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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25594 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I'm not sure the value of this as a top level comment, but I'll write it because it struck me as odd. I live in California. I stopped by Grocery Outlet today after work to pick an ingredient up for dinner and some bleach for cleaning. I walk up to the checkout line with my $10 worth of groceries, and in front of me are two groups. The first group currently checking out are a couple, both guant, face sores, interesting clothing/jewelry/tattoo choices, and are buying food and water. I presume they are either living on the street or out of their vehicle and do drugs pretty consistently. They have a whole load of groceries and what caught my attention was the lady who requested the cashier to separate the mushroom mind focus and energy https://lairdsuperfood.com/products/focus-and-memory-mushrooms bags of snacks she was purchasing because if they weren't EBT eligible she would pay for them on her own. Luckily as I was to find out, they were, and she went on to make a separate purchase of those with her handy card.

Next up in the grocery line, we have a black lady, also buying significant amounts of groceries, and frankly she was a good 300 pounds #healthyatanysize. Luckily she had her handy card too.

Now I make decent money, but I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line. Not sure what to add to this, I see the proposals to shrink EBT just to the essentials, only for people to be shocked as that would require people to make their food like me! Maybe this is what I get for living in California, but frankly, I think EBT and systems like it are just as prevalent elsewhere. It just strikes me as odd that I'm a professional, in a good industry, and I would question spending $50 for a couple of tiny packets of specialty mushroom superfood, but two methheads get to have it as they wish. Maybe I'm out of touch with the plights of the poor, but idk, doesn't seem half bad, I've car camped in the past before.

To be fair with the lady with the kid behind me, I did not stick around long enough to see if she too had her handy card with her, but I feel somewhat saddened that I am missing out on this club.

It reminds me in college, I had some hippy friends, they showed me the beauty of the college food kitchen. Just walk in, grab food, no worries. Oh yeah and btw since you're in a full college courseload, and your income is below the poverty threshold, despite being a dependent, you can apply to EBT, unemployment benefits, free health insurance, etc. Idk, I didn't partake, despite having years of less than stellar income and a strict budget. Maybe I should have? Is that just like any other tax loophole? What's the difference between saving money via that, and wash selling bitcoin shares to offset other investment income or other such schemes which I don't necessarily disagree with morally.

The other thing I think of when I roll this over in my head, is the stratification of grocery stores as a class separator. The last few years my closest store has been Ralphs. For those of you who don't know, Ralphs is slightly more high-end than Grocery Outlet which is more bottom of the barrel. Shoppers of Ralphs are probably not going to encounter EBT users at the same rates in areas with many grocery stores. Think Target vs. Walmart. The effect I feel like this has is for those contributing more to the tax pool, they encounter the absurdity of the purchasers less, and therefore the blob of money dedicated to it is further from the mind.

There is definitely a class element to grocery store positioning, but Amex Plat giving out free Walmart+ memberships is a boon to the comfortable middle class. Why would I pay extra for oyster crackers?

Yeah, it's certainly not fantastic. I was experiencing some schadenfreude last fall when SNAP benefits were possibly going to be delayed due to the government shutdown, and people were panicking about extremely first world food problems.

I do think we have to work on culture a bit. Countries used to have fasts. Lent and Ramadan are both starting. We should probably move back towards some amount of abstention being the proper thing to do, rather than just eating thoughtlessly all the time.

I've heard it said that a good relationship is one in which both people are trying to put in more than they take out.

This generalizes over the set of relationships known as a society.

My first mild awareness of the infestation of gibs culture in the U.S. was when my Hispanic friends in elementary school pointed out that I could be getting my school lunch for free just by having my parents fill out some yellow form. When I brought this up with my parents (both working class with no college education), they were annoyed and offended that I would even bring this to their attention. As though I was insinuating they couldn’t provide for me themselves.

Fast forward to today. Half my coworkers are former military. Of those, about half are either 90% or 100% disabled. They pay less in taxes in one year than I pay in a week. All of them are physically capable of running, lifting, and climbing. Very few of them are even fat.

Like you, I have always found something deeply repugnant about taking gibs, even if I β€œqualified” for them. I can rationalize how it is morally acceptable, but I cannot shake the latent disgust and lack of self-respect. I really do think this is just a piece of our culture being eroded by the Great Displacement and the increasingly mercenary, atomized behavior of westerners. Where pride and principles are just theories, not codes to live by.

Veterans are not eligible for Worker's Comp, FMLA, or long term disability, and OSHA is certainly not a concern in the military. Don't die on that hill.

I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line

Who pays for the rest of the food? Middle class pays about half the taxes (bottom 50% pays pretty much nothing or less) - with the other half being paid by the rich, the proverbial 1% so to say. They get the power for their half. Middle class gets bupkis. That's something to think about if you want to properly feel like a shmuck.

In fact the very rich or the middle class don't pay for the rest of the food. Much of it is paid for by the future American taxpayer in the form of debt, and/or inflation.

The 1% don't get power; maybe the 0.01%.

Populist politics, very much including MAGA, is driven by the perception that the middle 19% (or 19.99% in your formulation) are gaining power at the expense of the bottom 80%. [The 19% is personified here by HR professionals, corporate middle managers, teachers, doctors etc.] The elite that modern right-populists are attacking pretty explicitly includes anyone with a degree from a selective university, and doesn't appear to include hereditary billionaire real estate magnates.

Attempts by the 19.99% to enlist the 80% in solidarity against the 0.01% are the least effective political appeals going. Although the 80% include a lot of idiots, I expect they are accurately recognising the boot on their necks.

The 80% need to realize the boot on their necks imposed by the 19% (or 19.99%, although I suspect in reality it's just the 19.9%) is a good thing. Get rid of it to the point where the lower classes take charge and you'll find yourself in a very bad economic recession and once you get out of it it'll become very apparent that the position of countries like the UK on the new totem pole is one where Indonesia et. al. are now going to bully you instead of the other way around. That, I suspect, will be what truly ends up breaking the lower class western mind, and I look forward to seeing the day; of course, as a neutral third party there's no reason for a lower class Indonesian to be getting paid any less than a lower class Brit, the emergence of a more just world order will lead to squeals from westerners just like the squeals of the upper class westerners back in the 18th-19th centuries when their privileges were taken away.

  • -10

as a neutral third party

Oh, come on. You're a character and I enjoy your fantasizing about the destruction of lower class whites, but do not pretend to be neutral.

I meant in the sense that I'm neither a lower class Indonesian or a lower class white British man so I don't have a direct dog in the race. No reason why Amelia in the UK who has a job making and serving mediocre coffee should get paid any more than Mehmet making and serving mediocre coffee in Ankara.

I meant in the sense that I'm neither a lower class Indonesian or a lower class white British man so I don't have a direct dog in the race.

One notes that it is possible to be interested in axes of identity other than class, and judging by your comment history it seems clear that you pretty clearly adhere to such interests, between a thin veneer of self-interested line-go-up markets cheerleading.

No reason why Amelia in the UK who has a job making and serving mediocre coffee should get paid any more than Mehmet making and serving mediocre coffee in Ankara.

Is Indonesia as wealthy per-capita as the UK? Is the wealth of Indonesia roughly equivalent in terms of concentration within the population? That would at least potentially be two reasons why Amelia should be paid more than Mehmet.

Is Indonesia as wealthy per-capita as the UK?

No it's not, however this is a difference that in a perfect and efficient world should get arbitraged away, it's an imperfection that we should be working to get rid of, not for "fairness" reasons but for "efficiency" reasons.

