Tag Archives: SNAP

Economics, Education, Governance, Politics 2020, Representation, Responsibility

THE BIG ENVELOPE

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North Carolina Senator Richard Burr coincidentally sold most of his stock portfolio after a closed hearing on COVID-19.

The big envelope arrived the other day, from the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is not a committee that tries to solve problems for the Prudent and concerned citizenry, but a campaign committee that tries to solve problems for politicians.  And, while it certainly has that right, Prudence dictates that recipients are just as permitted to scoff at it and withhold requested funding… or send in the funding to the degree that the needs of politicians may, momentarily, coincide with one’s own.

The questions were off-putting.  Did the carefully chosen recipient think that the Democrats would work with President Trump to improve things for the American people?  The options were Yes, No, and Not Sure.  At the very end of the over-sized questionnaire the committee provided a space for “Comments.”  Except, they didn’t really want very many of those.  Prudence tried to compose two sentences that could impart the folly of the questions and the implied policies they hinted at, to no avail.  It could fill a whole blog post.

Unfortunately, in this recipient’s view, even President Trump, ostensible leader of the organization that spawned the aforementioned Committee, is barely trying – or able – to shift the course of Socialism that has infected our Constitutional system of individual liberty.  None of the questions even hinted at the underlying, fundamental corrosion of our potential and promise, so it didn’t seem Prudent to answer any of them.  Most Americans are inured to the essential Socialism we live with, even as it washes out our national foundations, nor do we recognize the socialist nature of hundreds of federal and state programs.  The Left has dragged the debate firmly onto its spongy, swampy, turf, yet we still appear befuddled in the few debates there actually are.  Where is all this socialism?

The federal and state budgets are replete with it.  “How can that be?” you ask.  “We don’t like socialism in this country!”  That’s what WE think.

Since 1946 the federal government has provided subsidized free and reduced-cost lunches to school-age children… millions of them.  Most recent statistics indicate that some 30 Million children receive breakfast AND lunch in public schools.  Here and there late-afternoon meals are also served.  Where are the parents?  Obviously so tied up with important tasks that they are unable to feed their own children. 

Obviously, no one can bear the thought of hungry children trying to learn on empty stomachs; we must feed them.  At the risk of sounding cruel, one is prompted to ask what the SNAP program is accomplishing if it fails to make sure that children receive nutrition from its benefits?  Are there no sanctions on parents who fail the test of the most basic parental responsibilities?  Feeding your own child?  Apparently not, and not needed.  The federal government has provided much of that function so that parents need not be bothered.  Everyone is happy.  Socialism:  identity linked to a certain group spurs unique attentions from a central governing body, frequently economic attentions – positive or negative.

What about the most basic socialist program: Social Security?  Begun as a simple, partial support for those too old to work, Social Security has become an ostensible retirement program as well as a source of “off-budget” revenues for our erstwhile budget-masters in the Congress.  Indeed, there they were: some dollars they couldn’t obtain cheaply enough on the open bond markets, and they didn’t actually steal  them.  They placed bona fide I. O. U.’s in the form of United States bonds in the imaginary “lock box” of which existence taxpayers were repeatedly assured.  In a way, the moneys collected on behalf of future retirees WERE stolen, another of the inevitable actions of socialists for whom ANY source of revenue may be justified for the good of all.

Social Security, long in surplus, was too sweet a piggy-bank when the “need” to provide for the mentally “disabled,” especially children, and for a host of others deemed disabled under the ADA, including alcoholics and other addicts.  Now, in answer to another prayer to who knows who, for more revenue for the common weal, we have THC emporiums springing up from coast to coast, often enriching former socialist office-holders, and which can allay the disabling anxiety of the developmentally coddled.  There will be less crime, now, and happier sheeple, ahhmmn… voters.  Gambling wasn’t expanding its contributions to the common good quite rapidly enough.  Prostitution is always waiting in the sheets, as it were, with added revenues needed for “education” and “infrastructure.”

Another clue to our socialist underpinnings is the $23 Trillion-dollar debt hanging over us, all.  The centuries-old result of socialism is running out of other people’s money.  Socialism is based on collectivist action, governing by group identity rather than having power derived from individual rights and actions… and responsibilities, the source of business-generated productive surplus and innovation.  Socialism is a system of diffusing responsibility, and once in that mindset it is a small step to borrow today’s comforts, ahh… crucial needs, from future taxpayers.  Politicians are especially comforted by the prospect of buying votes with the greatest “other people’s money” ever conceived: “borrowing” from 3 generations in the future.  Talk about diffusing responsibility.

Into this dishonest mess has dropped Covid-19, facilitating the wet dreams of socialists everywhere: “universal” health… ahh, well, not care, exactly, but universal RULES that are backed not by law but by police – best of all.  And these aren’t rules for hygiene; these rules are destroying the economy, individual businesses of every size, jobs, household economies, availability of goods, including food, paper goods and all the cleaning and disinfecting products that are needed to render every body antiseptically pristine.  All it costs are hundreds of billions of lost business and tax revenue, plus a few inalienable rights, like the entire Bill of Rights.  In one swell foop our governments have rendered virtually EVERYONE dependent on government, and otherwise rational and independent men and women are willing to argue angrily for following every new restriction on rights and commerce, out of fear.

