Josh Hawley, a senator who calls himself a “Republican”, in the New York Times:
Millions of Americans rely on food assistance just to get by. The program often known as food stamps — officially it’s now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — is a lifeline that permits the needy to purchase basic food items at the grocery store. Last year, SNAP enrollees hit about 42 million. That’s over 12 percent of the American population.
We’re informed that low-skill migrants make America rich. America has never been richer in migrants (CIS):
We’re informed that government spending on poverty relief reduces the number of poor people. The federal government spends more than $100 billion per year of workers’ (chumps’) tax dollars on SNAP. How much larger was the group of helpless government-dependent Americans 25 years ago before the most recent $trillions had been spent on SNAP? According to the USDA, the number of food stamp-dependent Americans in 2000 was… 17 million:
In other words, in the past 25 years the number of Americans who’ve become dependent on food welfare exceeds the population of Taiwan (23 million), where all of the world’s highest-tech integrated circuits and bicycles are made. The Google says that while we managed to grow our food-welfare-dependent population by more than 2X, TSMC grew its market value from $40 billion to over $1 trillion.
(Note that the 42 million Americans who are enrolled in SNAP/EBT shouldn’t be taken as an estimate of the number of Americans receiving what used to be called “welfare”. There are about 78 million Americans currently on Medicaid, for example. Maybe the discrepancy is that a multi-member welfare household shows up just once for SNAP and multiple times for Medicaid? Or some people getting taxpayer-funded food are getting it via programs with other names (see chart below)?)
Inflation-adjusted spending seems to have grown by about 14X since 1970 (USDA):
I have no doubt there is a lot of fraud in Medicaid. I got put on it just for visiting a Virginia Medicaid site when I was searching for Medicare information. It was very hard to get off of it. I spent hours on the phone, for months, and everyone I talked to was incompetent and gave different answers. And most basically said don’t worry about it, just don’t use it. (Wrong answer!) Finally I had to go downtown and talk to people, and I won’t have to tell you how slow and terrible the service was in that building. Many were shocked that I was trying to get off. They had never before heard this request. They told me it was far better than Medicare so just keep it. This year they are trying to put me back on again. So I am sure there are many wealthy people on Medicaid.
They look at income only. I make little income because I am retired and spending no money and so selling no investments and therefore taking no profits. Banks are like this as well. My friend’s super rich retired father could not get a credit card because he has little actual income.
Thanks, Mike, for a beautiful story! A friend who lived in a $2 million house (back in the pre-Biden period when $2 million was real money) and had substantial tech and venture capital investments ended up on Medicaid for himself and his family because the Maskachusetts Obamacare portal didn’t ask about assets (he answered every question truthfully). He paid $3/month for Medicaid for himself, his wife, and two kids. He said that it was far more usable than Blue Cross, for which he’d been paying close to $30,000/year. Every provider accepted Medicaid (“MassHealth”). There were no deductibles or copays. It was awesome! Sadly, however, eventually the wife wanted to move out of Maskachusetts so they had to give this up.
I’m happy for you personally Mike: you lead a charmed life and apparently are a miracle worker:
> I am retired and spending no money
My financial advisor keeps telling me I’m going to need 2X my current salary in retirement just to keep up with hyper-inflated property tax, eggs, and adult diapers–property tax burden is becoming a key weight for where to retire for me. And Obamacare, what a heap of expensive, poorly thought-out, compromised, passive-aggressive, and partially-socialized medicine–all to pay for a doctor who can’t or won’t help me. I’ll take free crappy Medicare, thank you, when I’m 65. I guess I’m misinformed, but I thought you had to drain your assets before getting on Medicaid, maybe that is just for a nursing home.
> My friend’s super rich retired father could not get a credit card because he has little actual income.
He probably is super rich because he didn’t have a credit card, circularly. Maybe it will stop raining this week, and I can go back to working outside instead of reading horror-stories like this on the Internet. 🕸️🕷️🎃👻
Phil (he asked completely innocently and scratching his head) I keep hearing Democratic messaging that immigrants aren’t receiving food stamps (nearly impossible to defraud that way) and most of the citizens who are on Oh SNAP! are employed–surely they wouldn’t mislead us middle-class chumps? I heard that very message on The Formerly Government Subsidized NPR just today. Eagerly awaiting insight.
