGA hat.
I don't know that JD Vance's philosophy has shifted. My read is that Vance is flexible and sees the Trump/RETVRN brand of conservatism as his route to the Oval Office.
I admit Williamson is a great writer-his insights into the causative factors of a lot of American social dysfunction often seem very on target. But his casual, arrogant dismissal of the misery it causes is pretty off putting and tin eared.
Cash is rare wut?
Milton Friedman famously connected most recessions in developed, capitalist economies to a drop in money supply. That sounds like a too-cute-by-half explanation that a five year old would come up with, but it makes sense when you think about it.
If person A is low on cash, and so is person B, it's hard for them to transact with one another. There isn't very much cash flowing into poorer parts of rural America. What there is a lot of, is in-kind transfers. It's not as useful as cash, but thanks to Gresham's Law of "bad" money displacing "good" money, that's what gets circulated, as people hold onto cash for when they're in a tighter spot.
Well money velocity drops during recession due to a claw back credit and reduction in speeding and we all know from Locke that this is a determinant of the money supply.
>That sounds like a too-cute-by-half explanation that a five year old would come up with, but it makes sense when you think about it.<
I think it makes perfect sense. It does indeed sound cute—or highly simplistic—but the basic problem that characterizes recessions is indeed "a shortage of money."
I get what you're saying, I was thinking more like... don't people in Appalachia have bank accounts and ATMs where they can withdraw cash as needed? Do they literally not have ATMs in small-town Appalachia?
I guess the thought is that if a significant amount of your earnings comes in the form of SNAP or other restricted benefits, then you hold onto your bank account money and cash and payday checks and so on for the kinds of expenses that require liquid money (like rent, mortgage, medical expenses) and for everything that can be settled informally, like paying friends back after they’ve helped you, or paying the babysitter or whatever, you see if you can use goods that can be bought with SNAP.
There's a lot of people talking past each other here with different ideas of what "Appalachia" and "Rural America" mean.
Of course they have ATMs in small-town Appalachia in general, but once you reach a certain combination of "small" and "poor" or "depressed" they may not have ATMs.
Certain areas of Appalachia, especially NE Kentucky and Southern WV might have more of those "too small and poor" areas than many other regions, but they probably aren't especially typical even there.
For obvious reasons, I've been reticent to say precisely where I work and live, but it is in Appalachia. "Maybe" it was true 12+ years ago that in the deepest of the boondocks people bought soda with their EBT cards and traded that in a black market for drugs and sex, but...the restaurant I worked at for several years was created by someone who moved out for decades, working on 6 continents, then moved back home to the unincorporated area she grew up in to repurpose an old building into the casual-fine dining restaurant she envisioned.
What he's describing reminds me far more of homeless encampments then Appalachian small towns.
In case you are interested in the article referenced, which was either taken from the book, or inspired the book. Not sure which.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/12/white-ghetto-kevin-d-williamson/
Thank you!
I sometime post my favorite KW article (post? essay? I never know...) of all time, which pairs well with the one I shared earlier:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/05/underclass-character-eviction-court-native-born-americans-entrepreneurial-immigrants/
Sorry for the National Review links. These were when they were a bit heterodox and Never Trump was their ethos. Not a surprise that KW has moved onto The Dispatch. Though NR still has some underlying anti-Trump writers, it has largely capitulated to reality on that side. It was usually been a somewhat beneficial counter to my usual diet of The Atlantic, NYT, Vox (back in the day) articles.
Just read it. Holy cow, was that depressing!
People are very good at gaming systems. And when you don’t have a lot of money, the incentive to game increases. That’s just human nature.
Soda sounds like a horrible kind of currency. How many 2L do I need to pay for a blowjob?
It's also quite heavy!
That sounds very enterprising of them. They should be commended for their ingenuity.
I thought of those articles too when I was reading this. Didn't Matt say that he had a neighbor on SNAP benefits who would trade him Diet Coke for cigarettes?
Can I take a minute and thumb my nose at the middle class? I'm not running for office, I'm not going to say any of this stuff out loud, but I'm annoyed by their (our?) moral impulses.
I've been seeing a whole bunch of memes on social media about "HoW cOmE pEoPlE oN sNaP gEt LoBsTeR fOr DiNnEr?" Ok, how restrictive do you want to make this program? If we get rid of lobster I already know you're going to find the next most luxurious food available on SNAP and get pissed about that. You're really mad about $177/month in benefits? "ThEy DiDn'T wOrK fOr It." Ok why don't you just advocate abolishing the program? Do you want there to be no food assistance for poor kids? "No." Ok, then either SNAP or some similar program is going to exist, so get over it.
Then, on the the rich people side of things, I think Matt is correct about elected Republicans' priorities, but average MAGA Republicans are just like Democrats in that they have zero problem raising taxes on people richer than them. But of course, just raising taxes on billionaires won't raise enough money to do anything, so again, "tax the rich" is just moral posturing.
Funny enough, the SNAP program would probably be more sustainable if everybody paid some 0.01% SNAP tax and the program was framed more as something akin to unemployment benefits that we would all use if we fell on hard times. I wouldn't like the sense of entitlement that would create, but it does seem to be the dynamic.
