(P.S.)Megan McArdle is Simply Correct
By Mona
It is trendy of late for left-of-center blogs to viciously ridicule and harangue Ms. McArdle. Well, I’ve got news for y’all, even hilzoy whom I supremely respect. I’ve been on foodstamps. Recently, as an adult and not a college kid. And McArdle’s right:
If you want to give money to the poor, give it to them. Even if they spend it all on drugs, it will hardly be much worse than spending it all on increasing their already astronomical obesity rates.
I didn’t need the amount of foodstamps that kept increasing: but I was forbidden by law from trading any of that value for things I required much more, like blood pressure meds, or gas money. You will not find a more jaded critic of the foodstamp program and governmental “help” systems than me — a libertarian who was in “the sytem.”
.
And if all you can spend it on is the food at the local Save-Mart, and don’t know how to cook lean, yeah, you are gonna get fat. There just is no getting around the correlation with extreme poverty and obesity.
***
P.S. I’ve of necessity taken this challenge.
Comment by Sean —
January 25, 2008 @ 11:22 pm
Geez Mona, your personal experience must mean that an expansion of the food stamp program would not stimulate the economy because poor people are fat and… something. And stuff.
Too bad neither you nor McMegan have said anything remotely relevant to assessing the studies that show that expanding the food stamp program would immediately increase spending and stimulate the economy.
Implying that we should not direct stimulus money towards the poor because they have poor diets and will just buy more Twinkies is callous, stupid, and condescending.
What’s your deal, Mona? What do you have against people like you?
Comment by Mona —
January 25, 2008 @ 11:32 pm
Yeah, stimulating the economy is my whole point, you betcha, as it is for every impoverished person who can’t purchase necessities. [eyes rolling]. Oh, and letting us buy gas and necessary medications would not stimulate the economy. Got it. Only FOOD stamps will expand the economy, so we should be limited to that in great abundance, and the foodstamp program is Christ’s great gift therefore.
Making fun of McArdle, calling her McMegan, answers all that…
Comment by John Quiggin —
January 25, 2008 @ 11:37 pm
You can make bad arguments for a correct conclusion, and claiming that obesity is a good reason for not giving more in food stamps is about as silly an argument as you can make. As your own post says, obesity is an indication of inadequate expenditure on food or lack of access to good food, not the contrary.
That said, your own post makes the correct argument for giving money rather than food stamps.
Comment by Mona —
January 25, 2008 @ 11:47 pm
I’m not making that argument, and neither is McArdle. But the fact is — and I’ve seen it myself — poor people on foodstamps overwhelmingly buy crap food. I shop at Aldi, for the most part (Google if you do not know what that is), and lately I can get good prices on chicken, fish, juice, lettuce and some other produce.
But by far, their poor customer-base prefers what is mostly available there — chips, sweets, high-fat frozen meals & etc. Were it otherwise, Aldi would offer more healthful food. They carry what sells.
Comment by LarryM —
January 25, 2008 @ 11:57 pm
Megan is certainly correct on the quoted point, and is sometimes unfairly criticized. But she does often bring it upon herself, sometimes when she makes analytical arguments which happen to be contradicted by the actual data which she ignores, and sometimes with narrowly correct arguments which miss the forest for the trees.
Comment by Avram —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:04 am
Sean: Too bad neither you nor McMegan have said anything remotely relevant to assessing the studies that show that expanding the food stamp program would immediately increase spending and stimulate the economy.
Would it stimulate the economy more than just giving each food-stamp recipient money instead of food stamps?
Comment by Leonard —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:55 am
So what is it w/ calling Megan McArdle “McMegan”? Far as I can tell, it’s a sneer, and as such unworthy of civilized debate.
It’s obvious what we should do with food stamps. We should consult with the best health and nutrition experts, and then disallow the use of food stamps to buy anything that we disapprove of. We can force them to eat correctly, I’m sure, with the correct incentives. It’s just a matter of getting bipartisan agreement. It’s a national tragedy that we are forcing these poor people to get fat via giving them too many choices.
