anti_dan
2d ago
Total US grocery spending is projected to be $900 billion or so, food stamps are $100 billion give or take, so 11% of the market. Supply is not highly elastic, demand, particularly on superior food goods (beef) is highly elastic. 20% seems like a reasonable ballpark number.
anti_dan
2d ago
So you are arguing people are going to market oatmeal cookies as oatmeal to get around said law?
anti_dan
3d ago
So why don't they already do this with booze and the like? Market beers and vodka as kombucha or something?
anti_dan
3d ago
Sure, but why? The Democrats when they were at their most coherent were stating that the shutdown was over sunset provisions to PPACA subsidies that they had passed as part of emergency measures when they had a trifecta during the Biden years, which actually wasn't a topic in the CR at all. So what you had was a continuing resolution on a previously bipartisan budget that failed to address a minor issue Democrats had created on their own 3 years prior and had 3 years of foreknowledge it was coming up.
Hardly "suck". At worst "mid". In reality "contrived complaints". This budget doesn't "suck" for anyone but fiscal conservatives. Almost all the covid era money from the sky programs continue its basically the Biden budget plus inflation adjustments. Republicans didn't pass a budget where all SNAP dollars are redirected to ICE and Medicaid is returned to 2007 levels. Welfare eligibility continues to be at levels Bill Clinton would have objected to, from the right. There is no case to be made. Or, at the very least, no case WAS made. Instead what happened was a niche issue that polls well for them was selected as the point of agitation, and Democrats leveraged their continued, but dwindling, media advantages to eek out some minor PR victories until a minor victory for them was achieved, likely right before a terrible PR situation for them was about to be dumped into their lap.
anti_dan
3d ago
Doesn't this already necessarily exist? You cant use snap to buy Budweiser or Cough Medicine from the grocery store.
anti_dan
3d ago
I would think the OP would point to them as just being fake email jobs where nothing of actual policy value is produced as well.
anti_dan
3d ago
I didn't see any Democrat making the case that the budget sucked. I certainly can make my case, almost everything should have been cut, but Democrats don't agree with me, so I dont see the case for the budget sucking from a Democrat POV.
anti_dan
3d ago
Yes, the sheer scale of the program is part of the problem. Its almost certainly making food 20%+ more expensive!
anti_dan
4d ago
I mean, you made a list including 10 bullet points and I am perfectly comfortable saying only the first two should be SNAP eligible and the rest is for people using their own money.
anti_dan
4d ago
What is your mental model of this "full Chrismas SNAP crisis", because I think its probably a load of crap. At least with regards to actual people being hungry. I'd expect people would loot and steal and riot because they can't get their Dr. Pepper, but no actual amount of people would be starving. There are too many school lunches, shelters, food banks, etc. And even outside private charities, states can also always easily step up in this sort of situation by simply being less generous in their dispensations. Restrict the eligible product pool to vegetables, fruits, grains, beans, and dairy and you save like 90%, while avoiding the issue of people spending all their cash on day 1 on waygu steak or orange crush, or selling them for spending money.
anti_dan
4d ago
Ezra Klein made the point that, in the end, the whole thing holding the shutdown coalition together was Trumps "tyranny". Which along with being a nebulous concept, I doubt Ezra and many Democrats even get close to believing their own rhetoric on that particular point. Faced with several of their core constituencies poised to violently riot again over losing government handouts I think the continued shut down was simply far too risky for the Dem defectors to continue to justify to themselves.
anti_dan
6d ago
Alec could have been a hero, but in the end as Bond said, his plan was to cause a global financial crisis to steal some cash. "Nothing more than a common thief" if I recall the line correctly.
anti_dan
7d ago
Can you perhaps expound more about why you think these quotes, if even true, are bad? They seem like jokes with a solid grain of truth in them.
anti_dan
8d ago
What people actually do, if they do anything besides buy what the mainstream media is telling them at face value, is find an entity who's motivations and biases they align with, and then pick that guy's story. Sometimes the establishment consists of flaming hot liberals (Rittenhouse), sometimes it consists of based law enforcement (ICE Twitter). What "establishment" figure gets trusted more depends on whos listening.
anti_dan
9d ago
Please specify what you mean by trans women and why you think their existence in male prisons increases the risk of rape.
anti_dan
9d ago
Those relationships exist, but they generally are outside the legal system.
anti_dan
9d ago
What are you envisioning here? Are police going to refuse to make arrests for crimes? What crimes? Prosecutors refuse to file charges? Judges going to toss cases? Are you under the impression all parts of the justice system today think every law they enforce is just? I am very skeptical that is the case.
