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There were two top level comments yesterday that I didn't get a chance to respond to before they got buried. Fortunately, they dovetail nicely with one another, enough for me to create a new top-level explaining my take on things. The first of these asked what a conservative was, and while I don't really have a horse in that race I did come across Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles. In many ways, Kirk is a relic, as it seems unlikely that he'd fit in with what calls itself conservatism today. But look at the first principle:
Now, I'll say as a preliminary matter that Kirk and other right-wing intellectuals suffer from the same problem as left-wing intellectuals in that they tend to speak in a kind of psychobabble that on the left results in Academicese and on the right in Biblical allusions and references to other people who have been dead for 200 years, and with both one predisposed to agree with the arguments finds himself nodding along without realizing that there isn't much there to even agree with. That being said, this principle illustrates conservative thought better than anything else I've read. As a liberal, I disagree with it as a matter of principle, and I could make a lot of normal, rational arguments about why it's wrong, but I don't find that very interesting. What I find much more interesting are the weird ways in which belief in this principle manifests itself among conservatives, and how these manifestations have convinced me that it's wrong more than references to Seneca or Thomas Aquinas ever could. And to see those manifestations, you need look no further than the discussion on food stamps that followed.
It's apparent to most that this board leans somewhat to the right, and I noticed several themes among what was said. I'm not going to call anyone out by name, but I will quote where appropriate. The most common one, both here and in popular discussion, is the desire to prohibit purchases of certain items, which some states have already begun doing. As a said in an earlier post on the topic, these items generally fall into three categories:
You can name certain staple items that nobody finds objectionable, like ground beef, chicken breasts, eggs, milk, etc. But then you get to the edge cases. Everyone agrees that grains are a staple of the diet. But what counts as a grain? Consider the following:
Someone in line behind a woman whose shopping cart contained a bag of rice, a box of spaghetti, Oreos, Ritz crackers, Chex, Nutri-Grain bars, Knorr alfredo noodles, pancake mix, Mrs. T's pierogis, and bakery Italian and was paying for it with food stamps nobody would probably bat an eye. But the person whom I originally compiled this list in response to insisted that everything but the first two should be excluded. A number of people below commented that food stamp recipients should be given no more than a basic subsistence diet.
Now, I don't have a problem with prohibiting pop and candy as some states have begun doing, at least not in and of themselves. The concern I have is that if I get 50 people who believe in some version of the above and ask them to make a call on a bunch of selected items, I'm not going to get any consistency out of their answers. There's no line everyone agrees on. The obvious response is "Well, nobody's going to agree on everything, but you have to draw the line somewhere." Well, we did draw the line somewhere, 60 years ago: No prepared foods, no alcohol, no tobacco. Everything else that's a food product is fair game.
Some people proposed away that would seem to skirt the problem by suggesting that the government provide food directly, "like they used to do", or focus on core items, like WIC. First, the government didn't used to operate the Food Stamp program like that. What they probably have in mind is government programs where agricultural surplus products were processed into shelf-stable products like powdered eggs and distributed to low-income people. While there are no longer dedicated pick-up locations, this program never went away, the food is just distributed through food banks and programs like Meals on Wheels. WIC is a different animal entirely in that participants are limited to purchasing specific items each month. But it's not a general food program, as it only deals with a few limited categories. Excepting things like fruits and vegetables which are usually sold generically, program guidelines limit eligible items down to specific brands. The program was developed to address specific nutritional needs of pregnant women and young children, and was never intended as a general food program. It doesn't scale as such.
I will briefly touch on the even more ridiculous idea that the government should just provide Hello Fresh or MREs, if only because it leads nicely into my next point. These items cost around $10/meal. Current guidelines for a single person max out around $10/day. I don't know what advantage these have that's strong enough to warrant tripling the program cost, an interesting supposition considering that many seemed to think that the $300/month that's budgeted for an adult is entirely too much. Now, I don't want to comment on this based on personal experience because my own food consumption is not that of a poor person looking to stretch his dollar; I spend a lot more than that on food, but since I'm not on assistance I assume I'm allowed. But keep in mind that the government doesn't set these amounts arbitrarily. If you want to know what goes into it, feel free to take a gander at the USDA publication Thrifty Food Plan 2021, and you'll get an excruciatingly detailed look at how they determine these things based on sample menus, nutritional requirements, and current prices, down to details like how a 12–13 year-old male's consumption of seeds, nuts, and soy products should total 92c/week following an economical budget.
The final broad theme had less to do with the program itself as the people who used it. Complaining about drug addicts using it. Being disgusted by fat people using it. Complaining about 25-year-old women using it. Saying it's clearly intended for people laid off from the mill. I bring this up last because it really goes to the heart of conservatism and the first principle. The idea underlying all of these objections is one of deserving. Certain poor people don't deserve access to government food assistance. Those who do don't deserve to derive any pleasure from eating beyond not starving. Cake and Pepperidge Farm brand bread products are luxuries you have to earn. Underlying all of this, of course, is a sense of moralism; alcoholism and obesity are moral failings and until you overcome them you're not deserving of assistance. Work is virtuous in and of itself so unless you're working you don't deserve any luxuries. Even the disabled don't get a pass anymore because we all know that they could probably work if they wanted to and they're just faking it to get their free Dr. Pepper and avoid work, which we all know they'd do if they were virtuous. Instead they're just moochers trying to ride off of the system. If any of us had any sense we'd do the same, except we're all too virtuous to ever dream of doing such a thing.
It's this last point that really sums it all up, the idea that the system is there to be gamed, largely is gamed, that there exists an advantage in trying to game it, and the self-congratulation that comes along with not gaming it. To make a seasonal reference, it's as if we are Christ tempted in the desert. Except anyone with half a brain knows that nobody on food stamps is getting any advantage from the system. For a single individual, the income limit is about $2600/month. Would you want to live on that in exchange for a benefit that maxes out at $300/month? And other dubious benefits, like reduced rent on a small apartment in a questionable area? And noticed I said maximum benefit; if you make anywhere near the limit you are only getting a fraction of that. I don't know how much but even if you're getting the whole thing it doesn't seem like a great deal. "But if I weren't working, I'd get the whole thing, and it might be worth it being poor if I didn't have to go to work." No, it wouldn't. You don't have to work, and unless your hobbies are watching daytime broadcast television or hanging around outside a Co-Go's, I believe you'd find yourself bored with the welfare lifestyle rather quickly.
