

US lawmakers vote to cut food stamp benefits from 2014 - frank_boyd
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24170617

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auctiontheory
Even as a poor country like India increases food aid to its poor, we cut food.
Incredible.

How can the GOP claim to be so closely allied with Jesus, and yet work so
consistently against the poor?

In case you missed is, the proposed annual savings of $3.9B is the cost of
three (3) B-2 bombers.

~~~
Osiris
In the immigration debate, an amendment to the bill was proposed to double the
number of border patrol agents at a cost of $40 billion. Maybe they are just
cutting food stamps in order to pay for border patrol agents.

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beedogs
Incredible that the US can feed other countries, and bomb other countries into
the Stone Age, but can't care for its own poor. Pathetic.

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apsec112
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic."

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something
genuinely new to say about them."

[http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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maratd
Really? Not a single comment supporting this? Talk about a mono-culture.

Reasons this is a good idea:

1\. Dispensing charity on the local level, rather than the federal, reduces
fraud and gets the funds directly in the hands that need it most. And there is
a lot of fraud in the food stamp program.

2\. One of the biggest problems the US is facing currently is the inability to
pay for entitlement programs. The federal government is borrowing furiously to
cover these programs. Unless they get a handle on things, after enough
borrowing, the dollar will simply collapse. The poor will be hardest hit by
this.

3\. Food stamps are essentially cash. Even when spent properly, they're
usually spent on processed poor quality food because that's the cheapest stuff
around. Take the funds and spend them at soup kitchens that can leverage their
purchasing power and buy high quality fresh food at a discount.

4\. Any entitlement programs reduces the incentive to work and become self-
sufficient. As much as this makes you cringe, it is true nevertheless.

5\. Having been on food stamps myself, I can tell you right off the bat, it's
absolutely degrading. At the time, they didn't use any kind of cards, you had
actual food stamps. There you are, paying with stamps, while everybody else
pays with cash. It's like wearing a sign saying "look at me, I'm poor!" and
it's humiliating. A more discrete way of distributing help would be far more
humane.

How about a discussion, rather than this echo chamber?

~~~
gte910h
>Unless they get a handle on things, after enough borrowing, the dollar will
simply collapse. The poor will be hardest hit by this.

Yeah, we have historically low tax rates for the modern era. Raising taxes
instead of lowering spending does the same thing to the balance sheet

>4\. Any entitlement programs reduces the incentive to work and become self-
sufficient. As much as this makes you cringe, it is true nevertheless.

This isn't necessarily true. Having the ability to eat reliably is quite
useful when shifts may be irregular. This allows you to take higher paying,
but more irregular work, providing a more dynamic labor force. This reason
alone makes me suspect basic income instead of SS and SSDI and welfare and wic
and foodstamps may be a good model for the 21st century.

~~~
maratd
> Yeah, we have historically low tax rates for the modern era.

This is false. The charts frequently used to support this all conveniently
exclude the 19th century.

Yeah, after socialism became a fad, we began to tax the living daylights out
of anything that moved and had money. Go back to the 19th century and you'll
see a different story.

~~~
gte910h
>> modern era. > exclude the 19th century.

As they should

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sbierwagen
The House, not the Senate. This won't get past the Senate, and even if it did,
it wouldn't survive a veto, so there's no chance of it actually becoming law.

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Shish2k
I wonder if the US is anything like the UK - we have something along the lines
of Benefit fraud: £10 million. Unclaimed benefits: £100 million. Business
scale tax fraud: £10 billion. And then we demonise the poor because one person
out of a few million ripped off the system and bought a big TV...

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frank_boyd
Signs of times getting really insane.

Last year, the richest 10% got 50% of all income/wealth.

This year, +/\- the same people vote to hurt the poor even more.

At the same time, you have Google wanting to extend life. Whose lives do you
think will get extended? The lives of those who can pay. It's even more insane
considering the fact that we're already using up all resources of our planet
and happily continue to overpopulate it.

If these tendencies continue, there will be a very big clusterf#ck pretty
soon.

~~~
yhckrfan
Note: The US is a good country overall so the following may sound like anti US
rhetoric but it isn't meant that way. Even in my country I am seeing similar
things.

>Last year, the richest 10% got 50% of all income/wealth.

I think it is an easy fall back to make comparisons between the rich and poor,
but that isn't the problem here. It is the government.

How much does the US government funnel into programs to feed the war machine,
or spy on their own people. This isn't a rich vs poor situation, it is a
government vs the people situation, there is money there but it is being
diverted into other programs. More tax = more bureaucracy + more waste + same
problems, when a government is not effective or efficient.

~~~
BgSpnnrs
This sounds, with all due respect, like libertarian mantra. How on earth do
you propose to enable the poor to bring themselves above the poverty line
without a centralised system to manage it?

You're completely correct that US government is wasteful, spends mindlessly on
military, war aid and the appeasement of dubious lobbyists - that is not a
problem with governance in general though! Furthermore, unless a
redistribution of wealth and a welfare state is mandated through taxation and
social programs there seems little hope of helping those at the very bottom
who have been failed (or failed themselves) thanks to the incredibly tough
odds they face compared to healthy, well-off, decently educated folk from
stable backgrounds.

