THIS is an insightful piece on the cuts to SNAP (food stamps) in the Farm Bill passed on Tuesday 4FEB14 outlining not only the harm that is being done to the 6th of our population dependent on SNAP, but the new humiliation and degradation they will suffer when applying for the program, and societies willingness to believe the least among us are the worst among us. I wish people in this Christian nation had a more charitable, Christian attitude about the social safety net and those who benefit from it. I also wish people would open their ears and eyes and realize that our nation's corporate welfare policies are more corrupt, more unjust and not subject to review and justification because of a well managed propaganda campaign funded by corporate America and the rich and powerful who feel they are entitled to tax cuts and subsidies at the expense of the rest of us. This is actually a "negative income tax" for the 1%. Austerity economics will be the destruction of the middle class and (literally) the death of some of our most needy fellow Americans. This is not what a Christian nation should look like. From the Washington Post and Bleeding Heart Libertarians....
Under
the new farm bill:
USDA will need to ensure that illegal immigrants, lottery
winners, college students and the dead cannot receive food stamps and
that people cannot collect benefits in multiple states.
I’m sure that some of those exclusions (lottery winners, the dead)
will seem unobjectionable to many readers, and the others (college
students, illegal immigrants) will seem unobjectionable to a smaller
subset of readers. However,
in an insightful post, Jacob Levy argues
that freedom-loving people should be skeptical of the new exclusions —
even if they are hostile to food stamps in the first place:
A lot of people a lot of the time underestimate how
burdensome, onerous, and intrusive complicated bureaucratic rules and
regulations are. . . .
I think this is a case in which our biases between groups we like and groups we don’t is especially strong. We are
mainly honest competent adults trying our best to do what we’re
supposed to do, and they keep getting in our way with these insulting
burdensome rules; they don’t take seriously the cost to our time and
energy of having to prove compliance constantly, both by paperwork and
by subordination to the administrative officials who monitor all of us
in order to detect wrongdoing by a tiny few. You are basically
suspect characters to begin with, and if we let you get away with it
you’d all be running wild, and the other ways you were going to spend
your time we don’t really like anyways, and we’re dubious enough about
you that monitoring you closely is a good idea anyway even if some of
you aren’t technically violating the rules, and the moral cost of even
one of you getting away with this terrible thing is so great that we
simply have to prevent it, and anyway what are you complaining about, if
you obey the rules like you supposed to, there’s no harm to you. . . .
And so poor people will be subjected to another set of forms, another
set of inspections, another set of surveillance and monitoring, another
set of insults, another risk of false findings of guilt, for trivial
financial savings. Someone gets to posture as having zero tolerance for
some unacceptable outcome; that’s what the zero tolerance policies are
for. And life for a sixth of the country’s population gets worse, more
unfree, more subject to the burdens and intrusions of micromanaging
regulation.
It’s worth reading the
whole thing.
Levy also observes that this is another good reason for Milton
Friedman’s proposal that we replace our ad hoc poverty programs with a
“negative income tax,” which would just give the poor money (using our
existing bureaucratic apparatus) and let them to decide what to do with
it.
A lot of people a lot of the time
underestimate how burdensome, onerous, and intrusive complicated
bureaucratic rules and regulations are. They casually treat the only
cost of a rule as the cost to bad people of not doing whatever the rule
prohibits, which isn’t a cost at all. But in order to have effect,
rules have to be enforced; efforts have to be made to detect violations
and monitor performance on an ongoing basis. This is a burden on the
whole class subject to the rule, not only those who were going to break
it. They have to devote themselves, at some margin, not to the thing
they’re actually trying to do, but to proving that they’re not doing it
in the prohibited way. They have to prove it through paperwork, which
either they’re inexpert in compared to the official reviewing it or they
have to (expensively) hire professionals to handle; and even people who
had no intention of violating the underlying rule are put in perpetual
jeopardy of wrongdoing-by-paperwork-mistake. They have to prove it in
person to the various spot inspectors, administrative auditors, and
other bureaucrats put in charge of monitoring and detection; and even
people who had no intention of violating the underlying rule are made to
feel like perpetual suspects or distrusted children instead of honest
trustworthy adults.
I think that everyone recognizes this about themselves and groups to
which they’re sympathetic. Politically we associate this kind of talk
with business owners and managers complaining about government
regulation, and that’s not a class to which academics are (as an overall
pattern) especially warmly inclined– but goodness knows that academics
understand these dynamics when it comes to the administrative
micromanagement of our own professional lives. Time that we should be
spending researching or teaching is instead spent asking for permission
to do so, by humbly seeking to prove ourselves innocent of all sorts of
potential malfeasance. No, I didn’t buy a glass of wine with that grant
money. No, I haven’t given an in-class exam during the two weeks before
finals. No, my study of Plato does not involve potential harm to human
subjects or laboratory animals. No, I haven’t made up publications to
include on my CV for my performance review. Yes, here’s the proof in
triplicate.