Comment by Avram —
January 26, 2008 @ 1:17 am
I don’t know that it’s a sneer; it looks like a simple shorthand nickname. Here’s Kevin Drum using it last year, and he doesn’t seem to be using it insultingly (and isn’t usually one for cheap insults).
Comment by Avram —
January 26, 2008 @ 1:19 am
And here’s Jim using it just a few days ago! Ask him if it’s a sneer.
Comment by Farah —
January 26, 2008 @ 2:23 am
As long as ypu don’t expect me to agree with the tax rebate idea (whch would only work if there was a severely graduated rebate which started with simply handing over dosh to the poor, and ended up by increasing the tax on the mega wealthy) I am totally with you.
Janet Poppeniek’s book Sweet Charity has a lot to say on this topic. “Targetted” aid treats the poor like fools, and as Jane Addams before us discovered, the poor ain’t foolish. I still remember as a kid the problem of school uniform grants, which could only be spent in certain shops, which charged far more than buying the material and making the uniform would have done.
And cooking lean requires a proper cooker. I got fat the year I was in accomodation with a two ring “baby” oven.
Comment by Jean —
January 26, 2008 @ 3:06 am
There’s more than one person called Megan that blogs. The two have a somewhat overlapping audience. Therefore, differentiation is required.
McMegan is catchy and also plays on the `Mc x’ snowclone, thus becoming common.
Comment by bryan —
January 26, 2008 @ 5:29 am
well I did pretty well on food stamps when I was on them, but that was also more than a decade ago in San Francisco (although at that time it was still considered impossible to eat well on food stamps). I suppose that location can also have an affect of the quality of food that can be cheaply had.
Furthermore that I was single and in college might be other factors that do not translate well to knowing how a family on food stamps would function, for example in a family it might make the best economic sense to buy in bulk, does bulk buying support higher or lower quality food, being in college might mean that one more chances to eat away from home that are nonetheless not prohibitively expensive (I can think of some cases), and being in San Francisco I remember eating out was really really cheap and pretty healthy in comparison to other parts of the US I’ve lived in. Finally I have some evidence that I am one of those people that can eat twinkees and other crap all day long and not put on weight, probably due to a high metabolism and a childhood of pretty much refusing to eat anything out of personal finickiness.
For these reasons although I can say hey I lived on Food stamps and I ate healthy and didn’t get fat, I also understand that my personal experience from more than a decade ago now does not translate perfectly to the whole of American Society today, and that it may be that data is not the plural of anecdote.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 26, 2008 @ 7:50 am
But a significant chunk of obesity among the poor is not a matter of bad choice. Some googling confirms my impression that studies of the matter (a good selection of links here) keep noting the difficulty in buying healthy food in poor neighborhoods and the lack of opportunities for safe play and exercise.
I’ve been on food stamps myself, and I agree that in most cases a transfer of cash would be preferable for a bunch of reasons. But that’s not going to be happening anytime soon – the prospect of letting poor people choose how to spend money is one that always gets someone worked up. And in the meantime, way too often it seems like campaigns to cut back on X because Y would be a genuine improvement end up cutting back on X and never getting to Y. Been there, done that, too often.
In the long run, a genuinely serious effort to improve the health of the poor would probably start with cutting back on a lot of agricultural subsidies.
Comment by Monte Davis —
January 26, 2008 @ 7:55 am
Uh, yeah: a lot of this discussion would be more sensible if we were to recognize as a starting point that the food stamp program — like foreign food aid — is shaped at least as much (often more) by domestic farm lobbies as by the needs of the recipients.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:03 am
By the way, Megan McArdle gets a lot of flack these days for much the reasons people like me often slag on Tyler Cowen and others, too: an extensive history of making policy pronouncements and moral judgments on those unlike themselves on what turn out to be entirely specious, speculative grounds, easily refuted by simple research, and never collected in any lasting way so that the same type of errors happens again and again. In addition, McArdle projects a general attitude that seems to many of us to be simply callous, fundamentally lacking in an appreciation for limitations others may work under or any real interest in the well-being of people outside her social set, and not understanding how much of her and her class’ prosperity depends on the folks she’s denigrating.
