hydroacetylene
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User ID: 128
hydroacetylene
6d ago
Many Americans who don't work due to just having money have a full time housekeeper who does some cooking, but a personal chef would be for billionaires only. Maybe the lower cost of labor in Russia changes things over there.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
Define 'upper class'. The US has plenty of full time housekeepers but only literal billionaires have personal chefs.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
We should certainly not be subsidizing the undeserving poor, that is to say, those who could work but just don’t want to.
Is thé welfare population mostly those people? IIRC it’s mostly thé working poor.
The question of whether poor person bad behavior is encouraged by the welfare system actually mostly centers around the extent to which welfare eligibility rules drive down the marriage rate among the poor. We should probably fix that, but the fix doesn’t look like ‘just cut welfare spending’.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
I would hazard a guess it’s because they’re known as particularly unhealthy and easy to identify.
I don’t share the particular fixation, you can get very fat off a diet of mostly rice, fruit, meat, flour, and oil. Go to southern Louisiana and you will see people who do this.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
It’s worth noting that the labor market for the urban poor in the Roman Empire was just appallingly bad, and it’s not an implausible story that Christianity spread in part because believers were able to better network getting each other jobs and buffer periods of unemployment.
If you’ve ever belonged to a church, that pattern looks familiar.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
Your math doesn’t math? Twelve is not 96, and 96 is 3 meals/day for one person for one month, not four people.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
A Cajun diet is cheap, I spend less per person than food stamps allots. But a big chunk of the food stamps target population can’t cook, may face some additional frictions(lack of consistent kitchen access for the poorest is a real thing), and or just refuses to eat healthy from scratch meals. Yes fixing these problems would be good but nobody really knows how to do that.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
SNAP exists to prevent childhood malnutrition, which if you are an IQ believer is way more expensive down the line than food stamps. It may not be the most cost effective way of achieving this goal, but it does work- there is basically no involuntary childhood malnutrition in the USA nowadays.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
The system is being gamed mostly through common law marriages not being claimed. The law doesn’t automatically combine finances if you aren’t married- two working adults, one of which is eligible for food stamps.
hydroacetylene
6d ago
No? While I agree that he used a lot of words, this is the motte, and there was plenty of content for those words. Conservatives think that there is a transcendent moral order and are more upset at food stamps mostly benefit those who violate it than any of its incidental effects.
Now I would disagree with him that the motte is a hub of classical conservatism- lots of right libertarians, lots of nrx adjacent, lots of rationalists who are above all deeply frustrated with democrat party academese lunacy more than with GOP proleslop populism. But it was a coherent point about food stamps.
An executive chef earns near six figures or lower six figures, $80-$120k ish. But executive chefs don't personally cook, they oversee line cooks who do the cooking and do the training, menu, and quality control side of managing a kitchen. Doubling that to account for executive chef level responsibility and line cook level work is probably generous but in the right order of magnitude. Private chefs exist, you can hire one for your next party, but the business model assumes an occasional extravagance for entertaining, not one regular client.
I suspect that the merely wealthy either like cooking(possibly as a status symbol) or go to restaurants, or have their housekeepers do enough low level cooking to not worry about it.
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