Is the wealth of Indonesia roughly equivalent in terms of concentration within the population?

Similarly this is something which should over time get arbitraged away as groups and populations mix, however I admit the "failure" here is less important to correct than the first one in terms of deadweight loss.

More comments

The people you are describing are mostly tools, or footsoldiers if you like. They apply the power but they don't make the decisions.

The elite that modern right-populists are attacking pretty explicitly includes anyone with a degree from a selective university

Certainly not. People from some of the most selective universities, but not nearly all from a selective university.

Back during the neoliberalization of the 90's, it was said that one of the results would be more wealth to the upper middle-class professionals and less wealth to hoi polloi. But they justified this on the basis that there would be greater absolute wealth to tax, and thus more government largesse to go around. So the upper middle class could be said to benefit from favorable economic policies, with taxes being a way to partially redistribute some of these uneven benefits.

And ultimately, all economic outcomes are contingent on government policies, so I don't see why policies which directly affect market regulation and such should be treated as special compared to policies regarding taxes and social programs.

Interesting and probably no longer the case - EBT was black coded when I was growing up. No white person would take them even if the need was present. You would either work more hours or do with less.

Any kind of subsidy or redistribution will have some kind of waste built in from people exploiting it. I just can't get too worked up about EBT: sure, it isn't 100% efficient, but a substantial portion of it does reach people who need it.

Another California program: property tax deferral for the needy. If you own your house but have an income below ~60k, you can defer property taxes indefinitely, as a loan at a simple (not compound!) rate of 5%. One one-time coworker has engineered his income and assets (multi million dollar Roths FTW) so he no longer has to pay property tax through this program; this ends up amounting to something like 20k in benefits per year (that's after subtracting the accrued debt). That's a lot more scamming of the system than someone buying shitty mushroom snacks on EBT.

My main objection to the people in your example is the obesity and the festering sores. But, that's what poverty looks like in the US today. If you want to avoid it, shop at better grocery stores than the bargain market.

Your California property tax evasion doesn't reach into my pocket to take money that then puts it in someone else's hands. It's just money staying where it found a place to rest, instead of being confiscated by the government. Unless, of course, you think all money rightly belongs to the government, making a tax cut is the same thing as a spending raise, and justifying the equivalence that's so clearly different.

There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well. I don't think that would make it any less objectionable to the people who object to it.

To your more abstract point, the government is an institution like any other, and it will extract value from the economy to sustain its own existence. As part of my negotiating with its power, I want it to do what it does in as fair and transparent a way as possible, in a way that minimally distorts the economy or incentivizes putting effort and planning into schemes to take advantage of it.

There are clever ways you could make EBT structured as a tax cut instead of spending as well.

I don't think you can. If people are taking more out of the system than they're putting into it, ie have direct benefits greater than their taxes, then they cannot receive those benefits via tax cuts, because there's not enough to tax. Once your taxes reach zero (or if you have no income and they started at zero) the only way to get more is to actually be given money. Which means it has to be taken from someone else.

Sidestepping the question of whether tax refunds that refund more than you paid in can be considered morally a tax cut...

EBT at most gives a few thousand dollars a year. It's true that the most of recipients are net negative in revenue, but there are still sundry taxes they do pay: sales tax, taxes on social security benefits, payroll, taxes on unemployment benefits, gas taxes, etc. We have a lot of taxes. You can dig through those and find enough they do pay so that you can refund them for food purchases without dropping into negative for taxes paid.

It would be a somewhat silly accounting game and wouldn't change how decidedly net negative they are in revenue. The trick here is in leaving out the really big redistributionist things (e.g. education, healthcare) and not counting it against their tax contributions.

Going back to actual net revenue, I can see the argument that it's impossible for anyone who's negative net revenue to receive a tax cut. But this has the side effect of meaning it's impossible for the large majority of Americans to receive a tax cut, because most are negative net revenue, both annually and over their lifespan. On an annual basis, the guy I originally mentioned above getting tens of thousands of value in property tax deferral is almost certainly net negative (though over his lifespan he's probably net positive so far).

The FairTax prebate (flat β€œprecalculated rebate”) of >$250/mo could be direct-deposited in a real bank account or dropped onto an EBT-like card.

I think he means something like the Earned Income Credit (welfare spending designed to look like a tax refund). It's just an accounting change to do something similar with food payments.

My main objection to the people in your example is the obesity and the festering sores. But, that's what poverty looks like in the US today. If you want to avoid it, shop at better grocery stores than the bargain market.

I recall a few weeks ago, the Trump administration announced some sort of drug price discount website, which included some GLP-1 drugs, and people were joking that Trump just solved the American obesity epidemic. Likely untrue, since, AFAIK, the prescription gate for these drugs still exist. But if he were to run roughshod over the Constitution and just declare such drugs as over-the-counter and fully subsidized (and/or nullifying all associated patents) and enforced it with the US military, over the objections of the other branches of government, then I'd seriously have to consider if the fascism and authoritarianism (the actual ones that exist in this hypothetical) was a worthy price to pay.

Of course, these aren't magic drugs, and I know that plenty of people have negative side-effects, including one of my friends who became super-gassy. So the improvement in attractiveness in senses of sight and touch (perhaps even sound - fat rolls rubbing or slapping against each other isn't that attractive) could be offset by the worsening in attractiveness in smell.

I mean, couldn't Trump get RFK to remove the prescription gate?

We could just dump it in the water supply. No need for the authoritarianism; there's the precedent of fluoridation for polluting our precious bodily fluids. Just have to make sure sodas also have it in them.

Sounds like a good way to poison the 58% of Americans who aren't obese.

Or just make them into more disciplined, less addictive, and more smelly versions of themselves.

Or make them malnourished when naturally skinny people eat even less than they were previously inclined to because they're being force-fed appetite suppressants.

It sounds like watching these people buy their groceries at your indirect expense made you feel like a chump. I read this article years ago and I still think about it a great deal.

chump

Exactly.

It's not about the math. It's about being made to feel like a fool.

Scott had that post recently about crime rates and spent a lot of time talking about shoplifting, and I think one big difference is that shoplifting when I was young seemed like something really risky. And now with self-checkout, it just seems like I'm only paying because I'm a chump.

Aside: City Journal used to be a publication I really liked, then I saw their college rankings where they weighed Jewish Issues higher than any other aspect of college, and essentially rigged it to get goofy ass answers, and since then I've been really confused by them.

Those sound like pretty standard "old GOP" positions to me. Fiscally conservative, fanatically supportive of Israel and Jews.

I'm not debating their CW bona fides, just the goofiness of it. It's embarrassing.

Yes, that's exactly it (and the article lives rent-free in my head, too). It seems like there is something at least once a week that makes me feel like a chump for getting up, going to work, trying to do a good job, trying to avoid taking any government cheese I don't feel entitled to (which is all of it), and then seeing hordes of grasshoppers scam the system. It's a good thing I don't live in Minnesota because I don't think I could handle the level of chumpitude that I'd feel there.

Yes, this is precisely the thing. Recently I saw a fact making the rounds that 40% of Stanford students were officially classes as disabled. This is a similar case. Or take for instance, getting pets classified as service animals so you can take them with you on airplanes. The problem is that there will always be a marginal case that feels unfairly excluded.

