South Africa, where 75 percent of the world’s rhinos live, is also at the forefront of a counterintuitive move to legalize the rhino horn trade. If adopted, the new policy would promote safer rhino-horn farming: rhinos could be sedated while parts of their horns were cut off, and then the horns would grow back. A team of Australian conservationists signed on to the idea in March. As Kevin Charles Redmon explained at the time on Pacific Standard, lifting a trade ban would ideally increase the supply and lower the price, and thereby lower the incentive for poachers to slaughter the animals. However, Redmon wrote:This free-market approach, however, does not have a good track record in products where demand is so irrational and lucrative. There are strong countering arguments.
The black market will only collapse when legal horns are cheaper and easier to obtain than ill-gotten ones and penalties for operating outside the ‘central selling organization’ are severe. DNA signatures and radio chips will help trace licit horns, and exporters will be subject to regular audits. At the same time, buyers must demand cruelty- and conflict-free wares (think of efforts to demonize blood diamonds).Legalization remains highly controversial among animal rights activists and wildlife conservationists. The World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Investigation Agency, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare have all been critical of the idea. What if lifting the ban increases demand, as it did in fact following similar, previous experiments with the ivory market? Or what if a legal trade simply establishes a parallel but separate market, while illegal (whole) rhino horns and heads continue to sell underground?
Likewise, would legitimizing the sale of rhino cups encourage and validate the baseless myth that they actually have medicinal properties? Perhaps conservationists’ and governments’ efforts would be better directed toward fighting the very misconception that drives the demand in the first place. [More]
South Africa reportedly will not seek a full legalization of all rhino-horn trade but a one-time sale of current stockpiles. The South African government has stockpiled more than 16,400 kilograms of rhino horns—mostly confiscated from poachers—while private owners possess about 2,000 kilograms more—ironically, mostly horns that have been removed from live animals to make them less attractive to poachers. With rhino horns fetching anywhere from $10,000 to $40,000 a kilogram, the South African government could net half a billion dollars or more from the proposed sale. Private ranchers, who own much of South Africa’s rhino population, would also benefit from this windfall. In fact, many ranchers have been pushing for a sale like this.The wild rhino population is hard to nail down, with mixed prospects. Some subspecies have disappeared although there are some successes.
South Africa’s deputy director general for biodiversity, Fundisile Mketeni, said monies from the one-off sale “should go to conservation”—note that he didn’t say it would—but experts and conservation organizations say the sale would do little more than feed the growing desire for rhino horns and make the situation much, much worse in the long run.
History backs them up on this point. Similar one-off sales of ivory to Japan in 1999 and China in 2008 have been linked to the resultant increased demand for ivory in Asia, which has driven elephant poaching across Africa to crisis proportions in the past decade. At the time, proponents of those sales said flooding the market with stockpiled ivory would lower prices and therefore eliminate the incentive to poach more elephants. The opposite happened and prices soared. South Africa now argues that putting more than 18,000 kilograms of rhino horn up for sale would glut the market, lower prices and save more rhinos. This is an argument we have heard before. [More]
I wondered if there was some bizarre preference for horns from the species under strongest poaching pressure, but it demand does not appear to be species-dependent but rather linked to horn size. This burgeoning demand is the result of rapid income growth in areas where traditional (and totally unscientific) medicine sill holds sway. Thus curbing demand could be a generational challenge, not an education process, I would think.While most subspecies of Africa’s two rhinos, the black and white rhino, continue on the road to recovery, this is not true for two of Africa’s most threatened rhino subspecies: the West African black (Diceros bicornis longipes) and the Northern white (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). The West African black rhino is now feared extinct and numbers of the northern white rhino have reached an all time low in the wild. In both cases, poaching for rhino horn is the main cause of their demise.This is according to new estimates announced by the African Rhino Specialist Group (AfRSG) of the IUCN’s Species Survival Commission. A recent survey of the West African black rhino by a French-based survey group has failed to locate any sign of their continued presence, despite an intensive survey earlier this year throughout its last refuges in northern Cameroon.
