Category: subsidy

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subsidy tax policy

Oh, SNAP!

junk food, SNAP, welfare, food stamps, RFK, health

It appears that recipients of “food stamps” (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) “often have lower diet quality and higher rates of diet-​related health issues compared to non-​participants,” according to an article in healthjournalism​.org. 

“While it’s unclear whether SNAP directly causes these outcomes or if other factors are at play, some argue that the program, at minimum, sustains unhealthy eating habits by not restricting purchases of nutritionally poor foods.”

Among the “some” who argue for restrictions is Robert Kennedy, Jr., head of Health and Human Services. He promises to purge unhealthy foods from the subsidy list.

Currently, the taxpayer-​funded “benefit” may “be used for ‘any food or food product intended for human consumption,’ except alcohol, tobacco and hot foods, including those prepared for immediate consumption. Critics argue that SNAP’s allowance for purchasing sugary snacks, soda and junk food promotes unhealthy eating habits, which can lead to obesity and other related health issues.”

The critics are undoubtedly correct; indeed, the proposed limitations will almost certainly be too tame. 

If the program must exist, it should do good without enabling demonstrable harm. So instead of a cumbersome and extensive list of prohibited food items, there should be a concise list of allowed categories:

  • uncooked meats and dairy products without added sugars
  • fresh, frozen, dried, and canned beans, fruits and vegetables
  • staple ingredients of traditional meals, such as flour, spices, and oils

Some rail against any idea of restricted benefits, but government handouts are not there to expand the “freedoms” of the poor; they are provided to help folks weather hard times. 

The freedoms of taxpayers have already been sacrificed for their sake. Forcing taxpayers to watch SNAP’s EBT card users in the grocery line buying candy and sodas adds insult to the benefactors while injuring the beneficiaries.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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regulation subsidy too much government

Flood and Fire

electric vehicle, electric car, hybrid, engineering, freedom

Tesla, the maker of some of the most popular, eye-​catching, and prestige electric vehicles of our time, offers advice to folks who may experience “submersion events” with their automobiles. The company “recommends moving EVs to higher ground ahead of potential” unholy baptisms and warns owners to keep a safe distance as well as notify “first responders if one notices ‘fire, smoke, audible popping/​hissing or heating coming from your vehicle,’” summarizes The Epoch Times.

This is sparked, I’m sorry to say (and pun) by hurricane victims in Florida, at least six of whom had their houses catch fire after their electric vehicles caught fire after their vehicles were submerged in water. Florida’s chief financial officer and fire marshal Jimmy Patronis put the number higher, at 16, of burning “EVs in the Tampa Bay area alone, including Pinellas County.”

“So far.”

When it floods, it burns.

“The governor had warned EV owners in Florida to get their vehicles to higher ground ahead of Helene’s arrival,” explains Jacob Burg, in the above-​mentioned Epoch Times piece, “as contact with saltwater can short-​circuit the batteries, causing a catastrophic chain reaction known as thermal runaway in which heat energy is released from the battery to cause a fire.”

I’ve been seeing quite a few reports that EVs don’t do well in extreme conditions. The cold, for one, where the batteries don’t work properly, and the heat, for another, when they can too easily catch fire. And now this “submersion” menace.

Electric vehicles sure do appear to demonstrate a technology still in its infancy. 

One the government shouldn’t be pushing on us.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies subsidy tax policy

Kamala Hood

Kamala Harris, crony corporations, green, taxes, spending, welfare

American politics is largely devoted to the grand task of taking from some and giving to others, a sort of Robin Hood mania that has nothing to do with giving back to taxpayers what was taken from taxpayers (as in the legend) — or doing much of anything for the poor — but, instead, to ostentatiously give to some and quietly take from as many people as possible.

Nevertheless, that giving is not always ostentatious. Sometimes it is surreptitious. 

Or at least not ballyhooed.

