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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9723 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 10, 2025

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Senate ends shutdown.

With no provision to extend COVID-era ACA subsidies, merely a vote, it has the appearance and character of a Democrat loss. The usual suspects on Reddit are crying foul of cowardice.

But could it have ended any other way? The Democrats are obliged to government unions, who weren't being paid: and to the urban poor, who weren't getting SNAP. Two massive interests within their base were being sacrificed for the benefit of... four million recipients? The math never added up.

You could say that the Republicans were heartless, but they have come out of it looking like fighters and winners, while the Democrats have capitulated to 'fascists'. The midterms will still probably be a Dem victory, but this act by Schumer and the moderates will not be something the #resistance will be likely to forget anytime soon.

It’s not just the urban poor who are on SNAP. The Democrats had a chance to make gibs into a real bread-and-butter issue, not just a culture-war distraction.

This was also a great opportunity to bait the Republicans into abolishing the filibuster, which would have helped Democrats in the long run. Zero Machiavellian instincts from these people. No wonder the base is angry.

It’s worth noting that a full Christmas SNAP crisis would be a major escalation. I realize some think the Dems should abandon “traditional politics”, but others think that the alienation and loss of trust that big of a move would cause could created some terrible effects. Like another Trump could rise, just as easily as the Dems could get a Trump of their own. A lot aren’t willing to risk that brave new world.

What is your mental model of this "full Chrismas SNAP crisis", because I think its probably a load of crap. At least with regards to actual people being hungry. I'd expect people would loot and steal and riot because they can't get their Dr. Pepper, but no actual amount of people would be starving. There are too many school lunches, shelters, food banks, etc. And even outside private charities, states can also always easily step up in this sort of situation by simply being less generous in their dispensations. Restrict the eligible product pool to vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, and dairy and you save like 90%, while avoiding the issue of people spending all their cash on day 1 on waygu steak or orange crush, or selling them for spending money.

Restrict the eligible product pool to vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, and dairy and you save like 90%, while avoiding the issue of people spending all their cash on day 1 on waygu steak or orange crush, or selling them for spending money.

This simply isn't feasible. Even assuming it's legal for states to deviate from Federal SNAP guidelines (and I doubt that it is), and that eligible items could be agreed on politically, there's simply no way to implement such a system without giving significant advance notice. Grocery stores rely on internal codes to determine what is food stampable and what isn't. If such a change required them to go into their computer systems and change the status of thousands of items, it would be a tall enough order, but it gets worse than than. To avoid having to code each individual item as being eligible or ineligible, they rely on an item's categorization in the relevant department. So in a typical grocery store items categorized as produce, meat, dairy, edible grocery, frozen, bakery, and deli would be eligible for food stamps, while items categorized as HBC, inedible grocery, and prepared foods would not. When you decide to start changing the eligible items you're requiring grocery stores to upend their entire department systems to accommodate the change. What you propose wouldn't affect some departments, but something like edible grocery would be entirely screwed up, and even things like deli would get complicated (what you propose would include cheese but not meat, and some stores categorize certain bread items as deli, but not others).

Conservatives in general like to excoriate poor people for the perception that they spend their food stamps on items they shouldn't be spending them on, creating a sort of triangle with the following three categories being the points:\

  1. Items that are objectionable because they're inherently unhealthy (fruit roll up, pop tarts, cheese curls, Dr. Pepper, etc.)
  2. Convenience items that resemble unobjectionable items or are composed of items that would individually be unobjectionable, but are prepared or processed to a degree that makes them both more unhealthy and more expensive than unobjectionable items (Hungry Man Dinners, frozen pizza, etc.)
  3. Luxury items that would be unobjectionable but for the cost (Waygu steak, most seafood, artisanal cheese, etc.)

There are certain staple items like the ones you probably have in mind that fit right in the center of the triangle that aren't objectionable to anybody. But when you move closer to the edges it becomes extremely difficult to draw the line. For example, you suggest restricting the product pool to grains. But what do you actually mean by that? Let's look at some items:

  • Rice, oatmeal, flour: These are more or less pure grains that would presumably fit any definition you want to use.
  • Bread, pasta: Processed, premade items, but such basic staples that it would be ridiculous to not include them.
  • Prepackaged cookies, cakes, donuts, etc.: Obviously in the snack food category, but they're really just basic grain items with more sugar and fat content
  • Boxed crackers: Still firmly in the snack food category, but without the added sugar and fat
  • Breakfast cereals: Run the gamut from Cheerios and Kix up to Fruity Pebbles and Count Chocula. I guess you could propose a sugar limit like my mother did?
  • Granola bars, breakfast bars, energy bars: Usually found in the cereal aisle. Like cereal, they run the gamut from so healthy as to be inedible up to Pop Tarts, the poster child for oversweetened convenience foods.
  • Hamburger Helper, Rice-a-Roni, Kraft Mac-n-Cheese, boxed stuffing mix, ramen: Unobjectional staple items plus flavorings that may or may not make the product significantly less healthy
  • Pancake mix: Unobjectionable on its own, except the intended purpose (and only purpose the vast majority will ever use it for) is to drench it in a sauce made of pure sugar, which is sold separately but conveniently located right next to it
  • Frozen garlic bread, frozen ravioli, frozen pierogies: Unobjectionable items made slightly less healthy and sold in a form that is typically associated with objectionable convenience foods.
  • Specialty breads: An unobjectionable item made in a way that may or may not make it more expensive. Bakery Italian is among the least expensive and best-tasting options at the store I shop at, but you can also get more expensive stuff pretty easily.

I don't doubt that you have your opinions on this and could draw a line somewhere that's both logical and reasonable. That's not the issue. The issue is that disentangling all of this would result in regulations so byzantine that you couldn't possibly expect the average person to have an intuitive sense for it.

Totally with you here. Of course every grocery checkout clerk has had to scan through huge packages of crab legs and Hi-C through EBT, but the difference isn't that big. Adding a bunch of complexity and power to a federal program is almost always a bad move.

The right one is to restructure SNAP as a whole to just serve fewer people.

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