Conservatives know this deep down, but they don't want to admit it because it conflicts with the First Principle. If there is an absolute, unchanging moral framework, then we can judge people based upon it. And to compound things even further, they are self-arbiters of this framework. They know what it is inherently, and if anyone tells them otherwise, they're just liberals trying to infect the culture. It makes about as much sense as someone confidently saying that frozen burritos are a luxury item that should only be available to the deserving. Because when it comes to any moral obligation on the part of ourselves, there is silence. No conservative criticizes food stamps on the one hand and speaks of an obligation to help the poor on the other. For all the Biblical allusions, I can't find the part where charity has to be earned through moral virtue. The moralism seems to be confused, solipsistic, incoherent. For his part, Russell Kirk was at least a generous man who was known to help strangers in ways that few of us ever will. But I'm not sure that he was really a conservative.
We wouldn't because we're pretty heavily selected for a kind of conscientiousness and drive that precludes checking out for such a small sum. But there is a level at least I'd check out of the work force for and there are definitely people for whom the current level is quite enough to justify it. I have a buddy who's inlaws are like this. They mooched off him for years until, and I'm not kidding, they managed to move to the Netherlands to mooch off better benefits under some loophole. You wouldn't see these people normally because basically by construction they're off the grid, but there really is a class of people that just will only work as much as it takes to feed themselves junk and lay around all day.
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I think those who say we have to draw the line somewhere are correct simply from a practical perspective. The resources available are limited by the ability to tax, and in some measure by popular opinion. If people turn against EBT because they’re constantly seeing the cards used to buy either absolute rubbish foods or foods that ordinary people cannot afford, there won’t be any support for the programs. Also given the limited funds available, it makes sense to go for the best nutrition for the buck, not because of morality, but because you only get so much, and it benefits the public if the limited funds they give to EBT users buy healthy foods rather than rubbish foods. If 90% of the funds go towards pop, cookies and chips, that doesn’t benefit the poor people either. Having poor kids be obese because mom buys nothing but crap sets them up for all kinds of health problems later on (and puts the taxpayers money on treating such a thing when it happens).
Im all for reasonable flexibility in most situations. But reasonable limits are absolutely necessary even if we can’t agree on edge cases because of the practical consequences of having no limitations.
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Maybe this is tangential to your overall position, but particularly with fat people and SNAP its not really about deserving IMO. Being fat is very bad for you, it is (indirectly) the leading cause of death in America. It doesn't make sense to pay people to destroy themselves, which we then have to pay to address through Medicaid.
Also it makes people not attractive, and I want Americans to be beautiful.
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Your argument doesn’t address the empirical evidence of SNAP fraud, like the half of Somali Americans using it or its high rate in Haredi enclaves. One example, another example. Your argument isn’t for the ideal charity distribution system, but for an unvetted system run by people I will never meet with a terrible track record of punishing fraud. It may even be a corrupt system designed specifically to be used by fraudsters. When I read that millionaires were getting benefits and their only punishment when caught was repaying the benefits back, I lose all faith in authorities administering the system forever, and no longer support the system.
In most cases, Jesus required pistis in return for charitable healing, and in those areas without pistis, no healing could be done. We translate this word as “faith”, and take it to mean a vague, confident belief in a set of facts. But its original meaning entailed a whole social dimension of allegiance and faithful loyalty. Jesus healed His allegiant followers, those who had fidelity to His new Kingdom of Loyalists and all that this meant. This is important to keep in mind. When Jesus praised the faith of the centurion, it wasn’t because he was especially certain of a set of facts, but because he said, “I am not worthy to have you come under my roof, but only say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I too am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. And I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does.”.
We also find in the Didache an exhortation to give freely to members and a condemnation against anyone who takes without need. And this is in a pre-selected group of Christians: they have already pledged full allegiance to the cause and there are elders leading them with the ability to excommunicate.
I think this all makes sense from an instinctive basis. We have an instinct to give to those in need, and we have an instinct to hate those who take advantage of us. The ideal system maximizes giving and minimizes fraud. It’s probably not a good idea to have a national system of administering benefits, unless you are willing to investigate and heavily punish fraud. I mean, I highly doubt you would be fine with me just stealing $20 from you, right? Could I justify this theft with “charity does not demand moral virtue?” This is the same thing on a population-wide scale.
Both of those look more like a cultural norm of having more children that you can afford rather than evidence of widespread fraud. Kiryas Jorel has the highest rate of measured child poverty in America, and they really do go without things like one bedroom per child or one SUV per parent that respectable-working-class American parents increasingly consider essential.
I would prefer to give zero cents to a system which takes the money of my working neighbors and hands it to an insular non-assimilating tribe, only because they’ve cleverly arranged a charitable system where the wealthy members provide food and clothing as tax write-off “donations” while the young men refuse to work (and in some cases refuse to learn English in school). “Measured child poverty” is simply a puzzle that they have gamed; you can walk around Woodbury Commons and see crowds of “measurably poor” Haredi women buying expensive clothing.
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As somebody who grew up poor, those programs were awesome, and I'd like to see them expanded.
One of the biggest problems with food stamps back in the day was that you could just... sell them. When we stayed in one place long enough to get benefits, my mother would barter food stamps for booze or other ineligible goods. I, on the other hand, would get saltines and mustard for dinner, if we had the money for it. Sometimes I'd just get a big glass of water. The EBT card system probably makes that harder, but not so hard that it doesn't happen.
On the other hand, programs like government cheese were fantastic if you were a hungry kid. It wasn't fungible in the same way food stamps were, so it usually ended up sitting in a big box in the fridge and you could just... eat it if you were hungry. The real, undeniable, fundamental foodness of it acted as an extra guardrail against abuse in a way that is probably impossible with financial assistance
I don't know if it's maximally efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way that a lot of people here prefer, but as a hungry kid having real food in the apartment was hard to beat.
I believe in utilitarianism with a broad and robust utility function that encompasses "things we care about" in an almost tautological way. Take "things we care about", convert them into numbers, and then do math on them and trade-off against each other. In contrast to utility that only cares about legible things like GDP, real utilitarianism should recognize that real utility is happening inside people's brains, and things like GDP act only as imperfect proxies attempting to unreliably measure the thing we actually care about.
Which is to say, food which is eaten IS more efficient in the purely utilitarian, ruthless economic way than food stamps that are traded for booze. Because the food which is eaten is value actually attained, while alcoholics getting drunk is negative value. Although you have multiply it out at scale and see how often this happens in comparison to cheese rotting and getting thrown out because it went to someone who hates cheese and wanted to eat cucumber salad. Or they like cheese but they got three times as much as they needed and had nothing to eat alongside it. Inflexibly giving specific things definitely provides a lower ceiling for non-abusers than something like EBT. But it has a higher floor as well. So its average efficiency across the population depends on statistical questions like "what is the rate of abuse vs good faith" as well as how bad in magnitude are these floor and ceiling effects.