Kamala Harris has taken up an old Democratic Party stalking point: soak the rich! Though she tries not to mention just how much money she and her fellow Biden Administration insiders have been giving to a few big corporations.

“Despite Harris’ rhetoric of fighting for the middle class,” writes Jack Salmon at Reason, “her policies have disproportionately benefited the wealthy and large corporations while leaving middle- and lower-​income Americans behind. Far from soaking the rich, Harris’ legacy has been one of feeding them.”

Corporate subsidies have “exploded,” explains Mr. Salmon, going from a ten-​year budget allocation of $1.2 trillion in 2021 to now surpassing $2 trillion.

Nearly doubled!

“The beneficiaries of this largesse are extremely concentrated,” Salmon notes, most of it going to “just 15 large corporations, seven of which are foreign.” Of course, a lot of this is under cover of “saving the planet” and fighting “climate change”: “Wind turbine manufacturers like General Electric, Vestas, and Siemens/​Gamesa — who collectively produce 79 percent of all turbines — are among the biggest winners.”

Robbing from the few and giving to the many makes neither for good mathematics or a winning political strategy. Robbing from the many and giving to the few is what usually works. But if your appeal is to “the left,” you have to pretend to grab most from the super-​rich few.

Your pals.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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national politics & policies regulation subsidy too much government

Stay Puft America

FDA, regulations, food, rules, diet, fads

“It was perhaps just a matter of time before issues of health — not policies over health-​care provision but actual human health — would enter into our politics,” surmises Jeffrey A. Tucker in The Epoch Times. “We look at pictures of people in cities or at the beach in the 1970s and compare them with today and the results are shocking. We have changed as people and for the worse.”

Jeff Tucker is trying to explain the background for a big policy-​interest shift, as a result of the Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., endorsement of Donald J. Trump. Kennedy’s big issue is health, and Trump’s gone along with it, willing to make it a part of his agenda.

In “How Did Health Become a Political Issue?” Tucker focuses first on the COVID debacle, moving on to the real culprit: government.

Or, technically, government and industry, combined into one huge Stay Puft Marshmallow of Destruction. For behind our changing eating patterns and food habits are government tariffs, subsidies, researchstrategies, diet crazes, and much, much more. 

Perhaps even bigger than Big Pharma is Big Agribiz, a conglomerate of companies pushing lab-​created additives and worse on a trusting public, or, as Tucker puts it, “many decades of heavy government subsidies for the worst food, and so much in the way of corn, soy, and wheat are produced that we’ve invented new ways to use it.”

But it’s not really “we’ve.” The Standard American Diet (SAD) wouldn’t have existed were it not for the USDA and the FDA and a whole alphabet soup of bureaus captured by the industries they were assigned to regulate, working together in a Big Biz/​Gov partnership to create a Big Problem in the general population.

Somehow, though, when asked about the government causes of SAD, RFKj said he wouldn’t abolish anything. He merely wants “better regulations.”

Someone needs a fast …from Big Government.

That someone? Kennedy. 

And America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Common Sense national politics & policies regulation subsidy

Electric Class Warfare

Star Trek, electric car, gas car, regulations, climate

Star Trek may have adversely affected American politics. Its techno-​communist utopian militarism was one thing, its attitude towards engineering? Perhaps worse.

In how many episodes did Captain Kirk demand that Scotty push the warp drives further, or decrease the time required for a task — arbitrarily according to his need, not actual possibility?

And, because television: presto, it was done; just in time for the finale!

We see that in the push for electric vehicles (EVs). 

The EV mandates, explains The Epoch Times, “will likely cause a sizable wealth transfer from rural red regions of the United States to urban blue sections, and to wealthy Democrats who reside in them.…”

For while Democrats say they’re trying to “save the planet” from an increase in atmospheric carbon, really, analyst Robert Bryce counters, “it’s a type of class warfare that will prevent low- and middle-​income consumers from being able to afford new cars.”