But, nah, I’m really wondering why the neo-liberals were in such a hurry to offshore my highly paid tech job in the mid-90s. Nobody was interested in my innovative on-shore chip ideas during the Biden administration which promised an onshore chip renaissance (ditto Obama/manufacturing). Don’t my taxes from higher income pay for their Machiavellian schemes, and don’t they want me (chump #1) to succeed? Curiouser and curiouser. We do seem to be living in a live production of “Alice in Wonderland”. 🕳️🐇 It could be worse, though, I could have been stuck in Jamaica today.
Phil, I’m often a bit slow on the uptake, but your post here has me really baffled as to why this situation has developed (17 to 42!). Hoping you could apply your advanced degrees and learnings from MIT to explain it to me in a way my simple mind can grasp?
@DA
I don’t look down upon you because you went to a 3rd choice safety-school like Rutgers for a J.D., Lizzy W. You’re not dumb–girl power, you got this. Read the title again carefully:
> Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today
What word seems dissonant (hint, it’s a comparative)? Did they teach you formal number theory during your undergrad years at George Washington U.? Is 17 greater than 42 or less? Now read this quote:
> We’re informed that government spending on poverty relief reduces the number of poor people.
(Phil really needs to get scary quotes on “informed”.) Maybe law students aren’t allowed to study satire, but sometimes it can be achieved by juxtapositioning seemingly contradictory ideas in a “matter of fact” way. Got it now? Doesn’t it seem like someone in the government or their propaganda arm is fibbing?
For extra credit, prove that the growth in the blue bars is exponential:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_growth
from 1970 to 2025, which is what I see when I look at that graph.
I gained confidence and learnings [sic] by printing one of these out on an 8-pin dot matrix printer while on a break from my job pressure-washing driveways for $1000 each, and filling in my name with orange crayon (itself kinda impressive for a parrot), on the wall in a $2 Wal*Mart picture frame:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_of_Philosophy#/media/File:Columbia_University_PhD.jpg
Saved $1.5M in tuition, fees, and housing. Today I pretended my Ph.D. is in propositional logic. My thesis advisor kept saying, “brevity, brevity, brevity” after readings, however a parrot can’t change his feathers.
@DA,
Interestingly, I wanted to see if SlopGPT was any smarter than you, Smart Ass, in celebration of nVidia’s $5T market capitalization today (go Team A.I.!). I fed in Phil’s post here, and it missed the fact that 17 to 42 isn’t a reduction–until I gently prodded into seeing it. It did however make up a bunch of fake comments and analyze them on its own. (“Oh, you’re right I am full of crap, I don’t have access to the comments.”) Finally it called-out Phil’s hypocrisy for buying $60/lb. steak at Costco in his “Steakflation” post then begrudging immigrants (allegedly) their Oh SNAP! benefits to buy giant crab legs and jumbo shrimp at $100/lb.:
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2023/04/11/steakflation-60-per-pound-at-costco/
All for now. I have a pounding post-reality headache. No pressure-washing work today because of continued weather.
Mr. Parrot, thank you so much for awarding me a J.D. I am not sure exactly what that is, but I am incredibly appreciative. I was a bit confused by your mathematics and number theory lessons, but never mind. I found even more reasons to be appreciative when I read that you have also awarded me the moniker Lizzy W. I asked my AI assistant (Scam Altman) to tell me what that means and he told me it is the name of a Great Senator descendant of the great Cunne Shote. Wow! I feel like I won the lottery today. Sadly, no word back from our Great friend Phil on who has cooked up all these food stamps (and why?).
@DA (and not philg)
> no word back from our Great Friend Phil
I don’t know where he is, maybe debriefing his family about all the misinformation they might have accidentally ingested on their Grand Tour of DC museums? Or getting some customers’ driveways pressure-washed, because it was sunny in Florida today? He might be reassigning the #’cl: operators in his Common Lisp REPL back to their original semantics after writing this article, IDK.
I believe in my heart ♡ that Phil really wants us to think for ourselves, perhaps he’s watching us do that right now and nodding approval. For example, today I learned that I am the Father of the Internet and the Father of A.I. Vibe Coding. The Smithsonian Museum of Art considers Henrietta Lacks to be the “Mother of Modern Medicine” because Evil Big Pharma harvested her tumor cells without her permission, and used them to save many lives–and not someone like Elizabeth Blackwell, American physician, abolitionist, and women’s rights activist. (Even in their woke world, Lizzy B. makes more sense.)