I think this is a case in which our biases between groups we like and groups we don’t is especially strong.
We
are mainly honest competent adults trying our best to do what we’re
supposed to do, and they keep getting in our way with these insulting
burdensome rules; they don’t take seriously the cost to our time and
energy of having to prove compliance constantly, both by paperwork and
by subordination to the administrative officials who monitor all of us
in order to detect wrongdoing by a tiny few.
You are basically
suspect characters to begin with, and if we let you get away with it
you’d all be running wild, and the other ways you were going to spend
your time we don’t really like anyways, and we’re dubious enough about
you that monitoring you closely is a good idea anyway even if some of
you aren’t technically violating the rules, and the moral cost of even
one of you getting away with this terrible thing is so great that we
simply
have to prevent it, and anyway what are you complaining about, if you obey the rules like you supposed to, there’s no harm to you.
The point being, the new farm bill:
USDA will need to ensure that illegal immigrants, lottery winners,
college students and the dead cannot receive food stamps and that people
cannot collect benefits in multiple states.
Let’s start with the easy case: lottery winners. Let’s be wildly
implausibly generous and say that there are five big-money winners per
state per week. (Not all states offer lotteries, some lotteries are
combined across states, some states offer multiple games, and not all
lotteries pay out every week; but only “big money,” since presumably no
one thinks that the $10 or $100 payout should affect eligibility.) 250
per week; about 12,000 per year. Say that half of those people were on
food stamps to begin with (lottery players are disproportionately poor).
Say that a third of those winners were inclined to cheat and keep
drawing food stamps for which they’re no longer income-eligible, and to
keep doing so for the whole year until their income is assessed again;
2000 would-be cheaters. Food stamps for a family of four max out at
about $600 per month. So we’re looking at something like $14 million
per year total in fraud prevented, if we can manage to detect 2000
would-be cheaters from a population of 47 million food stamp recipients.
Even the financial costs of any detection and enforcement mechanism
serious enough to even try to get these false negatives (people who
aren’t caught and thrown out of SNAP) down to 0 will be high; it
wouldn’t surprise me for those costs alone to exceed $14 million (and I
don’t for a second believe there will be $14 million in savings). As
conservatives
know when it comes to business, environmental, and
health regulation, trying to turn one-in-20,000 events to 0-in-20,000
events is hard and expensive and complicated. Moreover (and as they
also know) it generates errors in the other direction. “Zero-tolerance”
policies are a plague on the American political and legal climate right
now. The effort to make sure that no American child ever brings a
narcotic or firearm to school is doomed to fail to begin with, and also
results in stupid expulsions of children carrying aspirin or squirt
guns. What we have here isn’t a new substantive rule (big-money lottery
winners are already income-inelgiible for SNAP) but a zero-tolerance
mindset applied to the existing rule, an effort to move from
trivially-few to zero offenses; and innocent people will get caught in
the net. (Something
everyone could stand to remember: the lower
frequency an offense is, the worse the ratio is likely to be between the
false negatives you’re trying to prevent and the false positives you’re
going to create.)
On top of all that: the process of proving one’s innocence all the
time is a demoralizing, degrading one that subjects you to inspection,
supervision, paperwork, and the will and whim of the enforcers. How can
states ensure that
no one is collecting food stamps for a dead
household member? The answer has to involve paperwork and bureaucratic
supervision or in-person monitoring by social workers or, in all
likelihood, both. Illegal immigrants? Well, by definition they already
lead a life of evading some kinds of bureaucratic surveillance. There’s
no way to squeeze them our of the system harder without squeezing
everyone else, too. (In a related vein, think of the proposals for drug
testing as a condition of receiving welfare. That’s a lot of
degradation to put a lot of non-drug-using people through for the sake,
not of
saving money (the cost of enforcement in this case is
clearly higher than the money saved), but for the sake of a
zero-tolerance regulatory insistence about welfare recipients not using
drugs.)
And so poor people will be subjected to another set of forms, another
set of inspections, another set of surveillance and monitoring, another
set of insults, another risk of false findings of guilt, for trivial
financial savings. Someone gets to posture as having zero tolerance for
some unacceptable outcome; that’s what the zero tolerance policies are
for. And life for a sixth of the country’s population gets worse, more
unfree, more subject to the burdens and intrusions of micromanaging
regulation.
This kind of thing is, famously, among Milton Friedman’s reasons for
advocating a negative income tax in place of the complex array of
partial-coverage welfare policies in America. (It’s also among the
reasons called upon today by supporters of basic income guarantees.) I
think Friedman understood, not only that regulations are
administratively expensive to enforce, but that they’re also sources of
unfreedom
for the many people who don’t violate them. And the
effort to make sure that income support only ever goes to the deserving
poor however conceived, to regulate their behavior to stop them from
doing whatever it is the undeserving do,
is regulation, and
requires the same costs, sacrifices, and burdens regulation always
requires. The bureaucratic state that governs poor people (or would-be
immigrants) is the same bureaucratic state that governs taxpayers and
businesses and people holding bank accounts and people travelling in
airplanes and so on. The arguments about regulation’s costs for the
latter groups are good arguments! But they’re arguments that it’s
wicked to selectively forget when it comes to regulating the former
groups.