The post in question is a good example, as it happens, because she acts as though no moderate or conservative economist has presented any arguments and evidence suggesting that an increase in food stamp benefits would be a good stimulus. But the CBO did, and so have outside observers. (Here’s an article quoting Martin Feldstein, president of Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors on the merits of food stamp and unemployment insurance increases, and the CBO’s paper (in PDF form). These are not wild-eyed liberals holding forth.) I do realize that no talk of stimulus of this sort is desirable from a libertarian viewpoint, but I’d think that you’d at least like it to provide most benefit if it is going to happen. (The counterargument that it’s better for well-intentioned efforts to end in squandering and waste for tactical reasons is one I’m not engaging with at the moment. I’d get angry and unpleasant, and the world has enough angry and unpleasant people posting right now.)
Instead, we get digressions about how icky and stupid the poor are, and how much better it would be to have a policy with no current prospect and therefore how desirable to toss out the one we’ve got and that seems like it would actually do better than alternatives that funnel more money to, oh, her employers and peers.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:09 am
Monte: Yeah, no question but what the food stamp program isn’t what one would get if one set up a program purely to help needy people get adequate food. On the other hand, it and a bunch of other services seem to get a kind of criticism that many others don’t. I understand that there are some deep flaws in various parts of internet administration, but nobody much seems to be calling for the simple abolition of DNS in hopes of reinventing something better, nor for destroying the nation’s dams because so many of them really need repairs as their mean times between failure approach. Or for that matter abolishing and rebuilding our system of land registration from the, um, ground up even though many deeds rest at some point on acts of overt fraud and coercion. It seems like a lot of folks are willing to hold efforts at helping the needy to a much tougher standard than they apply to other kinds of undertaking, and it bothers me from time to time.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:11 am
Sorry for being so wordy. This is one of those times of being bothered. Off I go to let anyone else get a word in edgewise.
Comment by chris y —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:12 am
There just is no getting around the correlation with extreme poverty and obesity.
Oh, come on, there’s no getting round the correlation with public drunkenness and Baptist preachers either. What’s your point.
The thing about food stamps is they’re much more insulting than money. This is the real argument for giving money.
Comment by Azael —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:38 am
Mona, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. The mere fact that McMegan finds a truffle or two doesn’t even begin to offset the pure and utterly bizarre bullshit she spews forth on a constant basis.
Your response to Quiggin is also pretty bizarre. You’re making the rather unsupportable claim that “if everyone were like me, they could find all sorts of good food.” Mona, just because you’ve been on food stamps doesn’t mean you’re like 90% of those who live on them every day. From your writing it seems likely that you have a very good education beyond high school. And lets remember that many – if not most – of the poor haven’t even finished high school.
I just love how this whole “self responsibility” thing on the libertarian side seems to drift into outright contempt for those who are obviously not blessed with the same capabilities and opportunities you were.
Thank “Bob” that we don’t all have this wonderful attitude.
Comment by Steve —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:50 am
Would it stimulate the economy more than just giving each food-stamp recipient money instead of food stamps?
Apparently yes, given the speed at which the additional money could be distributed. The Congressional Budget Office says that the two fastest ways to inject money into the economy are via food stamp increases and longer periods of unemployment benefits, because the systems are already in place for getting money into the hands of people almost immediately. This is a key point that I missed in my initial reading about this, but unlike McArdle, commenting about economic policy isn’t my job.
Comment by mctrollypants —
January 26, 2008 @ 9:02 am
But by far, their poor customer-base prefers what is mostly available there — chips, sweets, high-fat frozen meals & etc.
Oh, so poor people are responsible for their own bad health? That’s nice. But it’s different for you, because you’re a libertarian smart person! You can accept government assistance and complain about the form it comes in.
But possibly you support universal health care? Or are actually in favor of wads of cash being handed out to people who need it? If so, then then I don’t think you actually qualify as a libertarian, but perhaps you are not as hypocritical as you’re looking right now. If not, why is okay for you to accept a handout and bitch because it’s just fucking food?