“As a result this subspecies has been tentatively declared as extinctm,” says Dr. Martin Brooks, AfRSG chairman. “Also the northern white rhino is on the very brink of being lost. Restricted in the wild to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, recent ground and aerial surveys conducted under the direction of African Parks Foundation and the AfRSG have only found four animals. Efforts to locate further animals continue, but we must now face the possibility that the subspecies may not recover to a viable level,” he continued
On a more positive note, continental black rhino numbers of the remaining three subspecies have increased to 3,725 as a whole, a rise of 3.2% over the last two years: this from an all time low of 2,410 in 1995. The ultimate conservation success story continues for the other white rhino subspecies, the southern white. Down to less than 50 animals a hundred or so years ago, numbers have increased to 14,540. [More]
And day by day, I saw more of the world of the Maasai of Maji Moto. There was the bustling weekly livestock market in the nearby town of Ewaso Nero where Maasai herders filled a dusty corral half as large as a football field with sheep, goats and cows, selling them mostly to meat merchants from Nairobi. I bathed in the Maji Moto hot springs with the locals and was led on guided hikes into the easily climbed Loita Hills, where it seemed as if everything that grew had some medicinal, nutritional or spiritual significance. The leaves of the sagelike compa bushes, for instance, are rubbed under the armpits like deodorant; twigs from the leafy olkisikongu tree are used as natural toothbrushes; and the sacred oreteti trees, under which the Maasai pray to their god, Enkai, are said to have the power to dispel bad energy and instill peace.A couple of hundred yards behind the Cultural Camp is the “widows’ village.” In Maasai communities, women often outlive their husbands but are forbidden from remarrying. Some of these widows, and their children, are left destitute, with no livestock (the traditionally favored currency of the Maasai). Urged by his mother to address this problem, Salaton built a manyatta where poor widows live together like a family, earning money by working at the camp and selling beautifully beaded jewelry to tourists; the camp also pays for their and their children’s medical expenses. When I first went to their manyatta, the widows performed traditional welcoming songs and dances, but subsequent visits were less formal; they were happy to show me how they lived and were comfortable being photographed in their homes.Meanwhile, I got to know the Maasai who were working and volunteering at Salaton’s camp, especially those who spoke English. There was Rose, a teenage seamstress with a hair-trigger smile, who teaches the widows how to sew when she isn’t working with tourists; Joyce, a college graduate in her early 20s recently hired to help Salaton with the business side of the camp; and Meeri, who was in her last year of high school in Maji Moto after fleeing her own village a few years earlier to escape a marriage her parents were arranging for her. “I’d heard that the leader here helped girls like me,” she said, and described her three-day walk alone across the bush, sleeping in the branches of trees at night.Our rapport was easy as we asked and answered questions about our cultures. Among our many conversations, we compared differences between Maasai and American marriages; when I explained that we don’t have dowries, don’t practice polygamy and get to choose our spouses, they liked the way all of that sounded. But they didn’t immediately embrace the idea that a wife might be older than her husband. “That would never happen here,” Joyce said, laughing at the thought. [More of a short travel story]
That said, it remains that egalitarian anti-corporatism is a genuinely excellent, genuinely egalitarian idea. I would prefer to see it combined with a really solid scheme of social insurance. But we never see this combination because neither party is interested in it. Many Democratic partisans are even less interested in anti-cronyism than many Republicans, unless they think it will hurt Republican fund-raising, and that just goes to show that Democratic egalitarianism is as opportunistic and superficial as the Republican love of liberty. The Democratic Party is as bound up with corporate interests no less, or not much less, than the GOP. Yet Mr Chait says that "Pretending Democrats are actually succoring elites is a handy way for [advocates of conservative populism] to avoid grappling with the central issue", which is that Republicans don't like downward redistribution. Mr Chait apparently cannot see that Democrats do succor elites, that our political system is finely tuned so that the succoring will continue no matter who is in power. Moreover, all the deeper mechanisms that generate and reproduce America's peculiar patterns of income and wealth—the definition of intellectual-property rights, the structure and governance of corporations, the marginalisation and persecution of undocumented workers, the de facto apartheid of America's systems of criminal justice and public education, the evolution of family structure—seems to lack reality in Mr Chait's mind, perhaps because none affords an obvious angle for partisan electoral advantage. Rather than get bogged down in all this tricky stuff, Mr Chait prefers to reduce the whole question of inequality, of economic populism—of American politics altogether!—to a single issue, progressive redistribution, on which Democratic electoral interest and moral self-satisfaction happen to comfortably intersect. Democrats most certainly do succor elites, and this sort of glib self-righteousness about inequality is one of the ways they do it. [More]This is where the gap between what I used to believe 10 years ago and today probably is the greatest. I have come to the realization that our system inherently marches toward lop-sided wealth and well-being distributions if left unsupervised, so to speak.
