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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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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

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dontmeantobepoliticalbut · 3 months

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The COVID pandemic provided a real-time experiment of a strengthened social safety net, in which several anti-poverty programs were bolstered and benefits increased. One such program, called Pandemic EBT, provided a voucher for families to purchase groceries while children were unable to attend school in person, helping them to obtain the nutrition they would otherwise get through free school meals and lifting millions of children out of hunger.

In late 2022, Congress approved a similar, permanent program on a bipartisan basis. Called SUN Bucks, or Summer EBT, the program begins this month and provides families with $40 per child per month in grocery benefits over the summer, or $120 in total, when they don’t have access to free lunches at school.

Thirty-seven states, five territories, and the District of Columbia will participate in the program. But 13 states, all led by Republican governors, have opted out of the program, depriving millions of low-income kids. Several of these states have also declined to expand Medicaid, increasing the burden on households too poor to afford health care or basic groceries.

SUN Bucks isn’t as generous as its pandemic-era iteration, but the Department of Agriculture nonetheless estimates that the program will reach more than 20 million children. “We always see summer as one of the hungriest times of year,” said Kelsey Boone, the senior child nutrition policy analyst at the Food Research and Action Center. “We see summer EBT as kind of filling that gap in the summer nutrition programs that only reach a fraction of the children that participate in reduced-price school meals during the school year.”

The baker’s dozen of red states that opted out are Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, Mississippi, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. Their governors have cited an array of reasons, including logistical difficulties, but much of the opposition appears patently ideological.

“An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic,” said Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds in December, referring to the debit-like card that food stamp recipients use to purchase groceries. A Florida state official told WFSU News that “we anticipate that our state’s full approach to serving children will continue to be successful this year without any additional federal programs that inherently always come with some federal strings attached.”

A spokesperson for Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves insisted that Summer EBT amounted to “attempts to expand the welfare state,” adding that if “Democrats in Washington had their way, Americans would still be locked down, subjected to Covid vaccine and mask mandates, and welfare rolls would’ve exploded.” (Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen, who initially said his state would not participate because he did not “believe in welfare,” reversed course in February after speaking to low-income children.)

Some governors cited the cost of Summer EBT as prohibitive; a spokesperson for South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem said in January that “federal money often comes with strings attached, and more of it is often not a good thing.” The federal government will cover the cost of the program, but states must provide the funds for half of the operational costs. Others argued that it is redundant, pointing to state summer meal programs. Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt rejected the $60 million in federal funding, saying he was “satisfied that kids won’t be going hungry in the summertime.” (He told KJRH News in January, “We gave over $20 million over the last couple of years to different food banks.”)

But Chris Bernard, the president and CEO of Hunger Free Oklahoma, noted that only 6% of eligible children in the state participate in summer meal programs. Moreover, he argued, the existing summer food programs administered by the state are insufficient on their own. “These programs are meant to complement each other, not be exclusive,” Bernard said.

Even though Stitt opted out of Summer EBT, several Native tribes in the state will be participating and will provide the benefits to Native and non-Native children living in tribal territories. As much of the state is composed of tribal lands, this means that a large portion of Oklahoma’s population of low-income children will be served. However, this will also result in piecemeal application of the benefits across the state. Children living in Oklahoma’s second-largest city, Tulsa, will be eligible to receive the benefits through the Muscogee Nation, but families in the state’s largest metropolitan area, Oklahoma City, will not be able to obtain Summer EBT.

“You could be in a school district that’s bordering one of these other territories but not in it, and you’re going to miss out. But even your sibling could attend the other school district, and they’ll get the benefit,” Bernard said. “It makes for confusion. It makes for an unnecessary absence of resources for families.”

Neighboring Texas, the second-largest state in the country, with 3.8 million children eligible for the program, also opted out of Summer EBT; however, the reasoning seemed more logistical than political. Texas’s Health and Human Services Commission argued that it was given insufficient time by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get the program up and running. Moreover, the state is currently busy unenrolling people from Medicaid after the federal government removed its pandemic-era requirements for continuous coverage.

As a result, the charitable sector may bear much of the brunt of keeping low-income families fed over the summer. For example, the Houston Food Bank operates a summer meal program at around 200 sites in the Houston area, but it’s expensive to administer and reaches a relatively low percentage of children who need it.

“For years, we’ve argued that, yes, we’re happy to do this, but we do not think this is the best solution. The best solution is for those families just to be able to buy the food they need less expensively at supermarkets,” said Brian Greene, the organization’s president and CEO. He added that food banks are “not meeting the need to begin with,” so having to help even more families with children will further strain the charitable sector—not to mention low-income Texans themselves.

“We’ll keep doing as best we can, and it won’t be enough by a large margin. But it’s the families who are going to be taking the hit,” Greene said.

Still, even if a state doesn’t opt into Summer EBT this year, it does not preclude them from doing so in 2025. Stitt has not ruled out participating in the future, and states like Texas that dealt with administrative burdens may find those issues resolved in time for next year.

Something similar occurred with the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, the cost of which is largely borne by the federal government. Many Democratic-led states adopted the expansion in 2014, while many red states refused it, even as research demonstrated the expansion’s health and fiscal benefits. Since 2019, six more Republican-led states have joined the club. Seven of the remaining 10 holdouts have also rejected SUN Bucks.

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