Meanwhile, the largest bailout/stimulus/stock-buyback program in the world is being polished up by the 535 people on Capitol Hill who can benefit the most from it.  Don’t you sometimes wonder how Representatives and Senators become multi-millionaires while sacrificing for us in “public service?”  Insider trading is a good way.  Let’s hope that what they finally shove down Pennsylvania Avenue is actually the right prescription for our suddenly sick economy.  Could happen.

The third person in line of succession to the presidency, Nancy Pelosi, doing her level best to help Americans in this time of shared stress and fear, tried to slip a loophole into the emergency “stimulus” legislation that would have enabled federal funds to pay for abortions, which is currently illegal.  She has her priorities; most of the rest of the people in the United States have theirs.  One could look back to 1973 when a shadowy “law” was discovered in the fog and abortion became “constitutionally” protected, and wonder if the termination of 61,000,000 Americans was simply not enough to have prevented COVID-19.  Maybe speeding up and expanding the death of our future will have a net positive effect.

Fortunately, every college graduate over the past 40 years has NOT been a communications, marketing or art major, and the latest iteration of “coronavirus” will be solved and resolved by very smart and accomplished people.  The problems of the hog-tied economy will not be so readily set aright.  It was shaky prior to the flood of unprecedented federal and state dictates, becoming, both because of and in spite of the booming financial markets, more and more unbalanced.  The ultra-rich were becoming ultra RICHER; a smaller middle-class of small and medium businesses were doing better; the vast majority of small businesses were struggling against the globalization of contracts and ownerships that remove thousands of previously independent enterprises from the competitive, free-enterprise marketplace.  A large fraction of the population were simply watching the growth of the rest of the economy, while experiencing little of the new wealth.  This model is common as socialism matures in the societies that have suffered under it.  A small group becomes very much more comfortable – and powerful – than everyone else, the middle class is reduced to homogeneity, the helpless low-producers are eventually eliminated or relegated.

Right now we are required, under stronger and stronger sanctions, to place our trust in a pyramid of government strata, populated by smiling politicians who have made careers out of deceiving Americans.  Let’s hope this crisis has shocked them into utter veracity, now.  That could happen, too; we’ll ignore the deceptive insider trading.  It’s nothing new.

Economics, Governance

Borrowing for Welfare?

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Nearly every day there is some article or letter in the newspapers that decries the fact that the United States’ “defense” budget is larger than the next 7 nations’ defense budgets, combined. Moreover, that “bloated” defense budget could be reduced significantly so that the “savings” can be used to feed the hungry and house the homeless right here in our own country, for Heaven’s sake.

None of these heartfelt concerns is based on the right perspectives or even the right data. That’s the trouble with statistics.

For example, 65% of fiscal 2017’s Federal Budget is committed to entitlements, pensions, health-care and education. From a Constitutional standpoint, most of that 65% is not the business of the federal government, whereas defense, now 16% of the budget, categorically IS.

Years ago welfare was strictly local… and recipients were a little ashamed of having to ask for it. Many, your grandparents or great-grandparents, and many of your parents, would do the most menial jobs to AVOID being on welfare and to get “off” of it as quickly as possible. Children learned this reaction and revulsion. Welfare was a handout when you needed it, as temporarily as possible.

Soon after World War II, though, states took over welfare from cities and towns, mainly under pressure from cities, which were buckling under the northward migration of blacks from the deep south. Almost immediately, states began prevailing on Washington to take the burden off of their backs. After all, weren’t the new Northerners crossing state lines because of “national” conditions in the economy?

After 13 years of the “New Deal,” we could have seen where this was going. There were votes to be gained in the impassioned cries for better – federal – welfare: codified compassion.

Truman blazed integration trails, Eisenhower enforced anti-segregation in schools, Kennedy hemmed and hawed but crawled toward full integration and voting rights legislation, Johnson, riding a wave of sympathy for his murdered predecessor, got civil rights legislation done, and then carried on further to create some wildly expensive – reckless – new “rights”: federal, unaccountable, politically charged, easily defrauded, vote-attractive welfare.

Smartly, though, Johnson couched the new largesse to which people were now entitled – not ashamed-of, in wonderfully sympathetic terms and names. Names like: Aid for Dependent Children (AFDC), Women, Infants and Children (WIC), Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, ie. Food Stamps), Pell Grants (free college), Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), Rental Voucher Program (Section 8), Federal National Mortgage Administration (“Fannie-Mae”), Child Nutrition (School lunch, breakfast, dinner!), Head Start (very, very expensive day-care), Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), and, the granddaddy of them all: MEDICAID.