You ultimately have to draw the line between "eligible for accommodations" and "ineligible" somewhere, and there will always be people just to the left and just to the right of that line, and there will be very little absolute difference separating them. The difference in accommodations will feel arbitrary and cruel and those with excessive empathy will push to expand it to include those previously just on the wrong side of the line, to alleviate the arbitrary cruelty. But now the line has moved and the process repeats with a new group just to the left and just to the right of it.

Very few of these cases have a clear enough Schelling point to hold the line from this sort of gradual expansion and abuse.

You ultimately have to draw the line between "eligible for accommodations" and "ineligible" somewhere, and there will always be people just to the left and just to the right of that line, and there will be very little absolute difference separating them.

Part of the design of government benefits is to, where possible, avoid drawing that line and instead phase benefits out. It adds complexity, but avoids perverse incentives.

I mostly see food stamps users buying food in quantities that are clearly supporting a family, not an individual, and usually what I consider a quite reasonable grocery cart(potato chips to pack in your lunch don’t seem that out of line when you’ve got tons of other food in there). This is difficult to resent.

Granted, I shop mostly at Aldi, which has a different clientele(that is, people who cook at least a little bit and are at least mildly cost-conscious). Is it possible that restricting junk from food stamps is desirable? SΓ»re, but I think you’re significantly underrating the actual difficulty in doing this without banning eg canned green beans on accident. Likewise I don’t have a huge problem with saying β€˜no steak on food stamps’- sΓ»re, if the taxpayers are paying for your luxuries then we’re paying too much, thats fair. But I think the government attempting to actually enact this rule would probably ban Salisbury steaks, chicken fried steaks, etc, and then Walmart would figure out how to reclassify ribeyes.

I think any attempt to ban categories of items is doomed to fail. There really are no strict categories once you get down in the weeds of what's available at a typical grocery store. Or, there's as many categories as there are products, which isn't helpful at all. I advocate for starting from zero and adding foods you want people to purchase. Surely "whole raw onions" does not accidentally also cover something in the frozen frankenfood aisle.

Yes, it would be hard to do this and there'd be gnashing of teeth, etc. A big problem is that most people don't know how to cook. What used to be a survival skill at some point became a luxury hobby in some sense and for some people. I don't know what we should do about that. Maybe just live with the fact that the very poor will eat like the blue collar/lower middle class.

In my experience there's a bit of a "barber pole" effect that goes on, the underclasses don't cook, they depend on a mix of cheap pre-prepared meals and charity. The working and lower middle classes cook for economic reasons, it's far cheaper to feed a family or a house full of roommates by buying bulk goods (beans, cheese, eggs, rice, ground-beef, that kind of thing) and preparing them yourself than it it is to buy pre-made. Middle class strivers and broke college kids often don't have time or space to cook so it's back to either pre-prepared meals or eating out. For the upper classes cooking becomes either a hobby, or a means of status competition, IE "look at this fancy meal I put on", "why yes we did just have the kitchen remodeled, again".

For the upper classes cooking becomes either a hobby, or a means of status competition, IE "look at this fancy meal I put on", "why yes we did just have the kitchen remodeled, again".

That's a PMC thing, especially with the male partner doing the cooking.

The upper classes have personal chefs.

I feel like there's a lot of sloppy equivocation going on in this thread at both ends of the spectrum. Between people in the upper 90th percentile of income and multi-billionaires at the high end, and between "working class" (janitors, waitresses, delivery drivers, et al) and people who don't work at all at the low end.

Define 'upper class'. The US has plenty of full time housekeepers but only literal billionaires have personal chefs.

only literal billionaires have personal chefs

Why though?

I would imagine to hire a good chef that could otherwise have his own restaurant, you'd have to offer a good 6 digit salary; maybe somewhere between 200 000$ and 800 000$ depending on experience and details such as whether it's a live-in, exclusive or flexible position. Is that unattainable for mere multihectomillionaires?

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.

You do raise an interesting point that they probably go to restaurants; after all, having a access to all chefs in a city would offer more variety than a single chef would. But the situation I would imagine one would consider a private chef is for those who have a large mansion away from a large city's restaurants.

Not in the UK they don't, unless we're talking about the real super-rich older people with 10s or 100s of millions.

How are you dividing the PMC from the upper classes? Most of the upper class are PMC these days. Or do you mean it in the American sense where it's only big capitalists like Warren Buffet?

Have to work for a good living vs do not have to work for a living.

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.

Okay, that works. FWIW none of the people I know in the UK who fall into the latter category have chefs or full-time staff, though they often have cleaners a couple of times a week.

Correct, people don't know how to cook, but you're way overrating how good of a cook most women were in 1950 or whenever. When America was much poorer a high percentage of the population just ate unappetizing food. If you were stuck eating whatever you and your wife could throw together, you ate it regardless of quality.

As a society, we've decided that noone should have to eat unappetizing but cheap food. School lunches don't serve those weird rectangular pizzas anymore. Workplace and college cafeterias have professional chefs. Those box services have no stigma(and also no profit); hellofresh and factor and the like come off as responsible coded in a way that TV dinners used to be seen as an occasional extravagance that was only acceptable if you had kids to feed and a lot of overtime or something. The lower middle class does not eat rice and beans at home(or vegetables of any kind); they eat fast food, frozen dinners, pizza, etc- just like the welfare dependent poor. 'Having to eat bland food' is the lot of the world's poor historically, but it's an indignity that, in America, is reserved solely for prisoners.

There already are categories for SNAP EBT: you can't use it for hot foods (rotisserie chicken is probably the most common complaint). WIC also exists and has comparatively tiny set of eligible products.

We should do better about teaching basic cooking, though. Removal of life skills from k-12 education (compared to what my parents' generation talks about: home ec, shop class, etc) has been, IMO, a bad choice overall. Although I'm not sure I'd bring those back exactly as they were.

you can't use it for hot foods

That's exactly my point. They're trying to say what people aren't allowed to buy and it's too hard to get right. Instead they should only say what people are allowed to buy. And rotisserie chicken should be one of those things IMO (whole chicken, cooked on premise, no breading... or something specific like that so it doesn't accidently include hungry man chicken dinner or KFC). And anything not on the allowed list won't be covered by food stamps. But I'm not a policy expert on this topic (or any topic) and there are probably good reasons why it isn't done this way.

Everyone who has thought about the policy design says that you should just give people money. Money is fungible, so if you restrict EBT to actual necessities (i.e. things someone paid cash would need to buy anyway) then you are not modifying their budget constraint. There is no policy design behind eligibility lists for this kind of benefit, and nobody has suggested one (as opposed to grandstanding particular examples of upmarket food being bought with an EBT card). In particular, products are eligible for WIC because the industries that make them bribe politicians and/or employ a lot of people in swing states.

Going back to @tomottoe's OP, the practical effect of making fancy mushrooms EBT-ineligible was that someone who had enough cash-plus-EBT income to afford them had to split one transaction into two, delaying @tomottoe and everyone else in the queue behind them. If you phase out SNAP rather than cliff-edging it (which as a matter of creating correct incentives, you should), then there will exist people with jobs and EBT cards who have cash-plus-EBT income sufficient to afford an occasional small luxury, which will sometimes be food. Making said small luxury EBT-ineligible achieves nothing.

The people who think it is worth modifying SNAP so you can't buy luxuries with EBT cards are mostly people who think the programme shouldn't exist at all.

Going back to @tomottoe's OP, the practical effect of making fancy mushrooms EBT-ineligible was that someone who had enough cash-plus-EBT income to afford them had to split one transaction into two

This assumes that people behave like perfect rational machines.

