triknighted doth protest too much, methinks. It was a joke, albeit one at your expense. But I’m beginning to think I might have nailed it by accident. I don’t care what race you are. For all I know, you could be a self-hating black. But as I said, you are protesting just a little too much.
What red herrings?
My goodness, you can’t possibly be this ignorant. You originally said to Clayton:
As Clayton pointed out, watermelon is not shit food. I assumed that you actually knew that, and that you were not really talking about shit food. The first two words you listed are commonly known to be stereotypes of black people. So, since watermelon is clearly not shit food, it seemed pretty clear that you were purposely listing stereotypes. I went on to say that you forgot to list “corn bread”, another stereotype of black people. Do you need a source for this nonsense? Okay, here is a quote from an article about Hermain Cain:
So, where did I dodge your question? You asked what was I insinuating, and I responded. I was insinuating that you are a bigot and had simply forgotten to list a third stereotypical food of black people, and that you had only listed two. And of the two you listed, you claimed watermelon was shit food. I mean, come on, are you really this dumb?
Here in Missouri we also have WIC (women infants children) which is another food-stamp like program but I think it’s only for single mothers and you only get the food approved by WIC.
Most notably to me is that there are only two approved baby formulas: Enfamil and Similac. Not coincidentally, the grocery store I work at only sells these two brands of crazy-expensive baby formula. Almost no person can afford these on their own, and here’s WIC to save the day!
This seems like a case of cartelization, a newcomer in the formula market couldn’t possibly compete with free, allowing the WIC favored-companies to keep the retail price high, pushing more people into the WIC program. Vicious cycle.
In my opinion you are discounting the amount of bartering that goes on with food stamps. They are really a currency of their own in low income neighborhoods, usually worth 50c to the dollar. I have some extra food stamps and I need some cigs/weed/cds/gas etc etc etc… I trade you my food stamps for cash. This is pretty widespread actually.
Quite the opposite, I’m partly relying on this fact to make my case: sooner or later those foodstamps must all be redeemed for food. Looking at how John Doe rearranges his household budget as a consequence of receiving food stamps is immaterial to the larger question of whether food consumption will increase - if John Doe does not increase his own food consumption, then he will trade his leftover food stamps to someone else who will increase theirs.
I think the confusion arises between these two propositions:
Food stamps cause obesity
If you use food stamps, you will become obese
The second proposition is clearly false but does not imply the falsity of the first proposition, which is a statement about a population not about an individual.
No, you are still wrong. Let’s say I spend $500 a month on groceries, without food stamps. The govt comes along and offers me $400 in food stamps. Now, I only have to spend $100 of my own cash in addition to the foodstamps in order to get the same amount of groceries. In other words, I can spend all of my food stamps without spending more on food!
I’m not saying that food stamps don’t boost demand for food at all – I’m arguing against your logic that it must. The only cases where food stamps would necessarily increase demand is where the amount given out in food stamps is more than what would have been spent on groceries otherwise. And as Laotzu points out, this is still denying the fact that they can be bartered.
Let’s say the government spent $1B on direct subsidy to grocery retailers - just outright gave $1B to Safeway, Albertson’s, etc.
Would that increase, decrease or have no effect on consumption of food? Well, logic dictates that it would increase consumption as it would lower prices.
Now, instead of giving $1B directly to grocery retailers, let’s say the government created $1B in “grocery stamps” and handed them out by lottery in small denominations (say, $5-$10). Because everyone’s food budget exceeds the small amounts of the lottery, it is guaranteed that all of the stamps will be redeemed. Logically, this is nearly indistinguishable from the first case because the stamps must be redeemed at the grocers to be of value, The distinction between the stamps and outright subsidy is that the stamps divide consumers into two groups who feel opposite effects from the stamps. The lottery winners feel a decreased price of food and, thus, as a group, their consumption is increased. The lottery losers feel an increased price of food. Unlike an outright subsidy (which the grocers feel as a reduced cost of business), the stamps appear to grocers as an increase in demand, thus causing prices to rise.
What is different with food stamps from the hypothetical grocery stamps is that they are not distributed randomly (primarily to low income people who have a different schedule of wants from foodstuffs, namely, they consume more unhealthy foods than people with higher incomes) and the “lottery winners” receive substantial amounts of money rather than a token $5 or $10. But because the food stamps can be bartered, they will still ultimately end up in the pockets of the grocers no matter how many hands they change or what they are bartered for on their way home. The fact that the food stamps are not randomly distributed is important - in the case of random grocery stamps, we might speculate that the increased demand on the part of lottery winners will be offset by a concomitant decrease in demand in response to the rising price of groceries by lottery losers. But in the case of food stamps, this is definitely not true - the food budgets of those who do not receive food stamps (middle class) are by definition less sensitive to price changes than those who receive food stamps (low income).
Food stamps are naught but a food industry/grocery retail subsidy that is laundered through the hands of low income people on the way. The net effect of the subsidy is an increase in consumption of food (thus increased retail grocery prices). In terms of health effects, the increase in obesity is completely predictable. Yet the NYT and the Atlantic Monthly will continue wringing their collectivist hands in collectivist puzzlement at the inexorable increase in Americans’ waistlines even as welfare of all forms reaches ever unprecedented heights. Go figure.
This makes sense. It did seem you were proposing the latter. My apologies for misunderstanding you.