How? The EPA’s new “rules are the strictest in history and will effectively force carmakers to have one-​third of new car sales be plug-​in EVs by 2027 and more than two-​thirds by 2032.” But according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “as much as $48,000 of the cost of the average EV sold in the United States is paid not by the owner but in the form of ‘socialized costs’ that are spread out among taxpayers and electricity consumers over a 10-​year period.”

So the new rules will reduce the supply of gas-​powered vehicles, driving up costs. And the increased number of already-​subsidized vehicles will also be paid by taxpayers at large, while the benefits go to … mostly Democrats in the bluest counties of the bluest states, as statistics show.

In recent years, Democrats have prided themselves that their “blue states” subsidize “red states,” mocking the “rugged individualist” pretensions of the hapless bubbas in flyover country. But now such boasts ring hollow. 

This is the far-​flung future? 

Subsidy and regulation spoil the Star Trek promise.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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regulation subsidy

The Hail of It

Joe Biden, energy, green energy, spending

Early yesterday, an out-​of-​control container ship ran into the Francis Scott Key Bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore. Early reports claimed that a dozen vehicles and 20 people went into the cold water, with only two survivors, so far, being rescued; last I heard, however, the total went down to six missing after the initial rescues.

It looks like an accident, and accidents happen, sometimes horrific ones. There’s a reason “thoughts and prayers” are mentioned at such times, all other talk seeming vastly inappropriate.

Nevertheless, President Joe Biden immediately promised that the federal government would pay to replace the bridge.

Eleven days earlier a more humdrum disaster gave us greater license to speculate. “Thousands of panels on a solar farm southwest of Houston, Texas, were damaged by a powerful hailstorm on March 15,” a Newsweek report informs us. “Aerial footage showed rows of cracked photovoltaic cells at the Fighting Jays Solar Farm near Needville in Fort Bend County.…” A vast array of solar panels, ruined by something not unheard-​of in Texas: “baseball-​sized hail stones” falling from the sky.

And seeping out of the panels? Toxic chemicals.

This is something that we, the voting public, must confront: the fact that most “green energy” replacements are fragile and often environmentally hazardous. Compared to natural gas they are ecological disasters.

While Joe Biden yammers about funding a new bridge, we need to force a more important conversation, about removing subsidies for pseudo-​green alternative energy sources. 

To save us from the poorhouse as well as from environmental disaster.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture subsidy

Race-​Based Handouts?

collectivism, individualism, race, racism, regulations, welfare

The decision won’t be the end of the matter, but it’s a good sign.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman has ruled that a federal agency established to give subsidies to businesses, in its current form called the Minority Business Development Agency, may no longer use race or ethnicity as a criterion for distributing benefits.

The ruling comes in response to a lawsuit filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty on behalf of three business owners who weren’t allowed to apply for help from the MBDA because they’re white. The plaintiffs argue that the Agency violates the constitutional requirement of equal treatment under the law.

According to Judge Pittman, although “the Agency may intend to serve listed groups, not punish unlisted groups, the very design of its presumption punishes those who are not presumptively entitled to MBDA benefits.”

Supporting rights-​based governance, I’m no fan of any welfare programs. As long as we have them, though, why should the handouts or the ability to apply for them be determined by race?

Government-​imposed racial discrimination is unjust on its face. It should be extirpated wherever it exists. The Minority Business Development Agency is one of those places.

If Pittman’s ruling is allowed to stand, it may have a salutary effect on many other agencies and programs. 

The MBDA’s name presents a problem, however. 

I guess it won’t be too hard to remove the word “Minority” and call the agency the Business Development Agency. 

Or just shut it down.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets political economy subsidy

When the CHIPS Are Weighed Down

Taiwan, computer chips, regulations, DEI, race, racism

Has DEI “killed the CHIPS Act”?

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 created a giant package of subsidies that shouldn’t exist to begin with and is made even worse by all the strings attached.