THE Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has resolved to set up new not-for-profit credit unions to compete with pay day lenders, companies who offer short-term loans at very high levels of interest. The FT has some more detail on the proposals here. The Archbishop has a clear message for the pay day leders: “we're not in the business of trying to legislate you out of existence; we're trying to compete you out of existence." A new paper by Luigi Pascali, an economist at the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, suggests he might have the right approach.The rest of the short post is worth reading but the spoiler is research indicates this could work.
As Ecclesiastes 1:19 tells us, there’s nothing new under the sun. 15th Century Italy had its own pay day loan problem. A doctrinal change at the end of the 14th century had prohibited the Catholic laity from lending money to make a profit. But by the late 15th century Italy was in severe recession due to constant wars and many had to resort to pawnbrokers. (My colleague wrote about how this type of short-term lending against assets is on the up in Britain a few weeks ago). The only way in which Italians could borrow money was from Italy’s Jewish population who were absolved from the ban.
Franciscan monks resolved to compete the money lenders away. The Franciscans set up new lenders, the Monti de Pieta. The name means “mount of piety”, referring to the initial capital used to set up the bank. These not-for-profit credit unions would replace the Jewish pawn shops and eventually evolved into modern banks. The monks combined this with sermons on the evils of money lending, pushing borrowers into their arms. [More]
Fortunately, there's something we can do about this desecration of an American breakfast tradition. And it can be done while also trying to prevent millions of people from getting health care, thus killing two — or possibly 30 million — birds with one stone.The defund movement has gathered enough big names (all the assumed GOP presidential timber - which says something about the field) to make it newsworthy for that fact alone. But saner voices are coming forward to point out some flaws with this strategy. Like lowering expectations.
A brave group of tea party Republicans has decided that the best way to get rid of Obamacare — since voting to repeal it 39 times doesn't seem to be working — is to not fund the law. Heroes like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Sen. Ted Cruz of Hateseverythingistan say they'll oppose any budget that gives money to the health care law, even if that means risking a government shutdown.
This is similar to when Abraham Lincoln famously avoided an American civil war by holding his breath until the South agreed to free the slaves.
The tactics of Cruz and company have been praised by many Republicans, including North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, who called it "the dumbest idea I've ever heard."
In a recent speech, Cruz said that the Obama administration's tactic is to "get everyone addicted" to Obamacare, thus making it impossible to abolish. He's right. Outside of caffeine and cocaine, there are few things more addictive than access to affordable health care.
My guess is this is the same trick Jamba Juice has up its hemp sleeve. The company — clearly a radical left-wing group of nutrition Nazis — has co-opted something all Americans want (oatmeal) and is using it to get us hooked on smoothies that will turn us into dope-smoking pacifists.
So today I call on Sens. Cruz, Rubio and Lee to not just demand the defunding of Obamacare, but to hold the country's budget hostage until Jamba Juice promises to take its mitts off our oatmeal.
Because if there's one thing that's worth risking the full faith and credit of the United States over, it's anything that might possibly make us healthier. [Read the whole thing to start your day right in multiple ways]
I have a sad suspicion we are heading toward a total meltdown on the right as the divisions in the GOP make any legislative action impossible.SK: What do you expect the Obamacare rollout to be like this October?TC: I don’t know. What I do know is if you do say it;s going to be terrible, terrible, terrible as Republicans have been saying, and it’s only one terrible, it’s going to look good. We shouldn’t overhype things. We should just watch. The fact that they’re going to do everything they can to get as many people as possible to participate matters. [More]
The big picture is this: Recalculating the treatment of all “artistic originals” that fit the bureau’s definitions would have increased the economy in 2007 by about $70 billion, or 0.5 percent. And R.& D., particularly in the field of biotechnology, would have added more than $200 billion. Combined, these two changes would have swelled G.D.P. by almost 3 percent, Mr. Kornfeld said. How it will affect G.D.P. this year and in the restatement of past numbers was being calculated as we spoke. Brent R. Moulton, the bureau’s associate director for national accounts, said the statistics would be out this week. He noted that other nations had been making such shifts as well.The changes could have profound implications. R.& D. and the creation of entertainment originals have generally been treated as a cost of doing business, reducing G.D.P. Now they will be recognized for their potential to add economic value for years to come. Business software has been treated this way since the 1990s. “It makes sense to expand our definitions,” Mr. Landefeld said. “That’s something the bureau has done for decades.”But the bureau’s changes will widen the gap between corporate and national economic accounting, said Baruch Lev, a professor of accounting and finance at New York University. Despite the change in G.D.P. accounting, he said, R.& D. is still generally treated as an expense, not as an investment, in calculating profits and tax liability.“National accounting — G.D.P. accounting — is giving us a more accurate picture of the world,” he said, adding that various intangibles might constitute as much as 50 percent of the value of publicly traded companies. These assets don’t show up on corporate balance sheets, he said, keeping investors “in the dark about the true value of many of the companies traded in the stock market.” [More]