Current spending on these and more than ONE HUNDRED other federal “anti-poverty” programs (who could be PRO-poverty?) is nearly 900 BILLION dollars. That means that our virtually bankrupt federal government is BORROWING money to provide welfare.
Well, say unionized federal social workers and sympathizers, our defense budget is larger than the next 7 nations’ combined, let’s cut that, first!

Except… it isn’t.

When China, for example, builds sand islands in the South China Sea, and puts military airstrips and naval “bases” on them, and claims 200-mile territorial waters around these extensions of “China,” it’s not a military expenditure, but something else. For example.

When Russia directs a manufacturer to produce engines for new IRBM’s and ICBM’s, they aren’t military expenditures – they’re developments in space exploration. All peaceful. And subterranean military bunkers for both armament manufacture and survival are certainly construction projects… and expensive, but military? Not so you’d know.

And no other country carries the degree of personnel costs and benefits that are packed into the “Defense” budget of the United States. Simple ledger numbers are not comparable with other nations’ budgets.

Actually, under the Obama administration, defense has been cut a few times. One of his first steps was to fold tens of billions of retirement costs into the Defense Department budget. Logically, the cost of military retirements should not be measured as part of the Pentagon’s war-fighting / force-projection budget, should they? They certainly don’t threaten anyone but us.

Next, Obama forced the Congress into the “sequester” process, of which a large fraction of restrictions were imposed on defense – to be “fair.” Big cuts.

Finally, he walked out of Iraq, abandoning the very bloody, very costly gains we had made there. We are now paying to regain what had been won. His frothy, fraudulent Iran anti-nuclear “agreement” (cunningly not a treaty), will cost us many billions going forward – billions that need not have been spent had there been a different foreign policy.

The new president sees significant weakness that exists now or very shortly will, as normal refitting and reconditioning of hardware takes larger and larger fractions of critical military systems out of service. Warplanes are becoming antiques as our most experienced pilots are retiring; it is our phenomenal pilots who keep last-generation fighters useful in their 30th year of service. Now our latest fighter platform is too expensive to buy enough of!

If anyone thinks that McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried chicken are going to convince our potential enemies to not work – and fight – to destroy us, it is time for him or her to wake up. Maybe unrestricted immigration will make everybody love one another, but so far it is weakening the “West” and confusing our Constitutional rights with national suicide.

Race

RACE? AGAIN?

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Prudence says that America needs some fresh thinking about race.  Anthropologists can “describe” some 300 “races” using markers like blood-type concentrations, in a process that tries to use physiology to delineate human “types” or races.  It is largely a waste of time for most people since it cannot relate social activities, social actions, with physiological differences.

RACE is a construct for both safety and control within societies.. except, lately, a construct for hatred.  The most visual markers are employed – like skin, facial distinctions, hair, eye-color… virtually meaningless attributes in terms of how people ACT, but crucial when differing groups come together.  No training or understanding is required to distinguish physiognomy.  That is a matter of belief.

Prudence has thought long about the power and dangers of belief.  It can exist and guide the actions of millions of people without paying any heed to reality… to truth.  Just as faith is the engine for maintaining religious traditions, there are many other belief structures to which individuals can adhere that effectively replace reality with constructed, believed paths of action that guide whole lifetimes.  Belief can be so self-fulfilling that it becomes its own evidence of “truth.”  It’s commonplace.

Less common is honesty.  An honest person can be taught the error of his or her beliefs and it is this very effect that has held the United States together through slavery, Manifest Destiny, the Civil War, destruction of Native American culture, waves of immigration and the Great Depression.  Beliefs have changed, honing more closely to reality little by little… until the 1960’s.

It was under the aegis of “The Great Society” that we changed the role of government to one of, essentially, social engineering – unionized social services that Lyndon Johnson and other hubris-laden socialists believed could change the nature of both rich and poor people for the better.  Change has certainly happened.

Blacks, who were making sure, but uneven progress in the 1950’s, have regressed in the inner cities where federal and state policies have re-enslaved them for 3 generations.  Why such conditions continue, even as the drug trade flourishes in that population, seems a great mystery to progressives.  It must be the fault of Republicans.  Our incoming president has mentioned conditions in the inner cities, but no policy changes have been described.

It’s all a matter of belief.  Progressives have long held the belief that the most generous “safety-net” possible, especially now that welfare has been federalized, will cause people WE have taught to be irresponsible for themselves, to become responsible, self-sufficient citizens.  We have placed them in a system where the only way to “get a raise,” requires careful cheating – things like getting two EBT cards or SNAP allowances beyond one’s entitlement.  Or, to sell some drugs, perhaps.  There should be no surprise that blacks hate whites.  They believe that whites have kept them from opportunity, that we discriminate in a thousand ways, that we are racists and on and on.  Some of it is true.  But the policies that have done so are not those of most whites, who feel guilty about black’s condition, and who act a little nutty because of their guilt; they are the policies of progressives who believe socialism will make better humans than God has… despite all reality to the contrary.

One might infer that Prudence indicates that progressives may not be truly honest, else they could learn the error of their beliefs, lo these past 50 years.