All posts by Thomas L. Knapp

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Purpose versus Excuse: Why Congress Might Buy Trump’s Food Stamp Reform Plan

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English: Logo of the .
English: Logo of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Politico reports that the Trump administration wants to partially replace “food stamps” with “a box of government-picked, nonperishable foods every month.” Under the plan, recipients of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which these days are delivered as debit card balances rather than as physical coupons — “stamps” — would receive about half as much money to buy food with. The other half would be replaced by the “America’s Harvest Box,” stuffed with “100 percent U.S. grown and produced food” such as shelf-stable milk and canned goods.

From the initial response, one might expect this plan to go nowhere. Its cost-cutting benefits are debatable (the US Department of Agriculture says it would save $129 billion over ten years, but they’re not including the cost of actually delivering the food). Grocers oppose it for the obvious reason that it would reduce the amount of money flowing through their cash registers. Smaller-government types point out that it would entail a bigger USDA and that families are better judges of their own food needs than some box-packing bureaucrats.

But it still might pass. Why? Because the purpose of “food stamps” is not what most people think it is.

What is that purpose?

No, it’s not to feed the poor. That’s a happy side effect and a convenient excuse.

The real purpose of the program is to justify welfare checks to Big Agriculture.

That’s where the program came from, starting during the New Deal, when US Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace proposed it as a bridge across “a gorge, with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other.”

That’s why low-income households received “government cheese” in the 1980s when the federal government got caught warehousing enormous quantities of dairy products it bought for the purpose of propping up milk prices.

And that’s why SNAP remains the largest appropriation line in the “Farm Bill” that Congress passes every five years (the 2014 Farm Bill dedicated $756 billion to “food stamps and nutrition”).

Good arguments against Trump’s proposal notwithstanding, the “America’s Harvest Box” would serve the program’s true purpose well in one particular respect:

It would let government direct money to specific farm welfare queens in a way that can’t happen if SNAP recipients can buy whatever they want to eat using the debit card.

If the dairy industry is the squeaky wheel this week, more milk and cheese goes into the box. Next week maybe it’s more cereal because the grain farmers hired a sharper lobbyist. And the week after that, more canned beef stew or ham after those industries make smartly targeted campaign contributions.

Yes, the whole thing has to be sold pursuant to the excuse, and it will be. The box will deliver more balanced nutrition than people are inclined to buy for themselves, and more food at less cost to the taxpayers. And so on.

All of which may be true, but the decision, as always, will be made in favor of special interest groups with more clout than the hungry.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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No Voting Rights for Felons: Unfair, Anti-Democratic, and, Yes, “Nonsensical”

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RGBStock.com Vote Pencil

In late January, US District Judge Mark Walker struck down Florida’s rules for restoring the voting rights of former convicts, finding those rules not just unconstitutional (on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds) but “nonsensical.”

Why nonsensical? Because “disenfranchised citizens must kowtow before a panel of high-level government officials over which Florida’s governor has absolute veto authority. ”

If a panel of  appointed bureaucrats (or the governor) doesn’t like you, you don’t get to vote. Maybe they don’t believe you’ve truly “reformed.” Maybe they don’t like your perceived partisan affiliation. Maybe they just don’t like your skin color.

In fact, the system would be “nonsensical” even if it didn’t leave the decision in the hands of partisan hacks. If the Declaration of Independence is to be taken even a little bit seriously, that system is completely out of line with American values.

Only four states  (Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, and Virginia) fail to automatically restore the vote to convicts at the ends of their sentences. Maine, Vermont, and the US territory of Puerto Rico don’t just restore voting rights at end of sentence — they allow prisoners to vote.

The Declaration of Independence lays out a clear bottom line standard for the legitimacy of government: The consent of the governed.

We could argue about what consent really means, but where democracy is the form of government, the vote is traditionally deemed the instrument of that consent, and in America expanding the franchise — to former slaves, then to women, then to all citizens down to the age of 18 — has been the trend for 150 years.

Prisoners are certainly “governed,” and to a far greater degree than most of us. They live in cages. They’re told when to get up, when to go to sleep, and what to do in between, with draconian punishments for disobedience.  Once their sentences are completed, they’ve supposedly “paid their debt to society” (would that our justice system emphasized restitution to real victims rather than the myth that “society” is or can be owed anything, but that’s a subject for another column). On what grounds can former — or, for that matter, current — be legitimately forbidden the vote if “consent of the governed” is truly the standard and the vote is truly its expression?

Florida’s existing voters will have an opportunity this November to pass a constitutional amendment ending their state’s “nonsensical” system and restoring voting rights automatically to felons who complete their sentences.

That’s a good first step.

Next, how about a federal voting rights suit on behalf of  all those who are governed but forbidden the legal ability to supposedly consent?

And, finally, how about a dramatic reduction in the scope and severity of government power that we supposedly consent TO?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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A Korean Spring after the Winter Olympics is Unlikely. Here’s Why.

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Korean War armistice agreement 1953
UN delegate Lieut. Gen. William K. Harrison, Jr. (seated left), and Korean People’s Army and Chinese People’s Volunteers delegate Gen. Nam Il (seated right) signing the Korean War armistice agreement at P’anmunjŏm, Korea, July 27, 1953. [U.S. Department of Defense (F. Kazukaitis. U.S. Navy); via Wikipedia]
 

Peace between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) the the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) suddenly seems closer than ever as the 2018 Winter Olympics open in Pyeongchang on February 9. The North is contributing athletes to a bi-national team with the South, and also sending a delegation that includes its head of state (Kim Yong Nam) and the first ever official visitor to the South from its ruling dynasty (Kim Yo Jong, sister of Kim Jong Un).

The two Koreas have been in “ceasefire,” but still formally at war and with occasional outbreaks of violence, since 1953. Could this Olympic thaw result in permanently improved relations, a peace treaty, perhaps even reunification?

Don’t get your hopes up. Many powerful forces are  predisposed against such an outcome. All of those forces can be summed up in one word: Inertia. After seven decades, any status quo is difficult to shatter.

In the North, continued rule by the Kim family and its Workers’ Party depends largely on positioning the regime as guardians against an external threat posed by the South and by the US military presence along the ceasefire line. Reunification under any circumstance, peaceful or otherwise, would result in the end of that regime, because …

… The South’s population is twice that of the North, its GDP 50 times as large. They’re not going to peacefully submit to rule by the North’s government. Even if the North could militarily conquer the South’s territory, it would be assimilated by, not assimilate, that larger and wealthier  population.

The South’s government, on the other hand, has seen what happens when a larger, wealthier state welcomes back a still comparatively large, but much poorer, population. Reunified Germany (West Germany’s population as of reunification in 1990 was 78 million, East Germany’s 16 million) is still dealing with the economic, cultural, and political fallout nearly two decades later. And like the North’s, the South’s government has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because tens of thousands of US troops, and lots and lots of money, subsidize the South’s defense costs and artificially boost its economy.

The US government, in turn, is happy with that situation because it’s part of American government’s raisson d’etre since World War Two, which is to perpetually funnel wealth from the pockets of American workers into the bank accounts and budgets of the military industrial complex in the name of “defense.”

As for the Chinese government, it regards North Korea as a “buffer zone” keeping those US troops far away from its border (the last time US forces neared the Yalu River, China intervened and drove them back to the 38th Parallel, resulting in the current stalemate).

Some of those players are going to have to make bigger moves to break the ice.

A good start would be for the US to notify South Korea’s Moon Jae-In of a date certain — say, five years — for complete US military withdrawal from the Korean peninsula. But that would threaten the bloated US “defense” budget. So don’t bet on it.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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