Also, see the classic Beware Trivial Inconveniences post. Trivial inconveniences like having to buy things separate are a huge influence on actual humans.

Everyone who has thought about the policy design says that you should just give people money.

Sure. That way when they give people money and the recipients spend it on booze and drugs and are still "needy", the proponents can use that to push for an increase in the amount of money given.

Right, if I get $X in food stamps and earn $Y at work, what will stop me from buying "proper" food with stamps and everything else with my own money?

That's also the argument about whether or not government funds are "being used for abortions", is it not?

If you're spending your thoughtspace seething about a fat lady getting groceries for free, you're not making decent money.

  • -25

I can walk and chew bubble gum.

Or more plainly: this is not a situation with meaningful opportunity cost. I'm not a profligate wasting precious mental resources on noticing.

I hate this kind of argument. You notice something being done in a stupid or wrong way, you say "X is wrong because of reasons A and B, this really should not happen this way in a proper society". And people come out of the woodwork and say "oh, so you are obsessing about X, like you don't have anything else to do with your life, you must be some special kind of stupid loser". This can be done about anything with zero effort - whatever X is, there's an infinite number of things in the universe that are not X, and near infinite number of problems one can be concerned with, so being concerned with anything in particular inevitably turns anybody to a stupid loser. This is completely useless low-effort snarl, that's how I see it.

Note that I did not and do not claim that not making enough money to ignore the costs of groceries makes one a stupid loser.

I do, however, find this whole waffling distasteful - not merely noting the brokenness of systems but expressing the "chumpitude" of following the rules. Pick one, damn it - either start stealing from self-checkout stores or find some dignity in being a productive and honest member of society.

Nope. I can be a productive and honest member of the society, and at the same time be furious at non-productive leechers and moochers that abuse the system, originally designed to cater for rare and grave exceptions, to live lives of careless uselessness and no worry without contributing anything to the society - and often actively and deliberately harming it. It's not either or, it's both at the same time. I don't want to stop following the rules, I want others to start to be held to the same standards I am held to.

Source: you made it up and it sounded too good to check.

A couple months ago Elon Musk reposted this tweet including: "Be very, very strict with SNAP, Section 8, and EBT. Force these do-nothings to get up and go to work." This might say questionable things about his thoughtspace or his priorities, but not his money. The net worth of the world's richest man increased by $200 billion last year.

Decent is in the eye of the beholder, and seeing as Elon hasn't stopped making money he clearly doesn't have enough.

  • -15

I’d definitely be on board with reasonable limits on the types of food you can buy on EBT gibs. I don’t think it’s reasonable to allow people to use gibs for luxury goods or empty calories in the form of junk and snack foods. To be honest it might be more reasonable to simply give out the benefits as those kinds of foods so they have less option to trade for stuff or abuse the system. My thinking is that basic meats like ground beef or chicken canned or frozen veggies, cheap bread and basic Kraft cheese product are probably good enough to live fairly healthy, especially if you’re allowed to buy other stuff to supplement the diet for flavor or whatever. It’s hard to abuse the system when you’re getting canned corn and ground beef. It’s a pretty bland diet, you can obviously live off of it, but not something that you’d choose if you had better options.

Cheap bread isn't very healthy to have as a major component of your diet. Ought to be rye bread or the like, if we're trying to design something people can live on indefinitely with no adverse effects to their health.

I mean we can quibble about the bread. GV whole wheat is less than $2 a loaf. But even if you go with white bread it’s better than cookies.

Cheap bread is likely universes better than straight up pillaging the junk food aisle or whatever. Also provides more incentives to get off the system as I believe a decent amount of Food Stamp luxury purchases is then used to essentially arbitrage via selling 'plates'

I think if the government gave out a few standardized food items to every benefits recipient, that would actually heavily encourage trading. They'd basically be minting a currency, except instead of coins that all contain the same amount of silver, it's bags that all contain the same amount of Kraft cheese product or whatever. There'd be big opportunities to take those items and smuggle them back into the regular supply chain en masse for cash, or sell them to people who want a reliable source of cheap Kraft cheese product.

Ideally, if you want to prevent trading, you want to give people stuff that seems valuable to those people, but worthless to everyone else. So they're incentivized to consume the items themselves rather than try to sell them. The mushroom "superfoods" described in OP actually seem like a excellent example of this principle in action.

I think if the government gave out a few standardized food items to every benefits recipient, that would actually heavily encourage trading. They'd basically be minting a currency, except instead of coins that all contain the same amount of silver, it's bags that all contain the same amount of Kraft cheese product or whatever. There'd be big opportunities to take those items and smuggle them back into the regular supply chain en masse for cash, or sell them to people who want a reliable source of cheap Kraft cheese product.

This essentially already happens with the 'plate' system of selling meals for cash to fellow members of the low-end economy and a lot of resale of nonperishables like baby formula. Also it's competing with literal currency whilst this'd ostensibly allow for curation of a relatively efficient system that might save massive longterm spending on healthcare, in theory.

Every government program expands until it all is essentially 70% fraud by most people’s understanding of what the program was suppose to fix.

Wait until you hear about military disability payments. Those have essentially become a pension scheme for military personal who are perfectly healthy. Programs like that are virtually impossible to get rid of because which politician wants to fight the motte of taking care of disabled veterans. They have expanded to basically anyone who was in the military even if it was a desks job or a chef and if you don’t sign up for disability you’re basically turning down part of your compensation. If we want higher military pay we should vote for it.

I think things like this expand because the most morality lacking person figures out how to hack the system and then it slowly spreads to people less evil until even the good people hack the system because 70% are doing it so it’s just normalized.

I’ve met 25 year old girls with EBT cards. EBT was never meant for them. Or the drug users or probably 75% of current recipients. It’s meant for the person who can’t find a job because the largest employer in town shutdown, the single mom whose husband became an alcoholic and left her, the person with a health issue etc.

I don't dispute that there's a lot of fraud and over-extension, but "25-year-old girls" can have crippling health issues. I've known 25-year-old girls with crippling health issues. I imagine you meant "obviously healthy and able-bodied 25-year-old girls", but at that point why specify "25-year-old girls" at all, and while leaving the important bit implicit? Chronic illness can affect people at any age, and of either sex.

25 year old women can also have dependent children. In fact most of the ones with EBT cards will do, given the design of SNAP. Poor kids are precisely the group US welfare programmes (including SNAP) were meant for.

but at that point why specify "25-year-old girls" at all, and while leaving the important bit implicit?

Because whether you can leave it implicit doesn't depend on how important it is--it depends on how obvious it is to a normie reader.

Food stamps is almost literally meant for poor people with dependent children. The government should eliminate the marriage penalty, but it’s not really intended for adult hard cases.

Every government program expands until it all is essentially 70% fraud by most people’s understanding of what the program was suppose to fix.

Technophiles like to talk about guaranteed minimum income when the robots inevitably take all our jobs. I wonder if the process won't be more gradual. Disability and unemployment schemes expanding until they encompass basically everyone. The more people who lie in order to access the schemes, the less taboo there is for everyone else.

The only thing that seems to be stopping it is the status hit that people take from being unemployed. As much as I criticise building an identity around work, at least those people tend not to cheat the welfare system.

Disability and unemployment schemes expanding until they encompass basically everyone.