To tie it with the shutdown more broadly, I think that it's a humiliation ritual. People should be made to feel bad about being poor. It's the "common sense" notion of "spare the rod, spoil the child," which doesn't actually work, but sounds like it should to most people. The poor are infantilised, and in need of discipline, according to this logic. It's not to give them support they may need, but about control.
More broadly, Trump and his Republican allies don't need Democratic support to open the government. They could pass it on their own. Trump has spent months taking over the power of the purse, and Republicans and the courts have largely let him. But for Trump it's not about that. He has to assert dominance. He has to make Democrats get kicked in the teeth and agree to get kicked in the teeth. Like with the folk wisdom of "spoiling" people one sees as lesser. I don't think that it's likely to work, but the logic is stubborn.
It's both possible to want there to be SNAP, and to not want people to spend it on things like Soda and other junk food. If people think they money is being wasted they are less likely to support it.
As for Lobster it codes as rich luxury
It's bad faith. As soon as we get rid of lobster, the next nicest thing will go viral, and that would repeat until the SNAP recipients are forced to eat nutriloaf.
As for soda I guess I agree, but I'm with Matt here. It would be better to give people cash and if we're concerned about people being unhealthy, tax junk food or whatever.
It’s also heavily location dependent. If you live somewhere where lobster is extremely expensive I could see SNAP recipients blowing their whole wad on an expensive luxury item immediately then not having enough for the rest of the month being a legitimate problem. Where I live though, lobster tails regularly go on sale for 6 or 7 bucks, a lobster dinner with baked potato and a vegetable is cheaper than eating at McDonald’s. Banning SNAP from being spent on lobster here would accomplish little beyond virtue signaling.
Okay, but the tax junk food part will never happen (even though I agree it should). So given that, I think it's a reasonable idea to limit SNAP. WiC seems like overkill (if Matt's 2021 article is anything to go by), but I feel like there's a middle ground where we cut out pop and chips and cookies.
I'd like to ask the critics what they want SNAP to pay for and if they can't come up with a list, let's just stick with whatever it's currently paying for.
A bit ironic that the sea bugs went from "this is what the poors eat, because they can't afford mutton" to "how dare you have that delightful, expensive crustacean in your cart", right?
We should all use SNAP when we fall on hard times! What’s wrong with that?
Universal SNAP.
I'm not kidding.
Universal SNAP and universal Section 8 and Medicare for all aaaaaand it's communism.
And it’s beautiful!
I’d accept a credit card with no limit I could bill to the government in lieu of in-kind benefits, though
Absolutely!
I lowkey worry that Dems get the blame of stopping SNAP “IT IS DEMS WHO SHUTDOWN” and that becomes the perception of low propensity voters - am I too paranoid?
So far, not a lot of evidence that is the case.
If they look far enough into the chaos to see that the shutdown on SNAP is caused by Trump's shutdown on Medicaid.
Trump did what now?
Trump: "We finally beat Medicaid."
Low propensity voters are by definition the least valuable voters.
Yes but they're often the most willing to vote for a different party than they did 4 years prior, which can kind of cancel this out.
Valuable by what metric?
How important it is to win their votes, since as a class they're defined by low propensity to actually vote.
Thanks for this breakdown, Matt. I have been very curious about SNAP ever since the threat of it being shut down started to loom, as I was having a difficult time conceptualizing just how much impact it's had. I agree with Matt that in an ideal world, I would roll SNAP into some sort of straight cash benefit, homey, thinking of his excellent case against coupon government [https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-case-against-coupon-government], demonstrated by hawking for GiveDirectly at the top and bottom of this article. (Hard pass on the in kind program, though, especially considering what the current government considers healthy eating after reading another article on RFK Jr.'s nonsense woo.) But I also had an instinct that there should be good reason to be cautious against disrupting the status quo, and this article lays out why.
This will be a fascinating (even while bad) experiment to see how SNAP beneficiaries get by. We all need food to live, and food is miraculously abundant in these days. But will they get it via private charity, via cash or in kind? Or will they get the money by cutting back on other spending, including on some other essentials like housing or utilities? And what adverse effects will follow from that? FAFO, as they say...
They'll get by because of state and local efforts by citizens and governments who actually care who eats and who doesn't in their jurisdictions.
This will likely vary in magnitude, however--both by the governments in charge and the divergent wealth that communities might have.
Yes. In blue states-even in tiny Maine here-state governments are doing their best to make people whole. Haven't heard much of that coming from Mississippi or Arkansas. Voters their have bitten the hands that literally in this case would feed them.
https://www.thv11.com/article/news/local/gov-sanders-500k-arkansas-food-banks-snap-freeze/91-eeb6906a-a3ac-46ac-bbc0-f3662bb4acd2
Well, that’s good to know.
Most states, red and blue, have diverted millions to food banks right now. They will pick up the slack to some degree.
The key is some degree, and how that will vary.
> I agree with Matt that in an ideal world, I would roll SNAP into some sort of straight cash benefit, homey, thinking of his excellent case against coupon government
I think there's room for a little more paternalism to encourage more nutritious choices, but it can easily tip over into absurdity as that article shows.
I don't think we can go any further beyond perhaps soda pop before we enter very dicey questions as to what is considered "nutritious", and whether the purpose should go beyond just keeping people away from deep hunger.
> I also trust that people are not relying on Slow Boring as their only news source.
Well I also read the comments.
Anyway, what’s new?