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There's gotta be a connection between a mama who makes those kinds of decisions and needing food stamps in the first place. That's enough to throw the whole program in the bin and go back to local neighborhood charity by people who can verify it's being put to good use.
Charity organizations normally have treasurers and are required to publish annual financial statements. Outside of legal requirements, they can submit to the oversight of bigger charities.
Citation needed.
As the kids say, yes_chad.webp.
I think the standard libertarian argument is to make adoption easier. If the teacher (or the school?) cares so much, he can adopt the child. Don't force the hospital to pay for it.
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I like about the free school food for any kid, even if their parents didn't apply programs that their parents don't have to apply, the kids can just go up to the counter and get breakfast or lunch. Also, the food I've observed is surprisingly good, actually.
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I would like to call out that I explicitly rejected providing Hello Fresh in my proposal, but rather a service that is similar in operation to Hello Fresh but explicitly more economical - spaghetti without meat, etc.
It's not so much that poor people aren't deserving of treats, or that they need to fix their obesity before getting the government dole. It's that the food someone eats directly contributes to their obesity and health issues, which we then have to pay for as well. There is a lot of crossover between people on Medicaid and SNAP.
I think it's not compassionate at all to just throw people to the wilderness without teaching them how to cook healthy food, what healthy food looks like from the store, what they should buy, etc. We used to teach this in High School, but we no longer do outside of a half semester health/gym class.
It's not compassionate to sit by as they eat their way to poor health and all the suffering that corresponds to that.
At the end of the line, it's not compassionate to the tax payer to spend their money on wrecking the health of the poor, and then pay to try to treat the symptoms of their metabolic disease. It's like a version of this meme.
I think it accurate to say that my positions on this does stem from the Conservative Principle that, "there exists an enduring moral order. That order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent."
Largely, it is within human nature to get fat and sick when eating potato chips and soda. We may be able to come up with medicines to combat this, but the underlying human nature is enduring and constant. It is morally true that it is an injustice to make someone dig a hole and then fill it in. Similarly it is an enduring truth that it is immoral to make someone pay to make someone get sick, and then make them pay to extend their life in an unhealthy state.
Notably, I'm not even putting moral judgement on the people on SNAP here. I don't blame them for not having been taught these skills, I'm not trying to punish them for their flaws, I'm just trying to imagine a way to help them that helps more than hurts.
Piggybacking to say: I said issue MREs because we were talking about a post-scarcity, UBI situation where AI and robots are doing all the work. What does "this meal costs $21 to make" even mean in that situation? What the hell is a dollar if all commerce has stopped?
If we're truly in a post-scarcity situation then why are we eating MREs? That seems like a dystopian hellscape.
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To say that poorer people have worse diets than wealthier people, and that people on SNAP have the worst diets of all is trivially true, but the USDA studies these things, and the difference isn't that stark. They categorize consumption into different categories, some positive and some negative, and score each category, generating a total score where 100 is ideal. Households earning 350% or more of the poverty line have an average score of 60. Households earning 115% or lower have a score of 57. Households in between have a score of 57. SNAP households have a score of 55. Keeping that in mind, if you look at the Thrifty Food Plan guidelines you'll see that they recognize 15 different age-sex categories with different nutritional requirements for each, which means that your spaghetti would need a dozen or so different versions to avoid, say, allotting a full portion to a small child. And then you combine that giving each person in a household a different meal to be cooked isn't efficient, so you'd have to synchronize and package them to be cooked all at once, and now you get into all the possible permutations you'd need to accommodate every household represented, and that's before you account for vegetarian, kosher, gluten free, peanut allergy, sesame allergy... you get the idea. Complicating this even further is the fact that while the maximum monthly benefit is around $10/person/day the average is more like $6/person/day, which means that a typical SNAP household is still buying a significant amount of food with their own money, at which point the entire system collapses anyway.
I'm not sure how much you could really expect the scores to creep up? How much would they have to go up to justify this level of complexity? 10 points? 20 points? Even with all perfect hundreds you're still only talking about 10% or so of the population. If the medical risks are so high should we impose similar dietary requirements on Medicare recipients (i.e. almost everyone over 65)? Would you be okay if your employer told you that to maintain your health insurance you had to buy a meal kit subscription with your own money on the theory that if you had to pay for it anyway it you'd eat those meals and not junk, saving the insurance company money? What you're describing massively overcomplicates the system in order to chase a dubious benefit. That's why I didn't bring health up in my initial post—it's not as much of a factor as people think it is.
I acknowledge the complexity, which is why I recommended a team of chefs and nutritionists to come together with suitable options that the individual can select from every week. Given the sheer number of people on food assistance, there would be plenty of room for economy of scale, even with such variety.
But see, that would be my own money. It would mean my employer is offering worse benefits, and if I wanted to I could switch jobs to find better benefits. Maybe I'd find the meal kits more convenient, it would be worth trying out for a couple weeks while I job hunted if they were affordable.
If it is for free? Hell yeah I'd sign up. Maybe I would sometimes supplement and buy more things with my own money.
The disconnect is that SNAP isn't some cosmic law of nature. It's charity, and we can sometimes decide if another form of charity is better. There is a user above me who says they loved stuff like this as a poor child, because it meant actual food in the house.
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I have a great many objections to the way that you've framed this presentation, but this in particular really stood out to me:
Why do you take "government food assistance" for granted, here? Any conservative worthy of the name is going to hold that no poor people "deserve" government food assistance. For one thing, "government food assistance" is just a fancy way of saying "confiscating some people's property for the benefit of other people." Indolent people do not deserve food, even if it is morally praiseworthy to provide them with some.
Some people warrant charity, particularly when they have contributed, do contribute, or can reasonably be expected to contribute to society. But to insist upon the charity of others is quite morally objectionable; the only appropriate response is gratitude. The entitlement that many indolent people clearly feel toward my labor is absolutely appalling, quite regardless of whether they are afforded a life of luxury or relative privation. The strangeness that you are tracking in your post is not a problem with conservatism, it is a problem with conservatives trying to meet you halfway. They recognize that for various systemic reasons it would probably be a bad idea to just abolish food assistance entirely, so they fuss over details (like donuts) in vague and dissatisfying compromise. Then, having been given an inch, you reach for the mile.