The thing about the legal system is that it is always susceptible to cascades in any direction.
Lets say the new trend is that drug cases are not big deals. Police stop charging them, prosecutors dismiss the cases pending, judges find not guilty in the cases they try. But, if drugs become a big deal, police charge them, prosecutors prosecute them, and judges find guilty. The guilty pipeline is more fraught with obstacles, but is not uncommon.
Once the police forces of a place make a choice, only the males of that place can rebel realistically in a way that would be confrontation-ally successful. So the theory does hold. M-W polarization is not sustainable, as approximately 90% of philosophers have suggested over the last 2000 years.
anti_dan
9d ago
The French Option is the one I would summarise as "just win the argument". The gospel truth is mighty and will prevail. All you need to do is get out there, present the gospel, and let the Spirit do the rest. Virtue and moral character are important, but they cannot be compelled or produced by any coercive institution - they come from local practices and must be nurtured in local, congregational contexts, attentive to the word of God. Liberalism and viewpoint neutrality are not problems to be solved, but rather are themselves the opportunities to grow the church and create disciples.
I would question how many Evangelicals in America who know about David French (not many I expect) agree with this characterization of him. I am not an evangelical, but I do know a lot of French's work, and I'd summarize it as "just lose the argument". David has done many things over the last decade, attempting to win an argument from a conservative or Christian point of view is not one of them.
anti_dan
10d ago
So make the case. What part of expelling Somalis or killing SNAP means we should pogrom the Shapiros?
anti_dan
10d ago
Yes all male prisons also currently suck for the residents as a result of the efforts of the same people (or their forefathers intellectually) who are trying to expand that problem to female prisons. That does not appear to me to be a good argument.
anti_dan
10d ago
The motte and bailey seem to me to be the same. Males in female prisons significantly increase the risk of sexual assault in prisons.
I find your solution overly complicated and silly. Granted, my solution is that prisons should be reserved for thieves and embezzlers, and rapists, murderers, hijackers, etc should be executed within 6 months of arrest via a speedy trial would make prisons a much safer environment for everyone, and a more safe world for everyone. But that doesn't seem like a solution you would be inclined towards.
anti_dan
10d ago
The Bell Labs etc. failed because corporations stopped funding them. There's a debate as to why. Some simply gesture at "grrr greedy capitalists" which has never been a satisfying answer for me
I am not as knowledgeable about the other labs, but clearly Bell Labs was a particular cultural entity that was of its time, and the answer as to its decline is simply formalization of education and hiring and workplace employee rules means that the kind of lightning they caught in a bottle at Bell can't be caught anymore. Shockley would be run out of a modern day Bell; Bardeen would never have been admitted to Harvard/Princeton and so never would have done his important grad work and been hired by Bell; Brattain's academics would not have gotten him hired; the kind of bouncing around between government and industry that Shannon did is now very difficult to do; Jewett is probably the person with a backround most likely to actually be in the position he was at Bell in the modern day, but his protege/successor Kelly would never have even gotten an interview now.
anti_dan
10d ago
I consistently see people talking about Matt Walsh like he's some turbo bigot who's openly making insinuations, but upon inspection of any of these claims they always seem to just...fall apart? Like today he kinda went viral with a list of things he thinks Republicans need to pass. And it was like all sorts of reasonable things like dismantling SNAP entirely, banning people from holding public office if they have a citizenship from another country that hasn't been renounced, requiring English literacy to run for office, banning immigrants from countries where >10% of immigrants from said country are receiving public benefits.
Other times he has done things like advocating expanding the use of the death penalty, he ran lead on the Tennessee anti-transing of kids legislation, etc. It all seems pretty in-bounds, just a bunch of stuff that can get the pearl clutchers to do said clutching.
Write it how you do, tie goes to "no". Not angry problem here. If using snap, or state equivalents becomes a pain in the ass, that's a feature. Its a horrible program
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