The Act authorizes giving $52 billion of taxpayer money to microchip manufacturers to make chips in the U.S. The boost to domestic production will supposedly help us if China invades Taiwan and disrupts Taiwan’s globe-​leading microchip industry.

But chipmakers eligible for the largesse are recoiling from all the embedded DEI mandates. “DEI” means “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” It’s a collectivist mantra and ideology designed to make employers fret about racial and gender quotas and DEI indoctrination at the expense of hiring qualified people and making high-​quality microchips.

According to Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson, writing for The Hill, nineteen sections of the Act are devoted to DEI. One gives the Department of Commerce a mission that Commerce describes as “strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem” by ensuring “significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”

The authors believe that CHIPS is “so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.” Worse, it’s making it hard for chipmakers to move, forced to focus away from making microchips and, instead, onto the wasteful exercise of appeasing regulators.

Now that they are finally about to get CHIPS funding, Intel and others are delaying announced factories and foundries on U.S. sites and instead going ahead with more overseas plants.

I guess they want to get stuff done.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment sports subsidy

A Big Step Over the Vomit

Washington DC, crime, sports

“Two hours before the Washington Capitals play in Chinatown on a crisp November evening,” Candace Buckner wrote recently in The Washington Post, “a man stretches out on the pavement near Sixth and F streets NW, wrapped beneath a gray hoodie that he’s using as a blanket. Around the corner, a woman rolls a blunt outside the arena’s sportsbook entrance, and soon the waft of marijuana will perfume the area. There’s a spillage of vomit, green, near the tree on the sidewalk. Another man, this one cradling his arms behind his back and mumbling, doesn’t seem to notice the mess as he walks over it and bends over to pick up old cigarette butts.”

Might there be some connection between the state of downtown Washington, D.C., and the decision by the owner of both the Washington Capitals hockey team and the Washington Wizards NBA team to relocate them outside the city to Virginia?

“The District faced competition from Virginia,” explained a separate news story, “only because Leonsis had begun quietly exploring a new home for his teams in 2022, after years of complaining about crime and the noise of buskers outside his arena.”

There was not only less vomit but more room to be had in Virginia. For an even more expensive “public-​private partnership” project. 

My fellow Virginia taxpayers and I are not crowing — Washington’s loss is our loss. We will no doubt pay for the privilege of experiencing even worse traffic and pricier tickets to hockey and basketball games … with higher taxes. 

Politicians can make names for themselves with these big sports franchise grabs. That’s what happened 30 years ago in the District of Columbia’s Chinatown. 

But the names have moved on, and now so have the games.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

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defense & war international affairs subsidy

Paid Invaders

immigration, China, border, wall, fence

“The United States is bankrolling its own ‘invasion,’” declares an Epoch Times article, “by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.”

Though it’s called “cash in envelopes” in the biz, actual payments to these immigrants on the road north from Ecuador usually take the form of debit cards, to the tune of $800 per month. This is funded partially from U.S. taxpayers through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nation’s mass migration arm. Last year, courtesy of Biden Administration enthusiasm, the U.S. threw $1.3 billion at the IOM.

It doesn’t stop there. “The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants.”

And it is not just the generous payments to individual trekkers northward. NGOs and foreign governments, in addition to the U.S. taxpayers, have organized help through every step of the long march. There is a break in the road, in Panama, where one must navigate  a jungle, or else go by sea. Quite a few organizations are making this leg of the journey doable for many.

And some wonder if the Chinese government isn’t supporting the massive surge — more than 50 times as many Chinese illegally crossing into the U.S. last year than just two years earlier.

Which is where the whole issue becomes scary.

Anthropologist Brett Weinstein — discussed here before for his ordeal at Evergreen University a few years ago — recently went down to Panama to see for himself what was going on. He calls the migrant hordes an invasion. He observed that the Chinese émigrés have separate housing, and exhibit radically different attitudes — and more wealth — than your standard economic migrant worker.

If the obvious danger doesn’t bother Americans … perhaps the fact that they are paying for it might?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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