Richard Hanania pointed out that, according to certain Supreme Court rulings, a majority of Americans could already be considered disabled. And this isn't me doing the "haha Americans are fat" thing: the Court was categorising any American who requires the use of glasses as disabled (i.e. 160 million Americans, or 57% of the population at the time of the ruling). And that's in addition to all those who are amputees, wheelchair-bound etc.

Being disabled per the ADA is a low bar because it doesn't get you much, just the right to a reasonable accommodation. There's a huge jump from that to being disabled as far as per the Social Security Administration, which if you're over 50 means you physically can't do any job you've done in the past 20 years (or have the skills to do) and if you're under 50 means you can't work, period. They're also different in that under the ADA the cost is trivial and born by the employer, whereas under Social Security the cost is substantial and is born by the Federal government. Few people under 50 qualify as disabled, even among those who think they're disabled.

Being disabled per the ADA is a low bar because it doesn't get you much, just the right to a reasonable accommodation.

They're also different in that under the ADA the cost is trivial and born by the employer, whereas under Social Security the cost is substantial and is born by the Federal government.

The upfront economic costs to address reasonable accommodations might be trivial, or might be trivial when compared to SSA disability benefits. But things like 40% of Stanford being disabled and getting extra time on tests, or 11% of LSAT takers getting accommodations / extra time erode our ability to select the best candidates, which I think is an example of a huge hidden ADA cost that no one actually pays. Its just growth or outcomes that could have happened but didn't.

the Court was categorising any American who requires the use of glasses as disabled

The article appears to say the opposite of that.

In subsequent years, what [the ADA's definition of disability] meant would be fought out in court. Unlike what happened in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, however, the judicial branch behaved somewhat reasonably. The case of Sutton v. United Air Lines, Inc. was decided by the Supreme Court in 1999. A pair of twin sisters both applied to be pilots, but were told that they did not meet the standard of having uncorrected 20/100 vision or better. They sued, saying that they were being discriminated against. The Supreme Court ruled that the sisters were not actually disabled, because they had a condition that could be correctedβ€”in this case by using glasses or contact lenses.

Crucially for its decision, the Court pointed to a Congressional finding included in the ADA that approximately 43 million Americans suffered from a disability. If the justices adopted the definition of disability urged by the plaintiffs in Sutton, it would include, among others, everyone who needed glasses. That would mean that over 160 million Americans were disabled. The original Congressional finding, however, arguably put a much smaller numerical limit on how many people were protected under the ADA.

Though Congress then effectively overruled that decision.

Later on:

Unfortunately, Congress did not like the decisions in Sutton and Toyota, and overrode them in The Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act of 2008. In determining who is disabled, the law now says institutions cannot consider mitigating measures that one might take. So this counts not only people who are in wheelchairs, but also alcoholics, sufferers of just about any recognized mental condition, and yes, those who need glasses. Congress even struck from the record the finding of 43 million Americans being disabled in 1990, on the grounds that it was too limiting. No numerical benchmark was set, which meant that Congress was implicitly endorsing the Supreme Court’s counterfactual in Sutton in which a majority of the country might be considered disabled.

I misspoke, it would be more accurate to say that Congress considers a majority of Americans disabled.

I like to eat pretty healthy and between that and not liking to spend much time on food, I tend to spend more money on food than I would like to.

I wonder if there is a really low-risk way for someone like me, who has a middle class income and no disabilities, to get government money for food.

I don't have much guilt about the idea of grifting the government, on the principle of "if they don't spend the money on me it's more likely than not that they will waste the money". Besides, government policy is probably partly responsible for the general low quality of American food and the fact that quality food tends to be niche and pricy.

Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients.

To me it’s not really a question of generosity. If recipients didn’t use hard drugs, dressed well, behaved decently, were polite and generally didn’t disturb anyone else, I would even be in favor of more generous welfare in certain cases. But welfare for slobs, addicts, the obese, antisocial people, and groups with a track record of poor interaction with mainstream society should be curtailed to the point of making life very difficult.

In general, the greatest failure of liberal universalism is that it does not adequately distinguish between categories of citizen by social contribution. It did originally (eg almost every 19th century democracy initially limited the vote to landowners or taxpayers) but these restrictions fell - long before even female suffrage in most cases. Welfare initially was often led designed to promote prosocial behavior in the underclass, but again, much of this fell by the wayside.

Idea: Tiered welfare, including food stamps. Very low, third-world-beans-and-rice level baseline. Take a drug test every x period and come back clean, get 25% more money. Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days and are on time 90% of the time, get 25% more money. Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test? 50% more money. Kid is arrested? 30% reduction in money (or down to baseline, whichever is higher) for 2 years, rolling reset every time a child is arrested. Your β€˜welfare tier’ also determines your tier of social housing, more recently renovated apartment in a better location etc. Every year of full time tax paying employment prior to going on welfare also increases your welfare. Local beat cops can also allocate a pool of welfare to β€˜trusted’ informants, making snitching higher status.

The divil is always in the details for these kinds of social credit schemes.

Have kids? If they all attend school 97% of school days

If the AIs cure viral infections first, I suppose.

Kid scores in the top 20% of his grade on a standardized test?

The main reason people currently (often) get paid more for being smarter is because we need that intelligence for important things like good decision making. But in a world where their parents are putting all their intellectual effort towards gaming the social credit system, this will end badly, as currently seen in places like South Korea. Anyway, in a world with ubiquitous AI programs, why wouldn't the student just talk directly to the AI, and get rewarded for asking about socially beneficial things, and generally sounding like an upstanding young person in the AI's professional judgement, rather than doing standardized tests at all?

I like the general shape on principle, but I'd hate to see it grow into 50,000 well-paid bureaucrats overseeing 15,000 beneficiaries. Also, they tend to morph into millions of exceptions and administrative hearings for "yeah, 3 of my kids got arrested but here's why the rules shouldn't apply to me right now."

I don't understand this. If we're talking about ~universal welfare in the age of AGI-granted post-scarcity, it becomes ridiculous to try to police the "social contribution" of citizens: nobody's "contributions" will be worth a damn anymore, that's exactly why everyone will be on the dole in the first place. Tiered welfare of the kind you propose might be a useful framework in a society for whose long-term survival the existence of a growing chronically-unemployed underclass is an existential risk, but it loses all meaning in a world where everyone is unemployed and human labor has become permanently irrelevant to the survival of human society.

Why? Even in such a society, the behavior of fellow people is important to us. We don’t want violent addicts on the subway, we don’t want ugly people covered in tattoos, we don’t want people who are antisocial, rude, vulgar, loud etc to the point of damaging their community or the broader social fabric. We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.

Putting everyone on UBI doesn’t solve any of these problems alone.

If it's truly post-scarcity, you just make a tiered society. The only difference between them is access to other humans. The violent addicts get all the drugs, food, and medical care (provided by robots and/or masochists, presumably) they desire, and the normal people don't ever have to see them or their effects. The beautiful people live in their own mirror-covered world away from the depredations of the glance of uggles, etc.

Of course, we'll never actually GET post-scarcity, but if we did the problem would be solved.

you just make a tiered society

This is, of course, what economic stratification already does. The question is how you do that when people are no longer differentiated by economic contribution.

In practice the only way to do this is with block grants through a rum millet system; you know that the fat violent addicts have to be given access to the hall of mirrors.

We want to minimize scammers, cheaters and criminals.

I think that can more straightforwardly and more humanely achieved by, you know, making laws against those things and enforcing them. You don't need to start gatekeeping access to food like a Charles Dickens villain.