The economics of food and government subsidies is--I'm sure you well know--complex. Farm subsidies here, food subsidies there, "cui bono" becomes an impossible labyrinth of special interests, not all of them neatly aligned to the red/blue grid. But another principle of conservatism is that you can't just decide to burn the system to the ground and start over. You must live in the real world, not the world of splendid ideas. So you try to at least put reasonable limits on the ways in which the government steals from the productive to benefit (or at least mollify) the unproductive.
I infer from this that you have surprisingly little life experience with conservatives. I haven't seen the inside of a church in a goodly while, but as a child I was treated to many sermons on both the evils of government assistance, and the obligation to help the poor. I understand that Trumpism has introduced a lot of confusion into political discourse on the right (as well as the left), but here you just seem to be indulging a maximally uncharitable stereotype of your outgroup.
It's pretty Lindy. Ancient Rome rather notoriously relied on poor relief ("Bread and Circuses") to maintain social stability. In medieval England, poor relief was the responsibility of the Church, which was effectively part of the government and used both spiritual coercion ("pay your tithe or go to hell" is coercive to people who actually believe in hell) and temporal coercion ("pay your tithe or we can legally seize your land") to collect revenue. This system broke down after Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and was replaced in 1601 with a national Poor Law based on elected local government with the ability to collect revenue coercively after it became clear that the practical consequences of not having a functioning system of poor relief were unacceptable.
The 1601 Poor Law was in force in colonial America, and replaced by broadly similar poor relief schemes (legislated at state level and implemented locally) after independence.
The balance between poor relief in the form of support for the deserving poor and poor relief in the form of coercive institutions to punish the workshy (while feeding and housing them) shifts over the following centuries in broadly similar ways in the UK and the US, with the same issues cropping up, including the eternal truth that people who are too old and/or infirm for coercing them into work to be worthwhile are the largest group of paupers, and widows/orphans/babymamas/bastards are the second largest, and the unfortunate truth that trying to "improve" the workshy costs more than just giving them a dole, while almost always failing.
In the US, the New Deal federalises the problem of the elderly poor and LBJ's Fair Deal federalises the problem of families with children but no male earner. But neither created a system of poor relief where none previously existed.
The cost of poor relief has increased a lot faster than the economy in the last century or so. The main reason is that we decided that aged paupers should be able to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle.
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Your post seems to be a lot of sneering, but is very light on facts.
But that's the thing: my choice is earn techbro wage$ and be productive, or go on welfare and have a lot less.
The people being non-virtuous are folks whose choice is earning an amount of money comparable to what they get from welfare, or just being lazy and getting the same amount for doing nothing. Slightly dated numbers, but you can see here that lots of people whose market income is low are gaining advantage by being lazy: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/11-15-2012-MarginalTaxRates.pdf
The market value of being lazy goes up quite a bit in many blue areas. For example a "poor" person who gets to live in a NYC apartment is getting at least $62k/year in rent subsidies alone.
That's why most of these folks make the deliberate choice to not work, or even look for work, for even 26 weeks/year. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2021/
I'm confused. You seem to be sneering at this claim, but you aren't explicitly saying it's false. It's well known to be true that SSDI is mostly just another welfare program, acknowledged by academics and left wing news sources alike:
https://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Documents/economic/conf/great-recovery-2016/Alan-B-Krueger.pdf
It's true that my personality aligns well with many conservative principles. I get joy from work - both techbro stuff and low paid stuff like construction - and I don't get much joy from vices like crime, drug use or gluttony. You are correct that I probably would not enjoy the life of a wrecker (to use the socialist term) or welfare queen (to use the conservative term).
Lets try to distinguish two separate claims:
Which of these are you claiming?
In any case I can square the circle pretty easily with an analogy you'll probably understand. I don't have any desire to rape children. It's very easy for me not to become a pedophile - literally no effort required. Some folks don't have it so easy - they want to rape children just as much as I want to consensually bang hot asian gym girls. I feel sorry for the desires that those folks seem to be innately stuck with. I still think society should produce incentives that steer them away from raping children.
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.
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Your priorities seem really whack. Why limit your banging to hot Asian gym girls? Subtract Asian and gym. Don’t discriminate against hot girls!
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I've also read those principles when they were linked, and also immediately thought: I'm so, so not a conservative. I disagree with almost everything in that list. Not particularly surprising though, since I'm not religious, either.
But that's unfortunately where my agreement ends. Incidentally, your post sums up many things I find extremely irritating about liberals quite well, and why I currently tend to side more with conservatives.
Yeah, duh, all systems are being gamed. That's not a moral stance, that's just basic reality. There is about an infinite number of ways to have access to more money than that theoretic limit:
And so on. For a simple example from my own life: We've had neighbours - a family with two kids - upstairs back when I was a student. The guy was a construction worker and very nice, the wife was permanently unemployed from even before they had kids. But somehow, they were regularly not in their place for weeks on end, and they were the kind of white trash that certainly isn't living a jet-set life. So what was the reason? Pretty simple: The flat which we thought was theirs was actually officially only his. She pretended to be a single mom with two kids and got all the government benefits associated with that, among them a nice little house in the suburbs. And then they got all the money from his work on top, while paying very little for the cheap flat.
The reality in most western countries is that if you earn anything like the median wage legally, you'd be better off switching to gaming the system. Yes, for the rich and upper middle class it might not seem worth it, but the working poor and lower middle class not only know this, they usually personally have people around them already doing this. And yes, the only thing holding them back is a combination of self-respect and peer pressure. They tell you this, and instead you mock and denigrate them.
There is also this weird insistence to pretend that not wanting government money being spent on something is the same as prohibiting something. No, they can just pay for it with their own money! I've had this discussion with my wife when she was younger about a clearly drunk beggar. No, I don't want to give him money; He clearly already could have bought something for himself instead of getting drunk. With welfare I can't just opt out, so yeah, I want it to be limited to important stuff. That doesn't mean I want alcohol banned altogether, since not only do I expect most people to be capable of enjoying it in appropriate quantities, they may even get drunk if they want to because it's their fucking money. That's basic common sense.
Worse, there really are a lot of people who do actually want to prohibit thing. They're called "liberals":
Or meat, or cars, or alcohol, or any number of things. For many a liberal, there are only two states: Banned or mandatory support.