< libertarian> High blood pressure, hmm. Don’t people get that from eating corn chips? Why should my tax dollars be spent treating the self-inflicted illnesses of strangers? </libertarian>
Comment by Cala —
January 26, 2008 @ 9:16 am
There just is no getting around the correlation with extreme poverty and obesity.
There’s also a correlation between extreme obesity and being middle class. The country is fat.
Mona, most of the nasty criticism of McArdle’s post (McMegan’s not intended as an insult, I think it might have been started by some of her RL liberal friends) stems from her offhand insults. Read her last line: even if the poor spend the cash on drugs, at least it means they won’t be getting ugh, fatter. To think that that counts as an argument for cash handouts is to have a very bizarre view of the situation (that obesity comes from poor people having too much money to spend on food.)that betrays a basic understanding of the situation. And if it’s not intended as an argument, then
it’s a cheap insult.
If McArdle doesn’t want people focusing on the cheap insults, she could try not putting them in.
Comment by Jackmormon —
January 26, 2008 @ 10:30 am
One thing that Bloomberg’s administration is doing is trying to expand the Green Market program to poorer neighborhoods and setting the vendors up to be able to take food stamps. I’m not sure how well it’s working, but it sounds like the right direction.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 26, 2008 @ 11:16 am
Cala, if you check the link I left for Mona, you’ll find several studies that do seem to show a correlation between poverty and obesity. It’s not that the other classes are in great shape, but that obesity does go up some as income falls – presumably for the sorts of reasons we’ve been kicking around about the practical availability or not of good food, taking in travel time, store selection, and all the rest, but nonetheless apparently real.
Comment by Nancy Lebovitz —
January 26, 2008 @ 11:40 am
There’s quite a bit of prejudice against fat people, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something to do with the number of poor fat people.
There are plenty of fat people who’ve gotten educations and good jobs (or in some cases, especially in IT, gotten good jobs without so much formal education), but prejudice can make a difference.
Comment by joe —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:21 pm
If the people on food stamps who buy cheap processed food because they get more calories for the buck are given the same amount in cash, they’ll buy better food?
Um…no.
Comment by yave begnet —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:26 pm
I agree with Bruce:
way too often it seems like campaigns to cut back on X because Y would be a genuine improvement end up cutting back on X and never getting to Y.
I was under the impression that food stamps exist instead of direct cash transfers because it is more politically feasible to hand out food rather than a wad of bills. Wasn’t that the dynamic underlying the 1996 Welfare Reform bill that eviscerated AFDC? Remember the “welfare queens” shtick? I think the voting public (prompted by our punditry) has decided it’s either food stamps or nothing. That’s why arguments to cut back food stamps from the same crowd that pushed through the 1996 act ring hollow to me.
Comment by joe —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:27 pm
But the fact is — and I’ve seen it myself — poor people on foodstamps overwhelmingly buy crap food.
There just is no getting around the correlation with extreme poverty and obesity.
There have been numerous studies of why this is. The reason is discussed in the very article McMegan links to – because produce and lean meats don’t have a lot of calories per dollar spent, and people on food stamps are on a limited budget.
And you both completely whiff on answering it.
“Hey, they’ll just buy more food, and they’re already fat!” is a sad, mean-spirited dodge.
Comment by joe —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:28 pm
Oh, btw, used to have programs that gave poor people cash, that they could spend on food, or medicine, or rent, at their own discretion.
Remind me, what were Megan McArdle and Mona saying about that at the time?
Comment by roger —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
If you want to argue that food stamps should be replaced with cash as something more than just an ideal point in the making of a utopia, you have to address the political reasons this hasn’t been done. That reason is pretty simple – a cash payment would surely make the whole program infinitely more vulnerable to repeal. We’ve already seen what the Republicans, supported by McCardle, have done to welfare. If she seriously wants to keep payments to the poor for purposes of food, she has to at least approach the problem on the political level – which is that cash payments would strip food stamps of their special nature, that compromise between helping the poor and regulating the poor. It is, admittedly, a second best solution – but if the first best solution comes at the political cost that it would, in all likelihood, be eliminated, it seems like the best solution to me. It is, in fact, an excellent example of the fact that models of efficiency are often unworkable in real social settings, because human being value efficiency only in relation to a whole set of other values. Pretending this isn’t so is what repulses me, often, from libertarian arguments.
