#big government

[dosesofcommonsense]

[culturevulturette]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Iowa's starvation strategy

I don’t really buy that “the cruelty is the point.” I’m a materialist. Money talks, bullshit walks. When billionaires fund unimaginably cruel policies, I think the cruelty is a tactic, a way to get the turkeys to vote for Christmas. After all, policies that grow the fortune of the 1% at the expense of the rest of us have a natural 99% disapproval rating.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/19/whats-wrong-with-iowa/#replicable-cruelty

So when some monstrous new law or policy comes down the pike, it’s best understood as a way of getting frightened, angry — and often hateful — people to vote for policies that will actively harm them, by claiming that they will harm others — brown and Black people, women, queers, and the “undeserving” poor.

Pro-oligarch policies don’t win democratic support — but policies that inflict harm a ginned-up group of enemies might. Oligarchs need frightened, hateful people to vote for policies that will secure and expand the power of the rich. Cruelty is the tactic. Power is the strategy. The point isn’t cruelty, it’s power:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/25/roe-v-wade-v-abortion/#no-i-in-uterus

But that doesn’t change the fact that the policies are cruel indeed. Take Iowa, whose billionaire-backed far-right legislature is on a tear, a killing spree that includes active collaboration with rapists, through a law that denies abortion care to survivors of rape and forces them to bear and care for their rapists’ babies:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/16/us/politics/iowa-kamala-harris-abortion.html

The forced birth movement is part of the wider far-right tactic of standing up for imaginary children (e.g. “the unborn,” fictional victims of Hollywood pedo cabals), and utterly abandons real children: poor kids who can’t afford school lunches, kids in cages, kids victimized by youth pastors, kids forced into child labor, etc.

So Iowa isn’t just a forced birth state, it’s a state where children are now to be starved, literally. The state legislature has just authorized an $18m project to kick people off of SNAP (aka food stamps). 270,000 people in Iowa rely on SNAP: elderly people, disabled people, and parents who can’t feed their kids.

Writing in the Washington Post, Kyle Swenson profiles some of these Iowans, like an elderly woman who visited Lisa Spitler’s food pantry for help and said that state officials had told her that she was only eligible for $23/month in assistance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/04/16/iowa-snap-restrictions-food-stamps/

That’s because Iowa governor KimReynolds signed a bill cutting the additional SNAP aid — federally funded, and free to the state taxpayers of Iowa — that had been made available during the lockdown. Since then, food pantries have been left to paper over the cracks in the system, as Iowans begin to starve.

Before the pandemic, Spitler’s food pantry saw 30 new families a month. Now it’s 100 — and growing. Many of these families have been kicked off of SNAP because they failed to complete useless and confusing paperwork, or did so but missed the short deadlines now imposed by the state. For example, people with permanent disabilities and elderly people who no longer work must continuously file new paperwork confirming that their income hasn’t changed. Their income never changes.

SNAP recipients often work, borrow from relations, and visit food pantries, and still can’t make ends meet, like Amy Cunningham, a 31 year old mother of four in Charlton. She works at a Subway, has tapped her relatives for all they can afford, and relies on her $594/month in SNAP to keep her kids from going hungry. She missed her notice of an annual review and was kicked off the program. Getting kicked off took an instant. Getting reinstated took a starving eternity.

Iowa has a budget surplus of $1.91B. This doesn’t stop ghouls like Iowa House speaker Pat Grassley (a born-rich nepobaby whose grandpa is Senator Chuck Grassley) from claiming that the cuts were a necessity: “[SNAP is] growing within the budget, and are putting pressure on us being able to fund other priorities.”

Grassley’s caucus passed legislation on Jan 30 to kick people off of SNAP if their combined assets, including their work vehicle, total to more than $15,000. SNAP recipients will be subject to invasive means-testing and verification, which will raise the cost of administering SNAP from $2.2m to $18m. Anyone who gets flagged by the system has 10 days to respond or they’ll be kicked off of SNAP.

The state GOP justifies this by claiming that SNAP has an “error rate” of 11.81%. But that “error rate” includes people who were kicked off SNAP erroneously, a circumstance that is much more common than fraud, which is almost nonexistent in SNAP programs. Iowa’s error rate is in line with the national average.

Iowa’s pro-starvation law was authored by a conservative dark-money “think tank” based in Florida: the Opportunity Solutions Project, the lobbying arm of Foundation For Government Accountability, run by Tarren Bragdon, a Maine politician with a knack for getting money from the Koch Network and the DeVos family for projects that punish, humiliate and kill marginalized people. The Iowa bill mirrors provisions passed in Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin and elsewhere — and goes beyond them.

The law was wildly unpopular, but it passed anyway. It’s part of the GOP’s push for massive increases in government spending and bureaucracy — but only when those increases go to punishing poor people, policing poor people, jailing poor people, and spying on poor people. It’s truly amazing that the “party of small government” would increase bureaucratic spending to administer SNAP by 800% — and do it with a straight face.