Look, I confess to hypocrisy. I eat meat, albeit with misgivings, and I have no compunctions about using mousetraps. So what? We have the same inconsistencies, controversies and hypocrisies in dealing with human rights. We may disagree about waterboarding terror suspects, but almost everyone shares a revulsion for genocide, the use of poison gas or the torture of children.Now we are plodding along a similar controversial, inconsistent, hypocritical — and progressive — path on animal rights. We may disagree about eating meat, but growing numbers share a disgust for extreme behavior, like the force-feeding of geese (now banned in California) to produce pâté.We as a global society have crossed the Rubicon. We disagree about where to draw the line to protect animal rights, but almost everyone now agrees that there is a line to be drawn.May our descendants, when, in the future, they reflect uncomprehendingly on our abuse of hens and orcas, appreciate that we are good and decent people moving in the right direction, and show some compassion for our obliviousness. [More]
To keep audience attention, the hosts like to goof around — doing little dances, teasing each other, running around in the pig pen. Nobody is yelling; smiles abound.IMHO, this effort will do more for the poorest Africans than dozens of industrial farming efforts to make Africa another Brazil.
After each episode, you can text the show’s creators and request a brochure on any topic covered. Four to six thousand brochures are now sent out each week, with numbers steadily increasing.
To maximize viewership, each episode is produced in English and Swahili. Shamba Shape Up is currently shown in three countries — Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda — but Campbell says 17 others have expressed interest. Still, no one has reached out from the developed world. Campbell suspects this may have something to do with Shamba‘s format. “It’s all very innocent,” he says. “It might not play well in the States.” [More]
There's an old vision of the American Dream that is obsolete, and has been for quite awhile. That's Thomas Jefferson's idea of a nation of self-sufficient farmers -- an agrarian republic. Over time, as people left the countryside for the cities during the Industrial Revolutions, this vision morphed: it became a nostalgia for (and even snobbery of) small towns. It's a vision that Republicans still cling to. Remember when Sarah Palin talked about "real America"? Or when Republicans warned that high-speed rail and bike lanes were some kind of socialist plot? It's a vision of America at odds with the American Dream today.The reason this is more than a cultural curiosity is the political impact. Part the the mantra of the right is "takers" simply won't get off their butts and climb the ladders of success by working hard and sacrificing. There is an element of truth in this, but it ignores the fact there are few ladders left in many parts of America.
It turns out the best place to pursue happiness -- and a career -- is in the city. [More]
Still, earlier studies have already found that education and family structure have a large effect on the chances that children escape poverty. Other researchers, including the political scientist Robert D. Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” have previously argued that social connections play an important role in a community’s success. Income mobility has become one of the hottest topics in economics, as both liberals and conservatives have grown worried about diminished opportunities following more than a decade of disappointing economic growth. After years of focusing more on inequality at a moment in time, economists have more recently turned their attention to people’s paths over their lifetimes.Polls show that Americans are worried about whether living standards will rise for most people in coming decades, as they have for nearly all of the nation’s history. In interviews in Atlanta and its suburbs, residents reflected many of the national concerns and many of the patterns in the study.[More]
This just in: Humanity is growing faster than we thought.To put it graphically:
In advance of World Population Day, United Nations demographers have once again revised official projections -- upward. This meticulous band of number crunchers doesn’t mean to be alarmist, but its statistics can be startling:
--Nigeria, the West African nation slightly larger than Texas, is on track to surpass the United States as the world’s third-most populous country by 2050. The size of its population may rival that of China by the end of the century, unless something dramatic happens.
--The number of people living on the African continent is set to nearly quadruple by the end of the century, rather than merely tripling, as previously projected.
--The world’s population is on track to reach 9.6 billion by midcentury and nearly 11 billion by 2100, which is 700 million more than was projected two years ago.