My inference that food stamps work, politically, where grants of money don’t comes from the history of the program. It was the only welfare program I know of that was added to under Reagan and Bush I. It was even added to after the contract with America eliminated welfare as we know it. I would guess that these were not environments in which liberals ruled – rather, these were environments in which liberals were forced to compromise with right wing dominance of the political machinery. Cash payments earmarked for food, in such an atmosphere, would have gone under the chopper. I suspect McCardle would love to see them go under the chopper, and thus uses a philosophical objection with liberal assumptions – let’s treat the poor as adults! – to advance a far right agenda – let’s expose the last bit of welfare for the poor to extermination by the Republican party I support.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 26, 2008 @ 12:38 pm
Would it stimulate the economy more than just giving each food-stamp recipient money instead of food stamps?
Clothing and consumer electronic sales would boom.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 26, 2008 @ 1:25 pm
My inference that food stamps work, politically, where grants of money don’t comes from the history of the program.
That history is full of abuse, unfortunately. Most of the poor aren’t irresponsible or criminal, but a significant number are, and those who are honest are easy prey for criminals. Handing out liquid cash would be akin to putting blood and chum in the ocean. Sharks would show up increasing all sorts of pathologies and permanently turning anyone against the program.
If the poor need more money for food, increase the food allotment. Twenty-one dollars is slim. I’m sure costs are different from area to area, so I’m guessing that maybe $50 would do, but I’m not committed to that number.
Comment by Tony P. —
January 26, 2008 @ 1:36 pm
Did the “McMegan” thing start as an homage/parody of the screen name of Daily Kos contributor “mcjoan”?
Does the fact that we give poor people food stamps instead of cash represent left-wing nannyism, or RIGHT-wing nannyism?
– TP
Comment by Leonard —
January 26, 2008 @ 1:39 pm
$21 is what the Food Stamp Challenge website uses. But they don’t justify that number on their site. They do link to the USDA food stamp site. And there’s a FAQ. According to that FAQ, the maximum amount one can get in food stamps is $162 per month, that is, $37.4 per week. Not $21.
Which is not to say that the Challenge is wrong, just that it is quite misleading in implying that individual food stamp recipients have to eat on $21/week.
Comment by dhex —
January 26, 2008 @ 1:58 pm
re: greenmarkets in nyc
some of their stuff is pretty cheap and good. some is expensive and good. some is kinda junky, depending on the time of year. most of it is fresh. but i don’t know how far 30 something bucks would really get you unless you were willing to put time and effort into figuring out preparation modes (i.e. modular salads as meals).
there’s also prepared food vendors – mostly specialty food stuffs a la vegan brownies or giant wheat free cookies and the like. depending on your tolerance for the whole “organic” thing, they’re interesting places to buy string beans.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 26, 2008 @ 2:11 pm
Tony P: As is usual with anything done by any large institution, public or private, the food stamp program is the outcome of the collision of a variety of interests, plus institutional imperatives, plus haphazardry. The answer is therefore “some of all of the above”. There are details, of course, but that’s a starting point.
Comment by Leonard —
January 26, 2008 @ 2:13 pm
A cash program would have the big downside of allowing all of the stupidest and most self-destructive poor do stupid and self-destructive things on the taxpayer’s dime. There’s a reason food stamps can’t be spent on alcohol.
My suggestion above was only partly tongue-in-cheek. I think we should get rid of welfare altogether. That’s where I was not serious. Of course, there’s a lot of other things that we should have a much higher priority on abolishing (like, say, promiscuous warfare, most of the standing military, Federal involvement in education,…). Also I think that we should free the economy in several ways before we abolish public welfare, because we need jobs for as many people as is reasonable, and we need private welfare to fill the remaining gap.
But if we are to have food stamps, or other welfare, I do think we should target it according to our desires, not those of the recipients. They are accepting our charity; beggars can’t be choosers. If it offends the demos that poor people are getting fat off our charity, then we need to consider that. And if it offends the demos that poor people are not shopping “correctly”, buying the things we think they should want, then we should consider that, too.