And also, reducing welfare to disincentivize actively harmful behavior is one thing; setting the bar at positive "social contributions" is still another. In a post-scarcity world where there's no need to incentivize human beings to pump their time and energy into the economy rather than spending it on more pleasant pursuits, there is no ethical justification for placing any artificial barriers in the way of someone who just wants to collect their share and then go off to live as a reclusive hermit, keeping to himself and never affecting other people's lives one way or the other. In the real world, we rightfully discourage people from becoming unproductive hermits living on welfare, because they're unfairly leeching off other people's sweat and toil, and if too many people defected in that way, the economy would collapse. But if the economy starts literally running itself then preventing hermits from being hermits is just senseless tyranny.

Perhaps senseless tyranny is the end goal.

Well - social contributions will be worth something, that's the point. We (at the risk of manufacturing consensus) want a UBI society to look like the glass utopia from that one meme where everyone is fit, pleasant and driven, not cyberpunk.

Cyberpunk dystopias are defined by the social order itself being oppressive in one way or another, not by the behavior of the citizens - but regardless, if citizens' good behavior isn't producing anything I object to calling it "social contribution". If what we are talking about is some kind of social conformity tax, its advocates should own up to what they are proposing, without hiding behind language associated with the fair allocation of scarce resources between productive and non-productive members of an economy.

Many cyberpunk-adjacent works nowadays put focus not just on the oppression, but also on the ignoble state of the people.

That may be, but "evil state-sized megacorps make you pay through the nose for the very air you breathe" is still a core enough part of the aesthetic that "in order to avoid a cyberpunk dystopia, we should establish a regimented system where people get less food to eat depending on a social credit score" scans to me as almost comically backwards.

Hey, if we're talking megacorps, then presumably the people can pick which megacorp's social credit score they want to maxx. We could have a plausible explanation for the origins of different factions within one city, that way!

In addition to the childhood nutrition issue, thΓ© Anglo underclass does not know what to do with rice and beans. They would just starve if you handed them dry goods.

β€˜Three hot meals a day from the canteen’, sΓ»re, that could be worked with.

Problem with that, though, is that if you do have growing kids, they need good food and nutrition. Restricting it to "beans and rice third world baseline" to start off means that parents will feed the kids processed/junk food because that's cheap calories. Not the greatest.

I agree about not buying snack foods and rubbish, but if you're going to buy decent meat and real vegetables, and more importantly cook proper meals, that will necessitate a better food budget than "on this tier we can only buy the frozen own-brand mystery meat nuggets".

Some states offer, in addition to free school lunches, to let people bring their children to eat remade lunches during breaks as well. That's fine, they can keep doing that. I'm generally impressed with the free lunches around here, the kids' school lunches are better than what I bring to work.

I will observe that EBT exists in parallel with WIC, which does have a pretty set of eligible items --- judging from the WIC signs on the price tags at my grocery store.

WIC covers literal rice-and-beans, but not frozen dino chicken nuggets.

I wonder if those meal boxes that are growing so common are an option. Upper-middle class people like them, so they're not punishing the poor.

Envisioning a system that everyone who applies to it can choose online between a selection of 15 or so meals, rotated out by a team of chefs and nutritionists. Most are pretty basic - spaghetti with canned sauce, some kind of chicken and sauce on rice, etc. Maybe 1 or 2 meals a week with some nicer cuts of meat.

Every meal comes with directions on how to cook it. When you are selecting your meal, you can sort by how long it takes to cook it, which is calculated by the median of self-reports from the users (no bs chefs claiming onions take 2 minutes to cut and sautee.) Most meals target cooking in 30 minutes or less.

Additionally, every week comes with powdered milk, choice of oatmeal or cold cereal, instant coffee, sliced bread, deli cheese, deli meat, salt, pepper, butter.

People pick up their kits from participating grocery stores nearest them. When you first enroll, a free pot and pan is thrown in with your bundle.

I don't think this will cut EBT costs but it might improve medicaid costs over time. At least it might remove some of the resentment.

Or just issue everyone MREs. The government already has the supply lines set up. Just need to ramp up the manufacturing. And you don't even need a heat source to make hot food.

MRE's are not intended for long-term consumption. They are much lower in water content than the regular meals that people are used to, so soldiers tend to underhydrate, causing constipation. Also, they tend to lack sufficient vitamins and minerals.

Research also shows that soldiers would not eat all of it, causing them to eat fewer calories than with regular meals. Of course, this could be a benefit for regular people, who often overeat. Then again, the calories in an MRE are aimed at a very active young adult, so it may could also cause worse overeating than a regular meal. I think that this would require research to see what regular people would do.

MRE's cost the USG about $10-$15 a serving. They are very not economical compared to a box of spaghetti noodles mixed with 4 Tbps of melted butter and a Tsp garlic salt served to a family of four.

When I’ve tried to game out UBI in practice, it’s looked a lot like this, where Amazon and Walmart turn into giant government contractors and welfare is paid in scrip to fund super corrupt qpq consumer spending.

Forcing the unrepentantly incompetent poors to have all their food and medical options be restricted to Hello Fresh and Better Help? Sounds like a pretty decent way to soak up the VC slop.

Well, I'm imagining something more socialist, run out of the USDA or something. Not just giving money to Hello Fresh and having them do it.

Nooooo! At least Hello Fresh is building something aimed at passing the profit/loss test. Why rebuild it asa government agency?

Has hellofresh ever been profitable? AIUI none of those mealkitbox services have been.

The whole reason I approve of hellofresh being the food distributor of choice is that this will accelerate their bankruptcy and we can stop having those fucking ads shoved everywhere. If your marginal revenue is negative and you get the big contract that'll just accelerate your death, and hopefully put the experiment of 'the druggies just want fresh food!' to rest since none of the druggies lack for food they lack for easily tradable goods for drugs.

I think the key words here are "aimed" and "government agency". Amazon famously didn't make its first annual profit for nearly a decade, but investors were still expecting profit eventually, estimating the likelihood of net profit in the long run, and wouldn't have funded it indefinitely if that expectation ended. A government agency has no such aims and no such limitations, whether or not it does its own production, but at least if it has to procure from among competing third parties there's someone who has an incentive to keep costs down.

Why would Hello Fresh need to worry about profit/loss once they have infinite government money?

Does it become like Medicare where prices are fixed by a centralized government agency?

Or does it become like colleges where prices to everyone balloons until everyone needs a subsidy to attend?

We are already messing enough with the free market to ensure that the poor do not starve, which is what the market would demand without government or charitable intervention.

Yeah, I'm not saying I advocate for this program. Just that in the world where wee decided meal kits were something the government offered, better to use an existing market company than to build it from scratch as a government institution.

The poor wouldn't starve even if foodstamps was abolished; they might eat shitty diets, but even the literal homeless do not starve, and you kinda need a kitchen to make use of foodstamps.

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The issue with tiered welfare is that controls are expensive. You are essentially taking money that could have been spent on food, and using it to pay for lab tests and full-time bureaucrats whose job it is to verify test scores and family size. This would have to result in some pretty significant savings for it to be justifiable in my mind. If you end up spending the same amount of money overall, but now poor people get less of it while more goes to the bureaucracy, at the same time making the process harder for those in need (as they now have to spend time dealing with said bureaucrats), I don't think you have really solved anything.

Given that with mass automation due to A(G)I, many more of us (possibly all of us) may be living off of a form of welfare before long, it’s time to have what has long been a taboo discussion, namely that government should enforce standards of behavior on welfare recipients

In practice, how long would it be before those standards of behavior included things like "don't say things which are deemed to be racist"

Probably I am at least as disgusted as anyone else here by the image of the 300 pound illiterate welfare queen spending her food stamps on junk food. But I think we need a rule that you get your government benefits even if you are a disgusting person. Because I am acutely aware of the fact that to a large percentage of the voting population, I (a conservative white man) am far more offensive and disgusting than this hypothetical obese welfare queen with 4 kids from 4 different baby-daddies.

In fact, here's an idea: Food stamps for everyone, even if you are a millionaire.

Make it like public education, which everyone pays for and everyone gets for free.

I think that assuming AGI doesn't destroy us, there's really no alternative to some form of UBI. And arguably the most expedient way to get there is to broaden eligibility rules for food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability, and so on.

This works pretty well with universal free school lunch in my area. Rather than having to load money on cards and check everyone's meal each day, the kids simply present their school ID and get food. Those who don't want it on a particular day (or ever) can eschew it, or give it to their friends. I'm not sure how well that will scale, but it definitely agrees with my internal fairness adjudicator.

Because I am acutely aware of the fact that to a large percentage of the voting population, I (a conservative white man) am far more offensive and disgusting than this hypothetical obese welfare queen with 4 kids from 4 different baby-daddies.

Are you getting some government benefits that could be gatekept in this way?

Are you getting some government benefits that could be gatekept in this way?

Not at the moment but (1) I think there's a pretty good chance I will lose my job and investments as a result of a hypothetical future AI revolution; (2) in that case, it's pretty likely that there will be some form of UBI; and (3) I would rather not have a precedent of "gatekeeping" government benefits in such a scenario.

Are you getting some government benefits that could be gatekept in this way?

It doesn't matter; they'll make something up that might rhyme if you stretch it, and insist that it's the same but worse. Much as when trying to discuss robbery and burglarly someone will chime in and say that no really "wage theft" is the real problem, or as in this discussion this

Typical things used might be the mortgage-interest tax deduction, or policing (a "subsidy" to the wealthy and safe areas -- no, this doesn't make sense on a number of levels), or schools (also doesn't make sense on a number of levels, but doesn't matter), etc.

And how many social credit points do you think you should lose for criticising the gove- uhh, I mean β€œsubversive activities”?

Because this is the universal failure mode of any attempt at conduct-prorated welfare: it would inevitably descend into political patronage.

The mistake is in assuming this won’t happen anyway. The system already ruins your life, shuts you out of flying, having a bank account, shames every would-be employer for hiring you etc if you have a disapproved-of opinion, and in most of the West you can even go to proson for it, where you are likely to be the victim of ethnic or religiously motivated gangs if you’ve said anything or done anything to offend or hurt them before your incarceration. During Covid there was even plenty of chatter about prioritizing β€œhigher risk” Black and Brown patients over white people.

You have - by the way - stumbled across a more general reality of the welfare system or entire modern state (discussed elsewhere in this thread): the system already exists to extract money and dignity from you and give it to others; you cannot destroy it, only redirect some of that extraction and humiliation toward others and some of the loot towards yourself.

It's funny you should mention social contribution because to my knowledge both of California's biggest welfare programs (Calfresh and Medical) are going to be restricted unless the person has a job, is disabled, in education, or performs a certain amount of community service. They say they're going into effect this year for Calfresh and next year for Medical but I'll believe it when I see it because they were already postponed by years at this point but in any case they already did pass laws that at least in some way tried to restrict eligibility aiming toward some kind of prosocial behavior.

I think it's fair that we want a society where people don't starve to death, and that means giving out free food. But I'd certainly rather see it implemented more like a government grain dole than a handy card you can use to buy anything that's edible and caloric. You might say that a grain dole is actually costs more to implement than a handy card, and is also degrading to the recipients, but that's exactly the point. People on the dole should be degraded.

I heard stories that the government used to hand out bricks of cheese and other foodstuffs in plain boxes labelled only with the name of the item. We should bring this back.

I heard stories that the government used to hand out bricks of cheese and other foodstuffs in plain boxes labelled only with the name of the item. We should bring this back.

When I was in the local ROTC boot camp equivalent, I was given some expectorant pills for my cough that just said "COUGH PILLS" on the packaging. I wonder how they label medicine in the US Army.

The US army purchases brand name products packaged in black and white boxes with no logos, solely the name of the product, and receives a slight discount(from, I'm sure, a marked up price) for doing so.

As a kid, I loved government cheese. My mom would sell her food stamps, but nobody wanted to buy the cheese, so I got to eat it

My grandmother got it in big blocks, and to my childhood taste it was amazing.

Yes, I can remember government cheese(rural Louisiana was a middle income country well within living memory).

My kids have been eating government posole lately. I guess I'm happy to see the government pay for regional food traditions. A big step up from my mom's memories of Navajo garages full of cheese sitting there going bad, because cheese wasn't culturally considered a viable food.

I heard stories that the government used to hand out bricks of cheese and other foodstuffs in plain boxes labelled only with the name of the item

This is part of the brand identity of a certain major Canadian supermarket chain, fittingly called 'No Name', with bright yellow packaging.

I heard stories that the government used to hand out bricks of cheese and other foodstuffs in plain boxes labelled only with the name of the item. We should bring this back.

This was definitely a thing when I was a kid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese

It wasn't just a welfare program, but also a dairy price stabilization program??

Huh, I had always been taught about government cheese primarily as a dairy price control program, and I was only vaguely aware that it was given out to people sometimes, though I never thought about it enough to figure out the details. I always assumed the government just threw them away when they went bad.

I remember when the EU donated the butter mountain to charity in the 1990s. (I don't know why we made the surplus milk into butter rather than cheese) There were a few perverse results, such as private school canteens getting free butter (because they were charities) when state school canteens couldn't. When you organised catered events at university, you had to sign a form saying that no for-profit business was involved - because there was free butter in the food. At least one Cambridge College maintained dual kitchen supply chains so they could host events associated with Silicon Fen while still giving free butter to the students and academics.

maintained dual kitchen supply chains

Reminds me of observant Jews I know explaining their kitchen situation. Cookware that never has meat in it and cookware that never has dairy in it, etc. Complying with an extrapolation of practices forbidden repeatedly in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Funny a modern university would make the modern equivalent.

The replacement program is the Dairy Checkoff program which funded those Got Milk ads. The funniest part of it is that someone gets a million a year to convince Americans to eat more cheese (which seems like it would be the easiest job in the world).

Supposedly there's a federal program to convince Americans to eat more cheese in order to help the dairy industry and a different federal program to convince Americans to eat less cheese for health reasons.

They should team up and push low fat cheese or maybe cottage cheese?

Now I make decent money, but I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line. Not sure what to add to this, I see the proposals to shrink EBT just to the essentials, only for people to be shocked as that would require people to make their food like me! Maybe this is what I get for living in California, but frankly, I think EBT and systems like it are just as prevalent elsewhere. It just strikes me as odd that I'm a professional, in a good industry, and I would question spending $50 for a couple of tiny packets of specialty mushroom superfood, but two methheads get to have it as they wish. Maybe I'm out of touch with the plights of the poor, but idk, doesn't seem half bad, I've car camped in the past before.

I can report from my state and city the situation is similar. With the addition of seeing multiple obvious retail thieves typically proceeding past the self checkout per month.