Again, yes. As a teen, I really got along great with my cousin's husband, who was ca 30 or so at the time, and I was gaming with him in the same clan regularly. Inter-personally, he's nice guy. But it doesn't change the fact that he claimed benefits for some undefined back issues that make it impossible for him to continue to do the warehouse work he did before. Even if that was true - and frankly, I don't think so - he could have certainly done a regular desktop office job instead of gaming 10 hours+ all day. He's sitting in front of a screen either way. At least once they had kids, he started helping out with house / child chores. Of course not because of virtuousness, but because my cousin got sick of his shit bc she was a full-time nurse.
You can believe whatever you want, 90% of young guys would certainly prefer gaming all day over working, and young women are only a little bit better. In most cases, the primary reason they don't is their parents giving them shit. If their parents are already gaming the system, their kids will usually do so as well.
As a matter of fact, most research on the topic concludes that conservatives give more to charity than liberals despite earning less. When I was still forced to go to church, helping the poor and needy was the #1 matter being preached. But helping and indulging their worst vices are not only different, they're opposites. Kirk was pretty average in this way.
At the end of the day, I can't help but notice that most liberals belong into two camps: So sheltered that they basically don't get into contact with dysfunctional people, and the actually dysfunctional. The former can't fathom why people might game the system because they already have it so nice without doing so, and the latter can't fathom not gaming the system. Others are stuck in-between, trying desperately to keep the system working somehow.
The kind of behavior you're describing isn't mere gaming the system, which implies taking advantage of the program's structure in ways that are unintended but technically allowed in order to maximize benefits. What you describe is outright fraud. Not reporting income is the most basic kind, though I have no idea how common it is in relative terms. In my personal anecdotal experience, "We're not going to get married because she gets benefits she'll lose if my income is included" is more common, but it's a mistake born more from a misunderstanding of how things work and doesn't work as often as people think it does because eligibility is determined by household income irrespective of whether you're married. A not too bright and not too close friend of mine got burned by this, or, more accurately, his girlfriend did. She had a kid from a prior relationship and they were going to get married but didn't for that reason. He works as a bus driver, I don't know what she does, if anything, but I know of a few low-level jobs. Anyway, she was living in subsidized housing and he was living with his parents and they ended up renting a house together. When she put down the change of address they asked what the rent was and if she was paying for it and when she told them the situation they explained to her that since he was no mere roommate buying his own food and keeping separate house his income would have to be included in the calculation. He works as a school bus driver so their income was still low enough to qualify, but there was a definite reduction in the benefit amount. Parents giving their kids allowances is unearned income that needs to be reported.
The neighbor you described was committing fraud, plain and simple. That isn't a problem with the system, because the system doesn't allow it. He was keeping his own apartment because he had to have a separate residence on paper. Keep that in mind, maintaining the fraud required paying for an apartment he didn't need, and on top of that moving his family between two locations to keep the government from catching on. If you're an unmarried couple with kids, both incomes are going to count if the parents are living together. The guy was taking deliberate steps to trick the government. Gaming the system would be if there were a hard line where his income only counted if they were married and they deliberately weren't getting married and the government knew this but there wasn't anything they could do about it because it was within the rules. Changing the rules doesn't prevent fraud because the new rules can be ignored as easily as the old ones.
I've seen conservatives trot out this statistic a lot, but there are two caveats. The first is that while it's broadly true at a national level, the effect disappears at the local level when adjusted for overall political leaning—liberals in red counties donate as much as conservatives, and conservatives in blue counties donate as much as liberals. The effect could simply be that since red areas generally have lower tax rates, people living there simply have more to donate regardless of political affiliation, and nationwide it makes it look like conservatives are more generous. The more important caveat is that none of these studies ask the nature of the charitable giving. Donating the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Trout Unlimited both count as charitable donations, but neither do much to help the poor. Complicating this even further is the guys whose name I can't recall who popularized this idea (he was one of those proponents of Compassionate Conservatism) 20 years ago based his research on data that differentiated religious giving from non-religious giving, and included religious giving in his calculation.
And what are you gonna do about it? Not you, personally, of course, but the system. The answer, in my experience, is: Nothing. On paper, they look too much like what they claim to be, and even if the state would start to do personal visits to random benefit-receivers, their legal options are so limited that it's trivial to hide the presence of the guy. Not that I would be in favour of the state doing that to begin with. I don't think the moving around had anything to do with the government, they just used the apartment for storage or the like. In fact they were very lazy about it in a way that made it rather clear they didn't fear them catching on at all; When we had a water leak in the apartment above them and they were repeatedly notified by phone that they have to be present so a handicraftsman can enter, they just ... didn't, up until the moment they were threatened that they have to pay for damages. It was very, very clear to everyone including the landlord that he didn't really live there. But as long as the flat gets paid they just don't give a shit, especially not in these places. We actually had several other people in this building who clearly weren't living in their apartments, at least not all the time, for various reasons. This included me & and my wife; For almost three years, I was officially living in the UK, my wife officially in Germany, but in reality we spent almost half/half in each, mostly together. It's just completely infeasible to investigate anyone renting a cheap small flat, there's way too much of it.
A system isn't measured by what words are on pieces of papers, but by what it does (note: this is distinct from saying that this is outright it's purpose; Of course systems can just simply be badly designed. Though if flaws don't get fixed even after being repeatedly pointed out, it's reasonable to conclude that at least some people in fact like those flaws and don't want them to get fixed). In my experience, everyone thinks this way once it's about a topic they care about; If, say, discrimination against blacks was illegal on paper but there are no mechanisms to suss it out and nothing short of a confession is considered sufficient evidence in court, and anti-black discrimination was as a result still widely practiced with impunity as long as they aren't so stupid as to openly admit it, I'd be pretty sure you'd consider such a system racist, and defending the system with "well but that's illegal so the system is actually perfectly fine" is at best extremely naive, at worst (and, honestly, more realistically) a bad-faith defense. So there imo isn't a hard separation between fraud and gaming the system here at all.
A system is good if the rules as-written are as close as possible to the rules as-practiced, for legibility reason, and if the incentive gradient that is created as a result of the rules as-practiced are reasonably aligned with the intentions of the rulemakers and the population as a whole when the rule was crafted. The second part especially means that the benefits from fraud/gaming the system need to outstrip its cost, otherwise the money is just going to go somewhere else entirely. This is where, in my experience, left-wing systems tend to dramatically fail in a reliable fashion. It's always "nobody is going to game the system", then it's "well that's fraud so it doesn't count" and then finally "why are we deep in the red and everyone still complains that it's not enough".
You can certainly find some conservatives somewhere who really are all about punishing the wicked poor, but this is where limiting benefits to basic necessities is showing its value. Someone in genuine need is still going to be very happy about a can of rice, but it's not worth playing stupid accounting games for. A small apartment is great if otherwise you're literally homeless, but ditto. And so on. To a first approximation with maximal uncharity, that might sound like wanting to punish them, but it's simply a very effective safeguard against being taken advantage of. Which is why conservative tend to have it as an instinctive reaction.
I'm actually broadly against investigations unless it's about a lot of money, since in the west the combination of high legal requirements and high cost of man-hours means that it can happen extremely fast that the cost of the investigation outstrips any plausible amount that could have been defrauded. It's best for fraud to just not be worth it, investigating the most egregious cases, and just eating the (small, in a well-designed system) difference.
I know this objection, but the same goes for a lot of left-wing charity being extremely politically charged; Imo politics is pretty isomorphic to religion in general. Once you look into the details, one might even conclude the opposite: Lots of nominally religious charities have not only overwhelmingly secular staff nowadays, but in particular very far left staff, and re-direct the money from the conservatives to their own pet causes instead.
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Does religious giving change the calculus much? The salvation army is technically a church. Planned parenthood is technically a charity but seems to do very little actual charity and lots of advocacy. I'd suspect that the 'only nonreligious charities should count as charitable giving' thing is mostly to make liberals look good; plenty of churches have charitable arms, and plenty of liberal charities don't do very much actual helping the poor. It probably evens out in the wash.
"Actually religious people aren't generous if you don't count religious giving" isn't really a very convincing line.
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I think it changes the calculus because most people who attend church regularly make regular donations in a way that doesn't exist for most charities. The Salvation Army is religious, but donating $500 to them isn't quite the same as putting $50/week into your parish's collection plate.
Well yes, it skews up the percentage of income religious people donate. I'm not convinced it changes the calculus of what percent of donations are actually used for charity.
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Your post reminds me of Bastiat. Hr said something akin to the statist claim that we (classical liberals) oppose food when we oppose the government paying for food or education when we oppose the government paying for education.
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No, it really doesn't. At best, you've just found that some people aren't good at applying the First Principle. That doesn't mean the First Principle is wrong.
EDIT: In fact, I'd say that it's likely that you're committing the New Atheist error in thinking that if morality is a thing, it must obviously be an obvious thing that any decent (seemingly-similarly-inclined) person can easily just intuit. And thus, when one sees some number of one's co-(anti-)religionists go off the deep end, one concludes that morality didn't real in the first place.
Instead, it's actually somewhat difficult to cultivate and propagate. It doesn't help that the wickedness of man is great on the earth.
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We're not talking about the gucci mres given to our warfighters that include coffee, skittles, and pizza. We're talking about something like the humanitarian daily ration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanitarian_daily_ration
A day's worth of food in a pouch for less than $5, ready to eat. Redirect those food drops away from africa and send them straight to baltimore.
I remember SteveMRE opening an Italian one that came with Cognac.
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This might have been a valid argument in 1989 but nowadays many people can do a remarkable amount of entertaining themselves with no additional cost if they have a computer and a broadband. Anyone academically inclined with an interest like ancient philosophy that doesn't have commercial utility can do a lot of reading and writing with just a small apartment and an internet connection.
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This is, essentially, incorrect and why your point ends up being silly.
People on food stamps often have brand new 70k+ SUVs. Are they spending their entire income on said SUV and living in it? No. The system is being gamed with hidden income, usually grey market, but often black. And living in a questionable area? Thats where these people grew up! They and their ancestors are why it is questionable! Its fish in water at worst, often they prefer it and actively object to anyone trying to improve the place their ancestors ethnically cleansed by persons of another race.
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.
That is possibly a small portion of it, but its not really realistic for the "spouses" of these folks to be high earners, they are underclass persons as well. Its not like obese black women on food stamps are shacking up with accountants.
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How often?
13% of Californians receive at least some EBT. Is it really unbelievable that 13% of people actually earned less than the EBT threshold (about $50k for a household of 3)? I could present arguments about income distributions but if you think it's not being reported I don't think you'd find them convincing.
Enough that I've noticed it as a trend at our local grocery stores.
I also pass a drive-through food bank on my way from my office to the courthouse. Most of the cars in line are SUVs, most newer than my 2016 Carolla.
Its plausible that they are earning less than that pre-transfers and discounting other scams/grey/black market income, but I can tell you there aren't 13% of Californians driving old station wagons and 90s minivans. Everyone who is "poor" in big states and cities drives a new car, usually a large one. Their teenagers all have illegal dirt bikes/atvs, wear brand new Jordans and carry expensive handbags. The scam economy is observably gigantic.
Something like 8% of Americans don't have a car period. Another 5% driving clapped out old cars seems pretty believable (source: drive down 101 bro)
Really doesn't match my experience in Hispanic neighborhoods. Lots of old trucks, civics, etc. When I sold my last car which was in rough shape it was a Hispanic guy that bought it.
You know that there's knockoffs easily available for brand name stuff, right?
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No, the underlying objection is to the lack of need. Conservatives view charity as primarily to cover a lack of ability to provide for yourself.
All three examples given in the prior post show a lack of need:
Looking at how the US government describes the SNAP program I think the conservative view has the right of it here:
The three people described above can afford nutritious groceries with fewer SNAP benefits than they're getting. They further appear to be putting the saved money towards other luxury items. The purpose of SNAP is not helping people purchase luxury goods. If you think it should be I welcome you to donate your own money and ask you don't try to take mine.
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.
But we agree these cases are indeed waste and not proper uses of SNAP, right?
The OP seems to hold the idea that these kinds of spending are perfectly fine and that objections to them are just the conservatives hating specific kinds of poor people. That idea is what I'm disputing - I think it's both out of line with the stated goal of SNAP and also the conservative conception of the purpose of charity.
Before we discuss whether or not this waste is worth it and whether it can be practically reduced we need to be on the same page about whether it is actually waste or desired results of this program.
What cases are you discussing, specifically?
Now, to be clear- I am perfectly willing to admit that there is lots of waste, fraud, and misuse involved in food stamps. I also totally understand being irritated about food stamps recipients eating better than you do. I simply follow-up with the acknowledgement that childhood malnutrition is a problem that causes IQ decline(much more expensive than some Dino nuggets and the like) and that as inefficient as it is, food stamps does address the problem as well as can be done.
You have to make the connection to justify the program. Child malnutrition possibly existing and being a problem does not mean SNAP actually solves the issue. The evidence of drug users selling their cards for cash, obese people (who probably have obese children), and buying junk food is indicative it does not.