Certainly the technology exists now to control on a per-item basis which items a food stamp is allowed to buy. There’s no reason I can think of to allow the poor to buy ice cream on my nickle. If they really want ice cream so badly, let them exert themselves to get off our welfare.
As for handing out money, I do not agree with many other libertarians in that handing out cash as the only means of welfare is a good idea. It would be great if everyone was homo economus, assuming we build in sufficient theft-control measures. But we’re not robotic consumers, we’re evolved animals. Cash handouts would work well for many, probably most poor people. But not all, not for a fairly sizable minority. And that minority, who would spend a month’s cash in a party week, on weed or alcohol or crack, or on a new big-screen TV, then once again come around for a handout — are we going to let them starve, freeze, and live in the streets? No, we are not. And will they be used against all the others, delegitimizing the program amongst the demos? Yes, they will.
Now, if we really wanted to fine tune a welfare program, then we’d give each poor person the benefit of the doubt, and hand out cash to em for welfare until ey proves, via coming around again before the next month, that ey cannot live on it. That’s when you go all nanny-state on em and force em into the food-stamp program.
Comment by joe —
January 26, 2008 @ 2:21 pm
The farmer’s market (ohnoes!) in my city is located in a public park (ohnoes!) JFK Plaza (ohnoes!), next to City Hall, a couple blocks from two sizeable public housing projects (ohnoes!), and it accepts “Food Stamps.”(ohnoes!)
Yeah, it’s a libertarian’s worst nightmare. But you see poor people buying vegetable there.
Comment by Derek Copold —
January 26, 2008 @ 3:39 pm
Leonard, $162/person/mo is attainable, if you have ready access to a grocery store. In some neighborhoods, you really can’t get the best bargain because of the expense of setting up shop. I don’t know a fix to this other than adjusting for area or–less desirably–have the government get into the grocery business in some areas.
Comment by Mona —
January 26, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
Mona’s meta-Answer:
First, yes, I have more than a high school education. An advanced degree actually, yet have never been close to wealthy and was on food stamps recently because of severe health problems. The fact remains, however, that obesity strongly correlates with poverty, as well as lack of education.
Second, that poor people preponderantly go to stores catering to their cohort and use foodstamps to buy: Cheetos, chips ‘n dip, loaded frozen pizzas, Ding-Dongs, and a sack of Mars Candy Bars doesn’t mean they are stupid or worthless. But many abide in a culture whose tastes are conditioned to prefer such garbage in the extreme.
Third, I love sushi; it is my favorite food and quite healthful. It can be homemade on foodstamps; I’ve done it.
Fourth, yes, my last amount was $162 per mo. I didn’t need that. Among other things, there are food pantries, and I eat at my adult son’s from time to time. But the GAS to get there was a serious problem — 8 miles away. Bartering food stamps for the gas $ was, however, considered fraud.
Comment by mctrollypants —
January 26, 2008 @ 7:22 pm
Once again I have to ask why you are complaining. It’s not as if you earned those food stamps. Why should you expect public charity to be unconditional any more than the private kind? When you and your pal Leonard have your way, people with severe health problems will be entirely dependent on the kindness of private individuals, who won’t be too concerned if you find the gruel thin, I expect.
Comment by dhex —
January 26, 2008 @ 7:22 pm
we’ll see what happens if the city starts giving out more cash to greenmarket vendors to set up shop in other areas. (maybe those with less train access, i.e. a lot of brooklyn)
my guess is that they probably won’t do that well.
Yeah, it’s a libertarian’s worst nightmare. But you see poor people buying vegetable there.
joe, if you start a band you should call it “joe spencer smug explosion.”
Comment by roger —
January 26, 2008 @ 8:47 pm
I think Mona earned the food stamps by being born.