So, by their logic since Google harvests my personal Internet data and Microsoft A.I. harvests my open source Lisp code *without my consent*, well I’m the baby daddy of a couple of big technologies myself. Not Phil, as previously thought.
https://wayback.archive-it.org/3340/20231024143515/https://americanhistory.si.edu/discovery-and-revelation/what-do-we-owe-each-other
If Phil had kept holding my hand and thinking for me, do you think I would be able to reason like that? Hell to the no. I would just be another faceless modern person with species identity dysphoria and a pressure-washer.
Godspeed Lizzy W., become the baby momma of the Progress of your dreams! Bye now.
DA: It might be as simple as “you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize”!
@philg
> “you get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize”
Pithy and more dopamine-friendly for the Internet. However, still contains a mathematical contradiction. Hint: think reefer, alcohol, gasoline, tobacco. Did you assign both #’cl: to #’cl:= by mistake? But you’re right, throw ’em a 1 liner and blog on.
PP: Econ 101 works for all of the items that you mention.
“Increases in cigarette prices and taxes are significantly associated with a reduction in smoking prevalence and an increased likelihood of quitting smoking among adults across different demographic and socioeconomic groups. However, as cigarette price and tax changes disproportionately affect low-income individuals, raising cigarette prices and taxes may deepen income disparities” — https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-022-13242-5 (curiously, the same article says “Cigarette price and tax changes were likely to have a smaller effect on individuals with annual income under $25,000 relative to individuals with higher income levels.”)
“we investigate the effects of a large excise tax increase that raised alcohol prices. The results show that heavy drinkers reduce purchases, and this reduction is no different than the reductions by other drinkers. The results also show that only low-income drinkers pay more for ethanol after the tax increase.” https://www.nber.org/papers/w30097
“Our analysis shows that a 5-cent tax increase reduces gasoline consumption by 1.3 percent in the short-run,
much larger than that from a 5-cent increase in the tax-exclusive gasoline price”, from a top Racism League university: https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/mrcbg/files/MRCBG_FWP_2012_02-Muehlegger_Gasoline.pdf
(The above-cited studies suggest that low-income Americans would spend 100 percent of their income on alcohol and cigarettes if taxes on those items were raised sufficiently, but I wonder if this result is an artifact of the cradle-to-grave welfare state that the U.S. runs. A low-income American may have taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food (SNAP/EBT), and phone (Lifeline/Obamaphone). The “safety net” covers at least 78 million people (latest Medicaid enrollment number).)
@Dumb Ass
> who has cooked up all these food stamps (and why?)
I know Phil and I are moving away from your latest question. So, who do YOU think has cooked up food stamps, and why? Hint: whose blog are you reading?
While we’re slinging studies (not sure about the quality, or Phil’s–NBER? Pfff, Harvard-trained MIT economists.) [1] says, here is an answer to this latest question:
Growing evidence suggests that pocketbook considerations influence voting behavior in the United States and other developed countries and that incumbents can use targeted government benefits to win voter support. It remains unclear whether the general relationship between government spending and incumbent support also holds for means-tested welfare programs, however. I contribute to this empirical literature by taking advantage of the decade-long rollout of the American Food Stamp Program. The staggered timing of local program implementation allows me to credibly estimate the causal effect of this new benefit on election outcomes. Overall, I find that Democrats—at the center of the program’s enacting coalition—gained votes when the program was implemented locally, apparently through mobilization of new supporters rather than the conversion of political opponents.
So, Dumb Ass, the answer is: Democrats cooked up food stamps to get into office and stay there.
@philg
In the Withering Ivy League, I noticed many young people taking up smoking, drinking, and toking to cope with the artificially-generated stress. Their bottomless trust funds paid for it by and large, so I’m not sure they even noticed the price–purely inelastic demand. Marijuana is taxed at 51% in Michigan, and Ann Arbor has its own weather from the permanent weedsmoke cloud over it, rich and poor, very egalitarian (that means the doctrine of equality for mankind, Dumb Ass, FYI).
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/708914?journalCode=jop