I mean, this is an obviously crazy-impractical half-assed undercooked sorta-half-idea that someone threw in there as an “innovation” that couldn’t possibly be enacted (for one thing, grocery chains will have a FIT), but let’s focus on how cartoonishly evil this is:
Under the Trump proposal, which the Agriculture Department has dubbed “America’s Harvest Box,” all households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits — 81 percent of SNAP households overall — would begin receiving about half their benefits in the form of government-purchased, nonperishable food items.
Those foods would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA. The department estimates that it could supply these goods at about half the cost of retail, slashing the cost of SNAP while still feeding the hungry.
No fresh fruit or vegetables for you! No more actually choosing the food you eat, dietary requirements be damned! We hate poor families this much!
You really have to admire the mental gymnastics lefties like OP are capable of pulling off by arguing that literally giving poor people food is the exact same thing as making them starve to death. That type of impressive athletics is something you’d only imagine seeing at the Olympics.
Hi!
I’m a disabled person whose family literally receives SNAP right now. Why we receive it or the circumstances under which we receive it is nobody’s business but ours: the social safety net is here for us because we fell on hard times. One of my disabilities? Celiac disease. And yes, that is an ADA disability.
I cannot simply eat a box of food that someone gives me. Canned foods often use glutenated substances as preservatives, making them literally poison for me. I must very carefully choose my foods. A restricted diet is the only treatment for my life-threatening disease.
So, yes, handing people like me a box of food absolutely is asking us to starve, because most canned meats, canned vegetables, and cereals are not edible by me, nor is it safe for those items to be eaten in a kitchen used to feed me; gluten adheres to porous surfaces such as Tupperware, plastic bowls, and non-stick cookware. That food cannot be eaten in my home without making me sick, so no one in my family can eat it either.
Now that’s leaving aside entirely the fact that I have a hard time, due to my disease, with absorbing nurtients from food, so I must carefully choose what I eat to maximize my nutritional absorption. Hint: canned foods have much lower nutritional value and would not meet my needs either.
The article – had you read it – makes very clear that those proposing this hadn’t considered how to handle people with food allergies or celiac disease. So we could go with this massively-expensive, incredibly invasive, paternalistic, infantilizing and ineffective system that would leave someone like me not only hungry but sicker, making more use of the Medicaid that I currently receive because I am permanently disabled, and thus more expensive…
… or we could keep it the way it is, not waste all that money setting up a ridiculously bad system that will make people sick, and trust poor families to know how best to feed themselves for their specific needs.
Oh, but wait! There’s more! This plan would take money away from small mom-and-pop grocery stores and farms who currently accept EBT and supply a lot of the food stamp needs for rural working poor.
It requires an awful lot of mental gymnastics to justify taking money away from small business owners and also giving poor people food less-nutritional food that a lot of us can’t even eat. It takes absolutely none to say ‘gee, here’s your food money, you know better than we do what your individual needs are, sorry life’s kicking you right now, hopefully things get better, I hope this system is here to help me if I need it.’
But, you know, go off, I guess.
And that’s not even considering that some people on SNAP, given, you know, they are REALLY POOR, happen to be homeless.
“nonperishable food items. Those foods would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA.“
Okay so, even ignoring those with celiac disease or various food allergies (did you know even red meat can be an allergen for people with certain past or current health issues?? Some people are likewise allergic for various reasons to strawberries, melons, apples, citrus, banana, or pineapple, just off the top of my head as list of COMMON “fruits” that I have met or talked to someone with an allergy to it, not to mention peanut or tree nut allergies OMG THEY LITERALLY EVEN SAY “PEANUT BUTTER”, PEANUTS ARE A FAMOUS ALLERGEN HOW CAN YOU NOT NOTICE THAT, plus is that milk the Lactose-free filtered version because many people have dairy allergies/lactose intolerance and can’t eat/drink that etc etc you get the idea)….
How the fuck is a homeless person going to store “shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruit and vegetables”??
SNAP benefits are already hard for homeless people to make useful since they often do not cover, for example, a premade meal and you can’t just literally use them at McD’s, you have to buy mostly “ingredients” or “components” of meals, with them. Just imagine if they had to get a bulk package of dry goods they had to store every fucking month when they already sleep on the street because they can’t afford to rent an apartment with a pantry and fridge in it.
Also, can’t help but point out that they are literally trying to make the program WORSE economically than it currently is: this proposed version forces a nanny state government to purchase your food for you, presumably from some large distant retailer who gave the government enough kickbacks to get the contract, and, it seems, nobody considered how much FUCKING red tape and complications and in fact actual goddamn liability that would cause for the government itself when you take into account medical diets, so there’s that on top of it all.
However, since SNAP benefits, at current, are used like a debit card… that money is, at current, GOING TO LOCAL COMMUNITIES. YOU KNOW. WHERE IT GOES TO LOCAL BUSINESSES IN THE SAME AREA THAT APPARENTLY HAS SOME POVERTY, AND STIMULATES THE LOCAL ECONOMY
I forget the actual numbers and I don’t have the spoons to google it, go do yourself if you’re so huffily disbelieving, but there HAVE been studies that showed that EBT cards actually STIMULATE the economy and effectively every $1 put into the program comes back in terms of economic stimulus as MORE THAN A DOLLAR. Like not a huge amount more, something like $1.07? but like, basically, SNAP benefits the local community by BOTH feeding people, and also stimulating economic growth by allowing purchases that couldn’t otherwise be made, it is LITERALLY the SMARTER way, within a capitalist system, to solve hunger than “just give people food” would be.
Also if the government is so keen on Just Giving Food Away, that’s fine, I like the idea OTHERWISE, but instead of mailing every one of several MILLION SNAP households a fucking individual box of food every month, which would be incredibly fucking expensive anyway, shouldn’t then the idea be like, you give it to charitable organizations that run Food Pantries for their LOCAL communities, and then you also – hell, why don’t we do this part already?? – make sure poor people who apply for SNAP, who therefore have demonstrated “I am super poor and having trouble affording food on top of my other expenses, such as a roof over my head” , KNOW WHERE TO FIND FREE OR CHEAPER FOOD?
Like, there’s places you can text to find who locally provides free meals or whatnot in your area based on your ZIP code, why the fuck doesn’t the government promote those things if it’s really just Concerned With Poor People Getting Food??
Other things that would be smarter, cheaper, and more effective than this proposal if the goal is to Feed More Poor People, Better:
– Free School Lunch, and Breakfast, for literally every child in public school,so we can stop with forcing parents to pay for lunches or go through hoops to ~prove their poverty~ and no longer shame the kids for having the Free lunch which makes many poor kids scared to use it for fear of rejection from their peers (yes, all this happens in the USA). Literally. Just free breakfast and lunch for every school-age child, they’re CHILDREN, let them fucking eat, they need it even more than adults do because they’re growing and guess what, if the parents don’t have to worry as much about feeding their kids, they can worry about feeding themselves a lot less! The whole household benefits! – For that matter, extend free breakfast and lunch at public schools through the summer. And/or do something in the communities to replace it. Many poor kids suffer during summer months when school is out because even if they qualify for subsidized lunch and aren’t too scared to take it, that’s not available for the SEVERAL months that school is not in session; but the kids, obviously, still need to eat, so…
– Make sure poor people are more likely to know how to find food pantries and free meal sources in their area by promoting the information for them obvious benefit is obvious I already mentioned this
– Raising the benefit amount for SNAP even one goddamn penny per person, since, again, it acts as economic stimulus while ALSO only being spendable on food items anyway?? You realize it’s less than $30 PER PERSON PER WHOLE ENTIRE MONTH on average to begin with, right? Yet economically speaking we get more out of it than we put in, so it’s totally logical to raise it even just slightly! Because it definitely would buy more food, would allow more healthy foods (fresh produce is expensive!) to be purchased, etc, and it economically stimulates the local economy.