I do find it sorta comic how people on the right are busy figuring out how the poor can get by on small amounts of money cooking rice and seaweed and stuff. I think this advice is perfect for CEOs, too. I figure that if, as in a just society, their marginal tax rates were raised up to 50, 60 percent, still they might just squeeze enough money out to be able to go out to dinner maybe once a week. Otherwise, of course, many of them would be left to barely survive on … oh, what, 100,000 per day? 200,000? That’s pretty tough. But I bet they could make it, skimping on lunches, while they innovated away on the financial markets as they have done so beautifully over the last seven years, confident of course that the Fed has their back covered.
Comment by Mona —
January 26, 2008 @ 9:08 pm
Conditional v. unconditional is not my argument. And I’m not so much complaining as simply noting that McArdle is correct.
But, I fvcking worked and paid taxes for many years, including into those programs. That’s how I earned them.
Many (not all) of DHS workers are idiots and treat one like shit. It is an inhuman, over-burdened and stupid system, with paid idiots required to implement Kafkaesque laws and regulations.
Comment by Sean —
January 26, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
Your argument hasn’t advanced much in a day, Mona.
There are several studies (one by the CBO, others by various think tanks) showing that expanding food stamps is THE single most efficient way of delivering an immediate economic stimulus. If you think those studies are wrong, then the burden is on you to show that they’re wrong.
McArdle’s point (and I meant no offense by calling her McMegan — I thought that is her hip nickname in the blogosphere) that we should give poor people money as stimulus instead is (i) plain wrong because of the time it would take to arrange for and deliver cash payments; and (ii) facetious because we all know that what she is really implying is that you shouldn’t direct the stimulus through the poor because they will just by drugs or fattening foods with the money (they’re too stupid to make good decisions, don’t ‘cha know…).
This is choosing ideology and bias over empirical evidence and good economics. It’s wrong, it’s ugly, and it’s mean.
‘Nuff said.
Comment by Doctor Memory —
January 26, 2008 @ 11:08 pm
This thread has wandered a bit and I’m coming in late, but I can’t really let this pass:
I’m sorry, but cry me a river. If Megan’s enjoyment (or anyone else’s) of her increasingly well-remunerated sinecures at some of the most respected publications in the English-speaking world is occasionally diminished by some strong language from people annoyed by her inability to do even the most basic research on the subjects she’s speaking on, there is a simple solution: take another job, ideally one that does not put her writing into the public eye.
Or, I suppose, she could start actually doing the research… but now we enter into the realm of speculative fiction.
With regard to McArdle’s alleged point: if anything, her critics are too kind. Forty years of bipartisan collusion with agribusiness has made corn syrup the most cost-efficient calorie source in the country for two generations, and so the food stamp program is now a danger to the poor’s physical and moral integrity? That isn’t merely “incorrect”, that’s a full-fledged flight from history into fantasy. But for “Jane Galt”, that’s pretty much par for the course.
Comment by Barry —
January 27, 2008 @ 8:14 am
I second that; I was going to write something similar (but not nearly as well written).
Megan has been a superficical fullash*t twit since the beginning of her blogging days. Because her superficiality and BS is useful for the elites of this country, she’s now well paid for it.
That doesn’t make her any more right, and she hasn’t used the opportunity of being a professional, and not having a day job, to do a better job.
Comment by dhex —
January 27, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
it’s always the elites pulling the strings, isn’t it.
damn elite string pullers.
Comment by Mona —
January 27, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
Nonsense. My state already delivers cash assistance to the poor — via the same card used for food stamp assistance (they are not “stamps” anymore). But to qualify for the former is far more difficult. There need be no slowing down an “economic stimulus” by delivering only cash; the process to do that is already in place. And in any event, I do not care, for my own purposes, about “stimulating” the economy. What mattered to me was that I was food rich but going without other commodities I urgently needed.
And McArdle is right that poor people are disproportionately obese. That is an empirical fact. Some unknown number of them will choose to use cash assistance on alcohol, booze and drugs — but some already barter food stamp value for those anyway, even tho it is considered fraud.
Sometimes, Sean, the truth is ugly.
Comment by MMGood —
January 29, 2008 @ 4:53 pm
But the question is, can this “empirical fact” be tied to food stamps. And the evidence is–not anymore: