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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.
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.
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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