Fat children being poor coded is evidence that foodstamps ensures poor kids have enough food.
We would have to take them away to see if that is true. I suspect it is not.
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The three examples I listed above:
As originally brought up in an earlier comment by @tomottoe and then mentioned by the OP.
Two of those cases are yes, waste/misuse. I would call the obese person on foodstamps a borderline example; I've already said elsewhere in the thread that the benefit amount should be reduced for adults, but it's not like you can(legally)redirect foodstamp spending to something else if it's more than you need.
I think our opinions are reasonably close. My opinion is that the program should be tightened up to curb misuse, but limiting starvation and malnutrition in your country is usually good and a more limited program which does so is worth having.
I'd approach fixing the problems differently, but I'm a lot less concerned about how exactly the problems in SNAP get fixed than about agreement that they are problems.
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This is not necessarily true in the case of "spending". Calories are actually very cheap, because rice exists and is far cheaper than any other foodstuff (it tastes lousy by itself, but a little butter and salt fix that). I eat quite frugally ($60 a week or so AUD, a bit over $40 USD) and I could double my caloric intake (and swell up like a balloon) for maybe an additional 10% on that (and that's with the decent rice, over twice the price of the true cheap stuff!). It's everything else that costs real money (particularly meat), because rice has negligible amounts of anything but calories.
In practice, most people don't eat as frugally as I do, but... yeah, price of a diet and calories of a diet are not closely related. (Also, do remember that while calories expended do go up somewhat as you become obese - because of the extra work hauling yourself around, and the nonzero metabolism of fat tissue - it's not actually that strong an effect; being twice the weight doesn't require twice the calories or even close.)
First, if you increased your food budget to double your needed caloric intake I would still say you're overspending, even if your expenses are relatively low compared to others. It'd just usually not be any business of mine if I'm not paying for it.
As your current food budget is showing, you don't need that much food. Ideally SNAP would be giving exactly as much as is needed to top up the person's budget to the point where they can eat healthily, but targeting a program this accurately is unreasonable.
Second, is this actually how a significant amount of obese people are eating? Getting fat on rice flavored with butter and salt sounds difficult. Nor do I think people would be complaining about an obese person purchasing a cart full of vegetables and rice with SNAP - I think the complaints implicitly include that they saw carts full of typical junk food that is easy to overeat and get fat on.
I'm not fat, and I'm willing to put that down to genetics & metabolism rather than any personal virtue, but I can absolutely house a very large amount of rice with butter & salt. Or noodles with butter & salt. Or bread, with salted butter so thick you can see tooth marks.
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That's very similar macros to the Cajun dietary staple(rice and gravy is slightly more nutritious, but it's close enough for government work). If you go to southern Louisiana you will see many very fat people whose diet consists largely of rice covered in stock and roux with some meat, which costs approximately as much as rice flavoured with butter and has a very similar nutrient profile.
I'll take your word for it. It's definitely plausible on a calories/dollar metric, I was more surprised to hear you can eat that much rice without running into problems with stomach size. I find it quite filling and it's not a snack food you can nibble on throughout the day.
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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.
Oh, don't I know it. My point was more the (lack of) proportionality; one can eat way more calories for way less money, so someone who's obese isn't necessarily spending more than someone who isn't.
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I mean…obviously yes? I don’t even buy store bought cake or Pepperidge Farm bread, and I’m not on the dole. Why should my tax dollars pay for your luxuries? Nobody has a moral right to cookies!
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Georgia expanded Medicaid with work requirements (which are coming to every state soon) in 2023. So far they've paid Deloitte about $90m to enroll about 10k people, with 2/3 of that cost being administrative. Surprisingly, that's not that terrible compared to Georgia's average of $5k medicaid spending per enrollee, but still quite a bit of waste to cover what should be a healthier population.
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As I understand it, the Conservative position is something like that there are still jobs that kind of suck. Electricians have been going out in 50mph winds, working on the power poles lately. There are people repairing roofs in Phoenix in the summer. There are people collecting garbage on single lane dirt driveways, where they have to back all the way down the driveway to get to the garbage bins. There are people working in the South Dakota oil fields, and on Alaskan fishing boats. They have to both get paid quite a lot, and also get negative blowback from not working. There's a whole essential layer of work like that. I knew a man who was a sewage diver, and was married with kids.
A big part of the illegal immigration "jobs Americans won't do" narrative is about how high the floor for labor is, due to forbidding low labor and poor person lifestyles, while also providing more benefits.
Of course, I say this, but don't necessarily want to do those jobs as currently constituted (and couldn't physically do most of them), and am strongly in favor of further automation to make them less difficult.
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SNAP benefits are about a thousand dollars a household per month: commercially, a 12-pack of MREs is $150. Let's assume we can get a bulk discount and get 12 meals for $125. That's 96 meals per month - 3 per day for four people, plus 3-6 extra for variety. It's not the most cost efficient, but it's shelf-stable, doesn't require utensils or a stove, and non-transferable. The paternal autocrat in me also likes the synergy with military production. What's not to like?
Edit: gack, I'm stupid don't mind me.
Your math doesn’t math? Twelve is not 96, and 96 is 3 meals/day for one person for one month, not four people.
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I'm not sure what kind of math you're using where 96 meals is three per day for any more than one person.
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Can't pass up a lob like that, 2nd Thessalonians 2:10: "If a man does not work, neither should he eat."
3:10, not 2:10.
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That was written in a very different time, when food was a lot less abundant, and there was always room for more people to contribute to its production even if they were what economists call 'unskilled'.
When Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed the five thousand, he didn't make any attempt to deny them to 'men who did not work'. It took nearly twenty centuries, but we have multiplied our loaves and fishes, and much else besides, to where we can feed not five thousand, but eight billion. (Is this one of the "greater things than these" alluded to in John 14:12?)
Scarcity cannot be eliminated, in this world.
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Paul was much more based than many modern Christians (Protestants) are prepared to accept. They'd rather reject his teachings or insist they only ever applied to the primary audience of the letters. Also from 1 Timothy when speaking about caring for widows:
Note that there's room in the above for accepting charity on behalf of your family. Don't be proud and all that. But if you have a family member on food stamps, and you're not, you're a piece of shit and I don't care what you think your taxes have to do with it.
What if your family member on food stamps is deliberately suppressing their earning potential in order to do things they consider more fun than use the lucrative degree they have and generally have a more easygoing and enjoyable lifestyle than you (and would even without food stamps)? I have a family member like this, and watching them abuse the system has made me way less supportive of food stamps than I used to be. I’m still probably in favor, but only just barely.