– Allow SNAP to be used on (select?) “prepared meals”, e.g. a cooked chicken from walmart, which goes a lot further than “ingredients” do, purchasing-wise and feeding-wise, particularly for working poor people (who are in fact the VAST majority of SNAP beneficiaries I might add) who don’t always have much time or energy to cook (this is, btw, PART of why poor people have “bad” diets in many cases; it’s not that none of them WANT to eat well, it’s that junk food and McD’s burgers are a lot cheaper than many healthy alternatives and often can be eaten right away so if you’re falling asleep on your feet after a double shift and know you have to work a ten hour day the next morning for which you have to get up at 5am, uh, yeah, sometimes…that’s the option if you want to not starve but also don’t have much money). Right now you can’t buy a cooked chicken or deli sandwich or whatnot on SNAP, you can only buy the things to make it, which is more time-intensive and energy-intensive. Allowing people to buy like, a rotisserie chicken with it though? Could give the equivalent of multiple meals to a disabled and/or working poor person who would otherwise not be able to cook every night. A single one of those little walmart rotisseries can feed a family at least one if not two or more whole meals, depending on family size, man. It would also be much more beneficial to allow these purchases, for the people on SNAP who are homeless or otherwise do not have a fridge or pantry to store food in.
– Create community food-centered gardens, especially in Food Desert areas, and/or give subsidies for transport in and out food deserts. A “food desert” is a place where there are NO affordable, proper grocery stores or farmer’s markets providing access to things like fresh produce, meat, dairy or fish to poor people. E.g. if your neighborhood only has convenience stores, no proper groceries, within several miles, then it’s a food desert. These communities are hard for poor people to feed themselves healthy diets in, for obvious reasons, and yet they usually cannot afford the expense of moving out of them (moving is fucking expensive, can we NOT pretend that it’s easy for poor people to just up and move to somewhere better??). Make transport to healthy affordable food sources more accessible to poor people or just flat-out help people in the community grow food plants with the explicit intention of it being eaten by locals, and you start to solve the food desert issue, though.
– Buy the “ugly, unwanted” produce off of farmers that grocery stores don’t want, and give it to food pantries or homeless shelters or public schools etc, especially in Food Desert type areas. At least a third or more of our produce goes to WASTE in this country because it has the most minor of blemishes or imperfections, and grocery stores only want the prettiest produce… so they reject it. Farmers don’t fight them on it, because if they did, they’d lose business. But most of that food is PERFECTLY edible! Buy it off the farmers for what’s already a lower cost than grocery chains pay normally and you’d still be giving the farmers far more than they’d get period off that load of fruit or veggies, so the farmers (large-scale or otherwise) would be HAPPY to participate, I’m sure, and LITERAL TONS of food would no longer go to waste, but instead would feed the people too poor to afford being picky about how pretty their pumpkins are.
– Make it illegal to ban feeding the needy/homeless in public. Hell, outright feed them yourself. This is something a number of cities have done and it’s appalling: they make it illegal to do soup kitchen or whatnot in public parks or sometimes practically at all. Do away with these laws or circumvent them with a government-approved soup kitchen event thing, and you’re feeding people! DUH.
Also I’m not sure whether it would be nominally “cheaper” but a MUCH more effective and SMARTER way of providing healthier food options and stability to poor people in a way that LITERALLY benefits everyone, is a Housing First program.
Utah is a US State which has tried this with a startling amount of success: they literally just make sure everyone has housing, period. That’s it. That’s all. They eliminated homelessness, by providing a home (usually an apartment, IIRC?), no requirements other than you need one.
What they found when they did this was, in addition to homelessness itself going away, uh, tons of other problems did too – crime rates dropped, substance abuse rates dropped, etc., because you know, a lot of those are exacerbated by homelessness (people get desperate when homeless, so they commit more crimes on average because of that in an effort to try and support themselves; people are more likely to turn to substance abuse if they’re homeless, due to the stress). Jobless rates would also tend to go down under such a system, because nobody wants to hire somebody with no address who doesn’t have access to a shower, you know?