A few of our readers here will say: well, food stamps are already
theft, so the people receiving them are already not innocent, so they
have nothing to complain about. I’m not here defending the existence of
food stamps (though neither are the Republicans making the principled
argument against them.) For reasons I discussed
here,
I think that once states exist they just do act redistributively and
that there’s sound responsible reason for them to do so in a way that
staves off disastrous material deprivation (e.g. hunger). The new food
stamp regulations tilt me some little bit closer toward the negative
income tax/ basic income guarantee strategies for how that should be
organized. For those who don’t share my views about this, I’ll say: you
probably also oppose the existence of public schools. I’ll bet that
you
additionally recognize the stupidity, indignity, costliness,
and loss of freedom involved in the wave of zero-tolerance regulations
within them. If so, extend the thought here: as long as the state is
doing this thing, it ought to do so in a way that is more rather than
less compatible with Hayek’s rule of law, with freedom from supervision
and surveillance by the bureaucracy, with the ability to get on with
living their lives rather than having to waste them proving their
innocence.
Update:
Since a couple of people have pointed this out in this context, I’ll link it here:
Milton Friedman argues with William F. Buckley on these questions.
And one more:
This is neither an argument against regulation as such, nor limited to cases of
state
regulation. Bureaucratization is part of the iron cage and we’re stuck
with it, across a variety of institutional settings. But there are
very important questions of degree when it comes to monitoring,
compliance, and enforcement, and costs associated with the whole
enterprise that don’t go away when shifting from a regulated class one
likes to a regulated class one doesn’t…
http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2014/02/an-argument-about-regulation/
This is not Paul Allen.
Gee, where could we come up with some of the money need to replace
that food stamp funding that was lost this week? Maybe from these people who are
all collecting farm subsidies?
- Paul Allen (Net worth: $15.8 billion)
Co-founder of Microsoft
- Charles Ergen (Net worth: $12.5 billion)
Co-founder of DISH Network
- Philip Anschutz (Net worth: $10 billion)
Owner of Anschutz Entertainment Group and co-founder of Major League Soccer
- Leonard Lauder (Net worth: $7.6 billion)
Son of Estee Lauder and former CEO of the Estee Lauder Companies Inc.
- Richard DeVos (Net worth: $6.8 billion)
Co-founder of Amway and Republican candidate for governor of Michigan in 2006
- Jim Kennedy (Net worth: $6.7 billion)
Chairman of Cox Enterprises
- S. Truett Cathy (Net worth: $6 billion)
Founder of Chick-fil-A [...]
And
many, many more.
That's a list composed by the Environmental Working Group, using
their database of farm subsidy recipients compared to Forbes 400 list of
the country's richest people. Between 1995 and 2012, these 50
people—who have have a collective net worth of $316 billion—received
$11.3 million in farm subsidy payments. They've probably have even
received more in crop insurance payments, but we don't know because the
law doesn't allow prohibits the disclosure of the identities of crop
insurance policyholders.
While a congressional conference committee meets to decide if they're
going to cut $40 billion (House bill) or $10 billion (Senate bill) from
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, they are probably
going to give billionaires even more!
[P]roposed changes adopted in both the House and Senate
versions of the bill will likely allow these billionaires to bank
millions more in premium subsidies. Both bills would shift subsidies
from programs currently subject to means testing to the more generous
crop insurance program. Unlike traditional farm subsidies, crop
insurance premium subsidies are not currently subject to means testing,
payment limits or conservation requirements.
In 2008, Congress created a means test
that was designed to deny some subsidies to individuals with annual
off-farm income of more than $500,000. The year before, Bloomberg News
published a report highlighting some of the billionaires who had been
receiving subsidies. But, lawmakers specifically declined to apply it to
crop insurance, which has become the primary government support for
farm business income.
The system is already skewed for, of course, the largest one percent of
farm businesses. They received about $227,000 a year in crop insurance
premium support in 2011, according to EWG's analysis from USDA data.
Meanwhile, the bottom 80 percent of farmers received only about $5,000
apiece.
There is no reason on earth taxpayers should be subsidizing what are
already nothing more than tax write-offs for the nation's wealthiest
people. And we particularly should not be subsidizing them when millions
are in danger of going hungry because the austerity fetishists in
Congress think they're getting too much food.
Originally posted to Joan McCarter on Thu Nov 07, 2013 at 09:09 AM PST.
Also republished by
Daily Kos.