I guess I should know better than to speak in such general terms with this audience. If I'm assuming good faith on the part of the recipient, I think you should help. If not, he should be ashamed.
Even without abuse I don't understand how one could be in favor of food stamps. If I hated mankind and wanted to hollow out all local social support structures in one fell swoop, I would implement a highly centralized system of handouts and then run it badly.
This situation is definitely not what I would call good faith.
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A lot of Paul's letters need to be read in the context of the audience he was writing to, and as far as I can tell, it seems as though some of Paul's early audiences literally believed the world was about to end, and therefore had concluded some combination of 1) ordinary morality does not apply any more, and 2) we don't need to plan or work for the future. There is no point to either if the world is about to end.
Paul, at least in his early letters, probably believes that the world is about to end as well. (cf. 1 Cor 7:26, "in view of the impending crisis".) However, he spends a long time trying to shut down the people who have concluded that therefore nothing matters and they can do what they like. 1 Cor 6:12-20 and 1 Cor 10:23-33 seem to be arguing with the hedonists, who think that because the Law has ceased to apply they can do anything they like. 2 Thess 3:6-15 seems to be arguing with the layabouts - people who sponged off the community's charity, probably thinking that there is no reason to lay foundations for a future that will never arrive. We can also see that part of the context is Paul's defense of his own ministry - he himself lived off charity, as a wandering teacher hosted by different communities of believers, and it sounds as if some might have accused Paul himself of taking advantage of his hosts. So in 3:7 he argues that he himself was not idle, and that he would never countenance idleness.
Compare also the Didache, which requires, in chapters 12 and 13, that groups of believers offcer charity and assistance to other believers who come to stay with them. But it puts some limitations on this:
You must welcome and assist believers for a few days, but only a few days, lest they take advantage of you. Believers who want to stay longer must work to support themselves and the community.
I think this is all pretty common sense, as an attempt to balance a strong imperative towards charity and hospitality along with a desire to not be taken advantage of.
If we want to draw a lesson from that for today's politics, I think the principles are obvious and hard to argue with. Provide some charity and assistance for the needy. Require everybody to work as far as they are reasonably able. Do not let yourself be taken advantage of by those who seek to live in idleness.
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.
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I'd prefer food support be produce, grains, flour, sugar, eggs, dairy, meat etc. This isn't about health, I'm giving away everything needed to make cookies, rather I prefer that because, I'd like the recipient to contribute. They're not contributing money, instead they'll contribute time.
Similar thing with housing. I'd love for homesteading to make a return. Give people smaller parcels of land and plans and training and access to materials and let them construct their homes.
I prefer this because, I hope the recipients feel a sense of fullfillment from contributing to their own needs. I want everyone to be more self reliant, rich or poor.
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The current market rate for prepared meals being approximately $10 is without economies of scale and assuming a decent profit margin. It should be within the capabilities of the government to make this more efficient, even if likely the pork would be barrelled.
You're also assuming that long-term healthcare isn't also largely being covered for the food stamp population by government spending. This thereby incentivizes some sort of adequate nutritional profile
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You don't need to ban every grain item that isn't efficient. You just need to ban ones that are particular problems. If you're trying to prohibit Pop-Tarts, maybe fancy Italian bread is halfway between regular bread and Pop-Tarts, but it isn't bought with a frequency that is also halfway between regular bread and Pop-Tarts.
The question I'm asking is why you find pop-tarts so problematic in the grand scheme of things.
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.
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I wouldn’t describe myself as a conservative per se, nor did I take part in the recent
brutal framemogging of junkfoodgooning EBT-maxxerskerfuffle regarding food stamps ‘round these parts, but allow me to steelman a little:yes_chad.jpg
Government policy should encourage the kind of behavior that will eventually lead people to reasonable self-reliance. We should certainly not be subsidizing the undeserving poor, that is to say, those who could work but just don’t want to. The more luxurious the benefits of welfare, the less incentive there is for its recipients to wean themselves off the dole and become productive, independent adults.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious here, and nor am I a Christian myself, but I would wager that a conservative Christian would rebut your point by distinguishing between 3 very different things: (1) God’s unconditional grace and love for mankind, (2) freely-given (human) charity, and (3) taxpayer-funded welfare. Perhaps God’s grace permits you to enter the Kingdom of Heaven regardless of your earthly transgressions, but nowhere does Scripture say that there will be no temporal consequences for sin and vice.
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’.
The "working poor" are mostly a myth. The vast majority of poor people don't work and aren't looking for work.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2021/
This statement seems somewhat misleading.
Your article states that, in year 2021, 38 million people lived below the official poverty line, and only 6.4 million (17 percent) of those were "working poor" (i. e., had spent at least 27 weeks either working or looking for work), leaving 83 percent of the poor as nonworking.
However, that denominator of 38 million includes children and retirees. According to the original Census dataset, the better denominator of people below the official poverty line and between ages 18 and 64 is 21 million people, leading to a "working poor" proportion of 30 percent. This new proportion of 70 percent nonworkers among poor people who are neither children nor retirees still possibly counts as a "vast majority", but it isn't quite as high as the original proportion.
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This just isn't reasonable for a whole lot of people on benefits. They're poor, and therefore far more likely to also be rather stupid and not able to contribute as much no matter how much you want to "lead" them to anything.
I have a great uncle with a developmental disability who no matter how much we try to explain can't understand basic elementary school level concepts about how the seasons work or how to read beyond the alphabet. He could do some physical labor back when the demand for simple tasks was more common and he was younger, but now he's basically useless and lives off his wife's survivor benefits after she died and my parents watch him.
The average poor person isn't nearly as dumb as he is, but they are still pretty damn dumb. Just like the leftist mistake over thinking that corporations are "subsidized" by benefits to workers, the idea that benefits are preventing people en masse from getting better assumes that they aren't already demanding max value for what they have to offer. Now they're dumb, so they might not be that great at the negotiating process but the amount left you can wean out of them just isn't much. (Of course it's also not just stupid, physical disabilities and other forms of mental impairments can cause this too but stupid is the main reason.). The only thing that really blocks improvement here is welfare cliffs and poor scaling down of the benefits, otherwise there's just no reason for a person to not be maximizing their pay already.
Thus we're left with the choice to not care and let them live in squalor or take pity on them being born with less functional brains and/or bodies and share with them a little. Maybe someday we'll be able to fix stupid the same way we're increasingly fixing other issues, but until then "they'll get better" isn't happening.
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