But the way this would impact FOOD is simple but powerful: most rentals include a pantry, kitchen access of some sort, usually an oven/stove, a fridge…
You know, the things that allow you to STORE and USE food of the type you can get on SNAP, longer-term?? The things that allow you to buy in larger (and therefore usually cheaper) amounts, the things that allow you to store perishable and non-perishable items, the things that allow you to cook and therefore eat them!
And don’t tell me we “can’t afford” to do it, when people have literally calculated that Trumps’ proposed military parade would cost LESS than literally housing every homeless person in America. If we can “afford” that frivolous parade, we can afford to house the homeless, now can’t we. And when you consider that it would benefit the whole of society by getting people off the streets, reducing substance abuse and crime rates, increasing employment, overall creating a more stable environment…why the frick wouldn’t you, really?
Certainly more practical a solution than “Blue Apron, but for the poors, and oops we didn’t consider special diets in that, because why would we ever research anything that effects actual people”.
We don’t know yet if Mueller has the goods — documentary or testimonial proof of explicit collusion — or if he can get them, so we have no idea how this is ultimately going to play out.
But we are disturbingly close to the following scenario:
Say Mueller reveals hard proof that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with Russia, strategically using leaked emails to hurt Clinton’s campaign. Say the president — backed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, Breitbart, most of the US Cabinet, half the panelists on CNN, most of the radio talk show hosts in the country, and an enormous network of Russian-paid hackers and volunteer shitposters working through social media — rejects the evidence.
They might say Mueller is compromised. It’s a Hillary/Deep State plot. There’s nothing wrong with colluding with Russia in this particular way. Dems did it first. All of the above. Whatever.
Say the entire right-wing media machine kicks to life and dismisses the whole thing as a scam — and conservatives believe them. The conservative base remains committed to Trump, politicians remain scared to cross the base, and US politics remains stuck in partisan paralysis, unable to act on what Mueller discovers.
In short, what if Mueller proves the case and it’s not enough? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that could overcome the influence of right-wing media?…
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. (Episteme, or ἐπιστήμη, is ancient Greek for knowledge/science/understanding.)
The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.
The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.
In their place, the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem.
But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.
The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.
But the right did not want better neutral arbiters. The institutions it built scarcely made any pretense of transcending faction; they are of and for the right. There is nominal separation of conservative media from conservative politicians, think tanks, and lobbyists, but in practice, they are all part of the conservative movement. They are prosecuting its interests; that is the ur-goal.
Indeed, the far right rejects the very idea of neutral, binding arbiters; there is only Us and Them, only a zero-sum contest for resources. That mindset leads to what I call “tribal epistemology” — the systematic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.
There’s always been a conspiratorial and xenophobic fringe on the right, but it was (fitfully) held in place by gatekeepers through the early decades of America’s post-war prosperity. The explosion of right-wing media in the 1990s and 2000s swept those gatekeepers away, giving the loudest voice, the most exposure, and the most power to the most extreme elements on the right. The right-wing media ecosystem became a bubble from which fewer and fewer inhabitants ever ventured.
As the massive post-election study of online media from Harvard (which got far too little attention) showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. “Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,” the researchers found. “On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.”
When mapping out sources of online news, researchers found that the two basic poles were the center-left and the far-right.
The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
In short, they conclude, “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”
That insular partisan far-right media is also full of nonsense like Pizzagate that leaves the base continuously pumped up — outraged, infuriated, terrified, and misled. At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything. And they are pissed about all of it.
As Brian Beutler wrote in a scathing piece recently, the mainstream media has never learned to deal with the right-wing bubble — it has not learned how not to take bad-faith lies seriously. And now we will all reap the consequences…
Say he pardons everyone. People will argue on cable TV about whether he should have. One side will say up, the other will say down. Trump may have done this, but what about when Obama did that? What about Hillary’s emails? Whatabout this, whatabout that, whatabout whatabout whatabout?
There is no longer any settling such arguments. The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.
If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.
The subject of climate change offers a crystalline example here. If climate science does its thing, checks and rechecks its work, and then the Republican Party simply refuses to accept it … what then?
That’s what US elites are truly afraid to confront: What if facts and persuasion just don’t matter anymore?
…I think we all know already that it’s going to go this way.
Meg's Mumbles 