I’m not sure that obesity is really a problem in low-income communities tho, and would like to see some data. In my experience (personal anectdote, and so irrelevant) obesity is more of a middle income problem. When I drive around the ghettos in my area, I see a lot of skinny (and quite muscular) people. Again, this is personal anectdote, and could just be because obese people don’t go outside much (which could also be the major cause of their obesity).
Data data data. We can get nowhere without it.
@Laotzu: Yes, I would definitely be interested in a study on the correlation between absolute welfare levels and obesity - specifically, such a study would need to look at:
Obesity increase trend versus food stamp subsidy trend - do they correlate?
If so, how do they correlate in neighboring jurisdictions (similar culture) with opposite policies, i.e. county/state A increases welfare while county/state B decreases welfare… what happens to obesity in each county/state?
Confounding variables I can think of: heritability of the tendency to obesity (this might confound inter-generational trends), other income correlations with obesity (as you mentioned, it is possible that obesity is positively correlated with income generally), and so on.
While data is important, I want to note that the government and its buddies in the food and grocery industries do not have the moral prerogative to put the burden-of-proof on opponents of food stamps … “Show your data, or else the program is justified.” I see this verbal jujutsu in my company all the time. When management wants to bury an initiative without outright killing it, they all of a sudden start chiming “where’s the data? we need data that proves this is a positive ROI initiatve”… and when they want some initiative to go ahead, asking for data is treated like betraying the company’s core objectives. “We all need to be on the same page, here… you can’t get the data until you’ve PoC’d anyway and this initiative is in line with the company’s core objectives. We’ll look at the data in the project post-mortem.”
If the government spends $1B on food stamps, it doesn’t necessarily follow that grocery stores receive a single dollar more than they would have otherwise. The reason why, is because individuals who receive stamps were still buying groceries before, and that previous grocery budget can now be shifted away from food. Food stamps are as good as cash because they essentially free up cash which was normally budgeted for food.
If I gave you $100 to spend a week only on food, and you continue to buy the same things you did before, what happens when you balance your checkbook? You suddenly have $100 more in your checking account to spend on anything you want!
But you’re missing the point that the government has just corralled $1B that previously could have been redeemed for anything and decreed that it can only be redeemed for groceries. In order to flow back into the regular state of being redeemable for anything, those stamps must first go through the hands of a grocer.
Let’s push it to the extreme to see the point.
Scenario #1: Government randomly burns half of all dollars in existence. In this case, the value of the remaining dollars would roughly double but then, as Hume pointed out, on balance, nothing would really change.
Scenario #2: Government randomly seizes half of all dollars in existence and randomly gives them to retail grocers. In this case, the price of groceries would plummet as grocers scurry to outcompete each other and attract more customers with their gigantic sums of cash. Food consumption would soar as food prices plummet. Ironically, food production would also soar as the flood of new cash into the food industry signals a false demand. This is very similar to the business cycle situation created by inflation, just limited to a single industry.
Scenario #3: Government randomly converts half of all dollars in existence into food stamps. In this case, the value of the remaining dollars would go up but not as much as in Scenario #1. The half of dollars converted to food stamps would still be redeemable for groceries. The grocer can then exchange the stamps with the government for dollars.
The half of dollars which have been converted into food stamps have to pass through the hands of a grocer in order to become dollars again. Demand for groceries would soar. It doesn’t matter if people were selling them at 25 cents on the dollar to go buy a new TV, the half of all dollars that have been converted to food stamps are now only redeemable for groceries. The economic effects would be indistinguishable from Scenario #2 except that food prices would rise rather than fall. Consumers would consume more groceries (since groceries are “cheaper” than other goods, with the food stamps) and food production would also soar.
Go back and think about it again - the government waves a wand and half the dollars in your bank account have been converted to food stamps. Now what do you do? Doesn’t matter whether you buy groceries or barter them away for something else, more groceries will get bought than when we all had dollars that could be exchanged for anything.
Okay. Lets say the City of Baltimore takes in $1B in tax revenue and hands this out directly in the form of food stamps. All tax payers are now collectively poorer by $1B, and all food stamp recipients are now collectively richer (in the form of food alone) by $1B.
If we look only at the tax payer side, we see $1B going (eventually) to the grocers, in addition to the normal amount that taxpayers spend on food. When you look at the food stamp recipients side, you $1B going to the grocers (in the form of food stamps) instead of $1B in cash, not in addition. The food stamp recipients are $1B richer in cash because they shifted that cash away from groceries and towards whatever else they want. As a whole, its a total wash. Its no different than directly transfering $1B in cash from one side to the other.
Now, like I’ve said, this is assuming that the food stamps is equal to or less than the amount they would have spent on groceries otherwise. If its more than that, then yes, demand for food has increased. But that’s an empirical point that you need to make, not a praxeological one.
But this isn’t whats going on. Sure, if everyone was suddenly forced to spend half of their entire bank account on food, that would most definitely increase demand for food – no one would deny that.
Your whole argument rests on the assumption that more money is being handed out in the form of food stamps than what would have been previously spent on food. You have to prove this though. If we aren’t going to look over the actual data on this, I think my assumption is much more realistic – that the amount handed out in food stamps (as a whole) is less than or equal to what would have been spent on food otherwise. The reason why, is becuase most people are not starving to death and they spend money on food before most other goods.