In his essay “The Utopia of Rules,” David Graeber (Rest in Power) described this pathology: just a couple decades ago, the right told us that our biggest threat was Soviet expansion, which would end the “American way of life” and replace it with a dismal world where you spent endless hours filling in pointless forms, endured hunger and substandard housing, and shopped at identical stores that all carried the same goods:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

A society that can’t feed, house and educate its residents is a failed state. America’s inability to do politics without giving corporations a fat and undeserved share is immiserating an ever-larger share of its people. Federally, SNAP is under huge stress, thanks to the “public-private partnership” at the root of a badly needed “digital overhaul” of the program.

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein describes how the USDA changed SNAP rules to let people pay with SNAP for groceries ordered online, as a way to deal with the growing problem of food deserts in poor and rural communities:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-04-19-retail-surveils-food-stamp-users/

It’s a good idea — in theory. But it was sabotaged from the start: first, the proposed rule was altered to ban paying for delivery costs with SNAP, meaning that anyone who ordered food online would have to use scarce cash reserves to pay delivery fees. Then, the USDA declined to negotiate discounts on behalf of the 40 million SNAP users. Finally, the SNAP ecommerce rules don’t include any privacy protections, which will be a bonanza for shadowy data-brokers, who’ll mine SNAP recipients’ data to create marketing lists for scammers, predatory lenders, and other bottom-feeder:

https://www.democraticmedia.org/sites/default/files/field/public-files/2020/cdd_snap_report_ff.pdf

The GOP’s best weapon in this war is statistical illiteracy. While racist, sexist and queerphobic policies mean that marginalized people are more likely than white people to be poor, America’s large population of white people — including elderly white people who are the immovable core of the GOP base — means that policies that target poor people inevitably inflict vast harms on the GOP’s most devoted followers.

Getting these turkeys to vote for Christmas is a sound investment for the ultra-rich, who claim a larger share of the American pie every year. The rich may or may not be racist, or sexist, or queerphobic — some of them surely are — but the reason they pour money into campaigns to stoke divisions among working people isn’t because they get off on hatred. The hatred is a tactic. The cruelty is a tactic. The strategic goal is wealth and power.

Tomorrow (Apr 21), I’m speaking in Chicago at the Stigler Center’s Antitrust and Competition Conference. This weekend (Apr 22/23), I’m at the LA Times Festival of Books.

[Image ID: The Iowa state-house. On the right side of the steps is an engraved drawing of Oliver Twist, holding out his porridge bowl. On the left side is the cook, denying him an extra portion. Peeking out from behind the dome is a business-man in a suit with a dollar-sign-emblazoned money-bag for a head.]

Image: Iqkotze (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_State_Capitol_April_2010.jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[commonsensecommentary]

“This year’s elections—and the stark choice they present for our nation’s future—are a tipping point that occurs perhaps only once in the history of any nation. How we vote in our local, state, and federal elections this year has certainly never been as important during my lifetime, and the direction we choose will reverberate through many, many decades to come.”

[ms-boogie-man]

This Terrifying Alex Jones Prediction Has Just Come True

Let me help you with that question posed by Mr Brand;

You are seeing the piloting of martial law

When your government ceases to perform their elected positions as the public servants those positions were designed to be… well, I will let you do the math on that one

… but before you respond, read up on our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and the 1st ten in our Bill of Rights; and you might want to see is there are any applicable points of interest in our CFR (Code of Federal Regulations)… I have not any patience for emotional outbursts from ignoramuses; which is what most liberals are

Angie/Maddie🦇❥✝︎🇺🇸

[gamer2002]

Gee, who could see it coming.

[ohyeslawd]

Republicans talk that shit about big government yet they’re all up in women’s individual rights. Hypocrisy all the time!

[anthonybialy]

Statist of Confusion

Poor confused leftists can’t figure out why this rotten universe rejects their dreams.  Wait: I don’t feel bad for them.  Their awful notions have ruined our world in reality, so they can cram it with worthless bills.  Uplifting notions don’t even work in theory when experiments are conducted by poets who never rhyme.  Free verse gets costly.

We are only poor financially and philosophically, so finances are swell otherwise.  The allegedly downtrodden took charge and really tread everywhere.  The delusional are pitiful without being pitied.

Professional victims are desperate to feel they’re opposing oppression means they can never announce things are okay.  Ruining everything is how warriors who condemn toxic male behavior maintain truth.  They just need to ladle on more of their gentle policies, which is presumably why they exceed power boundaries to spread misery.

Acting like tyrants while claiming to be democracy’s sole defenders is for the benefit of those struggling.  Politicians getting rich off making everyone poor claim everyone but them is in life for selfish reasons.