Sure, the rich aren't some distinct subspecies with little regard to humanity
and philanthropy is not a forgotten art, but when stuff like this gets voted
through you can see how broken the entire system is. A media which programs
the poor to turn on itself, a rule of law which actively discriminates against
the poor, a wage barrier that condemns those in low-level work to a life of
constant stress and fear.

They are things that the people need to fix through their government.
'Shutting down everything' only really serves to help those who already are
without the need of it.

->Potentially meandering off-topic and probably not that much of a direct reply to yhckrfan - apologies. I've not had coffee yet!

~~~
dnautics
>How on earth do you propose to enable the poor to bring themselves above the
poverty line without a centralised system to manage it?

Using a decentralized system? Food banks, shelters. Get the grubby Fed paws
off of it. Maybe the states should run them, even better if the cities did, or
even better if good-minded citizens came together and pitched in without the
state. Come on, you don't seriously think that the US Federal Government's
social safety net is working, do you? We keep plowing more and more money into
it and yet the divide between the rich and the poor is getting wider.

"unless a redistribution of wealth and a welfare state is mandated through
taxation and social programs..."

Bastiat comes to mind: "[The socialists declare] that the State owes
subsistence, well-being, and education to all its citizens; that it should be
generous, charitable, involved in everything, devoted to everybody; ...that it
should intervene directly to relieve all suffering, satisfy and anticipate all
wants, furnish capital to all enterprises, enlightenment to all minds, balm
for all wounds, asylums for all the unfortunate, and even aid to the point of
shedding French blood, for all oppressed people on the face of the earth. Who
would not like to see all these benefits flow forth upon the world from the
law, as from an inexhaustible source? ... But is it possible? ... Whence does
[the State] draw those resources that it is urged to dispense by way of
benefits to individuals? Is it not from the individuals themselves? How, then,
can these resources be increased by passing through the hands of a parasitic
and voracious intermediary? ...Finally...we shall see the entire people
transformed into petitioners. Landed property, agriculture, industry,
commerce, shipping, industrial companies, all will bestir themselves to claim
favors from the State. The public treasury will be literally pillaged.
Everyone will have good reasons to prove that legal fraternity should be
interpreted in this sense: "Let me have the benefits, and let others pay the
costs." Everyone's effort will be directed toward snatching a scrap of
fraternal privilege from the legislature. _The suffering classes, although
having the greatest claim, will not always have the greatest success._ "

he was too generous. The suffering classes will ALMOST NEVER have success.

tl;dr: You think you're helping the poor, but if you're using the state to fix
a problem, you're usually just lining the pockets of some wealthy or
politically connected jerk who subcontracts the work, _claiming_ to do the
good works.

~~~
BgSpnnrs
I understand the ideology, but I fail to see how this can work in practice. I
do think the US perspective is very different to my own due to the size of the
nation, and that state level programs probably would be fairer and less
wasteful than a federal taxation and implementation of welfare - it's still
government though, it's merely done at state level. I think this is often the
source of crossed wires when discussing politics over the Atlantic.

>The suffering classes, although having the greatest claim, will not always
have the greatest success.

Certainly, but the same lament is surely magnified when the invisible, broken
section of society is reliant on charitable acts...I'm not saying we are all
terrible, greedy people but as you quote, we often assume the role of victim
and feel hard done by whilst forgetting people who are far worse off than us:

>"Let me have the benefits, and let others pay the costs"

Being cynical about - particularly current - government is not an unfair
judgement to make, but the problem is in the machine's details - tearing the
whole thing down is like (to use an old cliche) throwing the baby out with the
bathwater.

~~~
dnautics
>we often assume the role of victim and feel hard done by whilst forgetting
people who are far worse off than us

That is not what the bastiat quote means. The bastiat quote says that people
will line up at the government trough and claim that what they are doing is
for the "common good". The benefit of doing things privately is much like
linus' law: that you have a million eyes reviewing and making the choice to
contribute or not; versus a bureaucrat, who is of limited accountability to a
narcissistic executive (or legislator) who doesn't give a rats butt about
taking care of the people and is only held accountable by polarizing issues
like abortion rights or gun control (in the US; but in every country you make
compromises when you pick whom you elect).

Why do you suppose that government is any better at allocating money for
charity? Do you really think that politicians are our betters? Why? In a
democracy, politics is always a popularity contest - would you look back at
the kids who were popular in high school, and say, "gee, these are the kids
I'd trust to take care of the poor?". What about the kids that did stuff like
class government or model UN? Or, in a country that's a lawyerocracy (like the
US), the kids that did mock trial or debate club?

The effects of authority also should be examined. Consider that in any
government you will disproporionately wind up attracting authoritarians to
positions all over the chain of authority; and at the lower levels, the people
who are directly dealing with the poor - are going to be the least accountable
and have the lowest skill set. Is that really who you want taking care of the
poor? Making low-level decisions that are affecting people's lives in very
serious ways with few if any consequences for messing up? At least a private
charity runs the risk of losing their donations if there's a publicized flub
up.

I happen to think that to support the worst off you don't need the full
cooperation of the entire society. You maybe need 1-5% or so fully committed,
and 20% willing to give more than a modest amount, and 30 or so % willing to
give small amounts.

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nazgulnarsil
Simplistic moral narratives without the need for economic analysis of the
costs, benefits and incentives of those who interact with the program! Surely
this will result in good outcomes for the needy!