Long ago I worked in a grocery store. People would steal alcohol. By which I mean they would simply walk out with a bottle without bothering to pretend to shop or go through checkout. We were told to ignore them.

Now in my local area most alcohol is locked up as is laundry detergent and some medicine.

Only about 13% of Californians receive EBT. You're probably seeing a lot of them because Grocery Outlet is, uh, a downscale retailer.

Another factor is that benefits are only sent out on certain days of the month. (Looks like in California it's the 1st through the 10th depending on your account number.) So you're more likely to see people using EBT on those days, or the weekends after those days, especially if people are doing the responsible thing and planning out a single big shopping trip to get all the stuff they need for the month.

"Only"

Wow I just learned how many Americans are on food stamps. Food is not that expensive...? How is this happening.

The income limits are fairly low - for a family of 3, the income limit is $53k per year. The benefits are a sliding scale but are capped at about $800 a month for a family of three.

$800/mo seems like a lot to spend on groceries for three people.

It's less than $10/day per person

If you're eating most of your meals at home, that's about $3 per person per meal. You can eat reasonably well on that, but it doesn't seem exorbitant. I spend about twice that for a family of 3 (because groceries are approximately free compared to rent and taxes, so why not optimize for quality rather than price).

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, for consumer units of three people:

Income (k$/a)Average expenditure on food at home ($/mo)
Any623
∈ [0, 15)416
∈ [15, 30)480
∈ [30, 40)507
∈ [40, 50)452
∈ [50, 70)576
∈ [70, 100)537
∈ [100, 150)641
∈ [150, ∞)799

$623/mo on food at home plus another $393/mo away from home. Even the <15000 group spends $625/mo across all food, $416 of which is groceries, so I stand by $800/mo not being extravagant if you cook all your meals. Probably a bit of room to budget but not that much.

You didn't take into consideration that food at home was on average only about 2/3 of a consumer unit's total food expenditures. Regardless of the reality that some food stamp participants are going to take some meals in restaurants, it seems disingenuous for the program to assume this.

Edit: I would also add that, this being a government chart that averages things out over categories, the results are weird overall. For instance, the average three-person consumer unit receives $108,468 in wages, $9,022 in self-employment income, $7,480 in retirement income, $752 in government assistance, and $821 in unemployment compensation. The average mortgage payment is $372/month, and people in the 15–30k range have an average mortgage payment of $ 83/month. The obvious explanation here is that people who rent or have their house paid off have a payment of zero, and this gets averaged across everyone, likewise for the income categories. The point here is that these numbers aren't representative of a typical household.

In China, a lot of the insurance system covers Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is pretty much just bullshit. Here in the US, I know people who have gotten chiropractic coverage under their own insurance. Acupuncture is also something apparently covered by many private insurance companies, despite also being highly suspect. Some apparently are even covering Reiki now.

Point here being that interest groups who believe they're effective push hard for their inclusion and treatment as "real medicine" and there's not really a strong lobby against it. It's not like you'll gonna be able to convince the TCM/Chiropractic/Acupuncture/Reiki/etc believers otherwise that easily after all, they're passionate and committed in a way that opposition isn't. If you have a bunch of people who really think that crystals or halo therapy or whatever are better than normal mainstream medicine, then you have a lobby pushing for their inclusion.

They have a whole load of groceries and what caught my attention was the lady who requested the cashier to separate the mushroom mind focus and energy https://lairdsuperfood.com/products/focus-and-memory-mushrooms bags of snacks she was purchasing because if they weren't EBT eligible she would pay for them on her own. Luckily as I was to find out, they were, and she went on to make a separate purchase of those with her handy card.

So in the same way, there's a whole load of highly motivated people who basically consider this sort of thing as the only real and healthy food there is. Heck even the head of the HHS now isn't that far gone, but he's a lot closer to that viewpoint than I ever will be. Even from the perspective of an EBT user, spending on those mushrooms instead of something else makes no sense unless you truly believe that they have some sort of meaningful benefits to them. They're at the store because people buy them and people buy them despite the cost because they believe it does something worth it.

Because there's a bunch of very very passionate people in support, I don't expect coverage of such products to end anytime soon in the same way that coverage of (what I consider to be bullshit) "traditional medicine" and other beliefs is being actively expanded by insurances. It's just part of living in society, sometimes you have to accommodate what you personally think is bullshit because large numbers of people believe it.

You might think "well just ban things that are stupid and bad" but the monkey paw curls and Whole Foods non GMO gluten free food and other stuff like that are the only things allowed to take EBT anymore. Whoops, turns out other people have different views on what is stupid and bad.

To be fair to the mushroom lady, although it probably would have been better had she bought real mushrooms, at least she was buying perceived benefits for physical health vegetables rather than trying to get cigarettes and alcohol off the food stamps. That at least is some kind of effort to get healthy or improve herself. I do think those 'superfoods' are gimmicks and rackets, but if it's a choice between "buy tiny expensive packet of dubious health benefit" or "giant snack food bags", then the mushrooms win.

I wish I were that motivated! (she said, hastily closing the bag of potato chips).

To be even more fair, she may well be selling her whole cart at 50% to spend the money on drugs.

Once you've accepted that political and social realities require adopting a progressive taxation system and social safety net, the existence of some form of absurdity like this is assured. The question then becomes how to administer the absurdity, and I think EBT does a pretty good job of it. The purpose isn't to prevent people from wasting their benefits on mushroom superfoods, it's to prevent people from buying things that are actively harmful (drugs).

You can have progressive taxation and a social safety net and not have the absurdities. America was once like this and my gut says their are a lot of people who would be in real need, but would feel a lot of shame taking EBT.

Something something high trust society where the government can offer goodies and make it easy for those in need to get help but people don’t abuse the system even if they could hack it to their benefit.

If ever a comment warranted "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" it's this. "High Trust Societies" only exist at small scale; a tribe, maybe a smallish vilage, where everyone knows everyone, and has known everyone for generations, can do this, and even then, there have always been freeloaders (or suspected freeloaders). At scale, even at the city level, this has never happened, and I have no clue how you believe America as a country once had federal welfare programs that didn't have fraud, waste, and abuse; maybe in the brief moment after the ink was dry on the legislation that created a given program but before the first checks went sent, there hadn't yet been abuse of the program, but claiming we - or any other country, for that matter - once had welfare programs but not absurd abuse simply flies in the face of reality.

I don’t view this as an β€œextraordinary claim”. Something changed in America and we have 2 Americas. My dad was an alcoholic and my mom worked about 70 hours a week. She made 30k a year. I’ve had a job since I was 12 years old. This is normal to me. I guess we should have had food stamps? Back then there was social stigma at being on assistance.

America culture has changed. Which I am willing to concede. But it’s not an extraordinary claim especially if you’ve lived outside of blue belts. It’s how things were.

I feel like β€œold man yells at clouds”. But Anglo culture was different.

Once you've accepted that political and social realities require adopting a progressive taxation system and social safety net, the existence of some form of absurdity like this is assured.

Modus ponens, modus tollens.

Modus ponens, modus tollens.

But only one of them leads to rains of fire and pillars of salt. (Ezekiel 16:49)

If you're not going to be following Leviticus, there's no point in worrying about Ezekiel.

"You must treat the foreigner living among you as native-born and love him as yourself, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt."? I am in favour of that too!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ger_toshav β€” interesting read. You must love a stranger living in your land, but a prerequisite is that he accept your values and pledge to live in accordance with those values.

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