Israel is where the good guys reside, in case anyone’s confused.  That rather obvious conclusion is startlingly resisted by fans of the oppressed who tacitly cheer for slaughter.  Fighting back against terrorists is treated as terrorism by the usual inverters of perception.  A bold and brave stance against an imagined genocide to prevent an actual one surely isn’t overcompensation for getting World War III wrong.  The only thing worse than obvious moral preening is doing so on behalf of the side that spurred conflict by attacking people listening to music.

The side of the line that struggles to get water to run uncannily blames its successful neighbor.  They didn’t connect their hose to your faucet.  The hometown of Hamas might just be a primitive society by virtue of choosing terror over trade.  Enemies of free markets and people aren’t assigned rottenness any more than they’re oppressed by those who lucked into working plumbing.

Liberals are for the poor, which is why they create so many of them.  Viewing life as a struggle while making it so would almost seem like a trick were it not responsible for causing untold devastation.  Claiming life shouldn’t revolve around money is a popular smug boast amongst those who ensure the destitute stay that way.

Who knows better how to help you than those who harmed you?  There’s not enough money in the economy to help those suffering, claim those who drained it.  Wondering why that’s so in the first place is for people who believe in cause and effect, which doesn’t include the party that made potatoes unaffordable.

These advanced times feature ignoring even more examples as they get easier to discover via search.  Your phone can be used to look up socialism’s failures.  Its very existence is based on the opposite.  Progress happening despite their beliefs summarizes same.  

Creating problems they condemn only sounds like a sitcom.  It would be funny if we weren’t living with the consequences of monumental screwups who never learn.  Spot the truly compassionate by their incessant claim that nobody would give to charity voluntarily as they drain the economy to let politicians choose what’s worthy.  The decision is mandatory, of course.

Never grasping incentives applies wholeheartedly.  People might be able to give on their own if they weren’t taxed to the point where essentials are a stretch.  And we might even need less assistance with people spending what they earned.  But how would Democrats show they care?

You oppose healthcare and safety from gun violence for all because you pawned your heart to the Heritage Foundation.  Your stubborn insistence that a guarantee may not do as claimed stands in utopia’s way.  Nobody spending their own money would trust a corporation whose business they can decline, but surely government must keep its promises.  Otherwise, this world has no morality, and that would turn out just horribly.  Submitting to authority in the lamest way spares us from worrying we might not have swell judgment.

Calling people producing useful things greedy is the typical occupation of the useless.  Naturally pushy Democrats can’t even find worthy causes to fund with what they take.  You’d think all that time dedicated to shiftlessness might spur self-reflection, but it’s tough to account for all personality types.

Spotting a lack of empathy is part of being empathetic.  The commitment to remaining unproductive extends to not identifying what spurs anguish.  Conglomerates decided they wanted to overcharge just as soon as Joe Biden got his way.  You can remember for him.

Calling the country they’ve distorted at will cruelly oppressive isn’t the fun sort of irony.  Liberals love nothing more than pretending America’s problems stem from its freewheeling finances and not from the welfare state they wanted and got.  What next: citing unfathomable crime levels in areas with heavy gun control as proof guns cause crime?  Oh: right.

Calling everything they don’t like right-wing is the best case foes of semantics have.  People who only have claims aren’t going to flaunt anything showy like improvements.  Their habit of announcing they’re for equality and against hate as they exacerbate gaps with malice is a nice touch.  Implementation of their ideas creates toxic trash that they use as evidence that America features too much autonomy.  The Munchausen by proxy faction inflicts diseases they claim to know how to cure.  Get on a waiting list.

[relaxedstyles]

[odinsblog]

Despite “RIP Ted” trending on social media, it is my duty to regretfully report that the Zodiac Killer, Ted Cruz, is still alive

[dosesofcommonsense]

Uneducated and distracted citizens can’t do math (thanks common core) and don’t care that the government is blowing through tax payer money. It’s not the government’s money; it’s ours.

We fund BIG government. Small government allows us to keep the bulk of our money, while BIG government takes and takes and takes.

Texas should remember this ideology and return bloated taxes and property taxes to its citizens. I thought Texas was conservative and for small government…what happened to that?

[culturevulturette]

Their gaslighting is outrageous. And so easily disproven.

[underthrowthegovernment]

[commonsensecommentary]

“When one looks at economic sectors where liberals today predominate—education, Big Tech, social services, and government at all levels—it can perhaps be said that a belief in the efficacy and importance of milking taxpayers for every possible penny, silencing unbelievers, and refusing to provide provable results is a matter of enlightened self-interest because reductions in today’s out-of-control local, state, and federal spending would reduce their income and push them into less lucrative jobs.”

(Prepare for the screaming when Trump and the Republican majority start cutting government spending in 2025 / From my blog archive)

[aspiringbogwitch]

[4libertylover]

"The bigger the government, the greater the corruption." - Dennis Prager