The reason for the higher figures? A slew of recent household surveys in African countries revealed the average number of children per woman was higher than previously estimated, said Francois Pelletier, chief of the U.N.’s population estimates and projections section.
In some countries, “a high level of fertility appears to have risen even higher,” Pelletier said. In others, “we realized the earlier estimates were too low.”
A seemingly modest change from an average of four children per woman to five, he said, can produce a dramatic upswing in coming decades due to the power of compound growth.
The prospect of Africa’s population of 1.1 billion exceeding 4 billion has surprised some demographers, because Africa is not following the pattern of falling fertility around the world. Women on average around the globe have half as many children as they did in the 1960s. [More]
The House Republicans just pushed through a farm bill with extremely generous farm subsidies while scrapping the usual corollary food stamp aid. It doesn’t get clearer than that. There’s no small government consistency here – just an embrace of subsidizing Big Ag and a contempt for the needy in a long, protracted growth recession. Are they trying to make themselves look like total douchebags? [[More with his links to other commentators]But of course, he is not a real conservative anymore, having been "frummed" out like like so many.
In fact, they made this new bill even worse—by making sneaky changes to the bill text so that some of the costliest and most indefensible programs no longer expire after five years, but live on indefinitely. This means the sugar program that drives up food prices will be harder to change, because it doesn’t automatically expire. It also means the new and radical shallow loss program that covers even minor losses for farmers will indefinitely be a part of the law. [More]But to make it easy, Chris Clayton at DTN has assembled much of the response from the hard right.
The farm bill passed by the House of Representatives yesterday is pretty much a disgrace. Republicans took legislation that had historically been 80 percent food stamps and 20 percent mostly awful and antiquated agribusiness subsidies. And they passed something that is 0 percent food stamps and 100 percent mostly awful and antiquated agribusiness subsidies.
"Billions for farmers, nothing for the poor" is a stark assessment, but a fair one.
[This last link - by Matt Iglesias - was a doozy too.]
“[T]he one explanation that almost always explains support for agricultural protection,” the paper concludes, “is the electoral pressure a legislator faces, i.e., the proportion of her constituents who are farm owners or farm managers.” Other things, like lobbying or a politician’s farm background, can also matter, but they have a weaker effect.Well, it's good to have some academic justification of something most of us considered obvious, but like the other comments, few have any idea of what happens next.
This was unexpected. The average number of direct agricultural constituents in a House district was only about 1 or 2 percent — there simply aren’t many farmers left in the United States. But those voters care a lot about farm policy. And most other voters don’t care much about farm policy at all — and are unaware of the costs of agricultural subsidies.
In an interview, Bellemare stressed that his paper is a work in progress — it’s not yet published — and he’s still responding to critics. For instance, it’s a bit tricky to analyze votes on the 2002 and 2008 farm bills because they contained both crop subsidies and money for food stamps. So the authors have used a variety of techniques to tease out lawmakers who are casting votes for food stamps and those who favor the actual farm subsidies.
One notable thing they’ve found recently is that lawmakers with high levels of poverty in their districts are actually less likely to favor farm subsidies. This suggests that the traditional set-up of farm bills — where food stamps are included to create an urban-rural alliance — has in fact made it much easier for the previous farm bills to pass.
“We can’t say that for certain from our results,” Bellemare says. “But it certainly seems like that coalition is a necessary condition of these bills passing.”
Of course, the House has now taken the step of splitting the farm bill in two, which could scramble the politics further in years ahead. It’s hard to draw too many hard conclusions from yesterday’s vote, since it’s a bit of a special case — the House leadership was trying different tactics to pass a massive farm bill that had already been written, and temporarily splitting food stamps and farming seemed like one way to go. [More]
The bill would also repeal laws from the 1930s and 1940s, essentially eliminating all old farm policy which some conservatives like.
Farm-state lawmakers have kept those laws on the books so there would be incentive to pass new farm bills and avoid expiration, but the threat of outdated policies kicking in has been a headache for farmers who worry they can’t depend on Congress to create new laws or extend more recent versions of the law.
Repealing those decades-old laws could mean that Congress would have little incentive to create new farm bills, however, and could make many farm programs permanent. [More]
At the third stop, a high school football player pleaded for extra milk; at the fourth, teenagers fired rifles at cans up the road; at the fifth, always the most crowded, kids, parents and dogs waited in the shade under the trailer park’s only tree.“Finally!” one of them said as the bus pulled in. He was a 12-year-old boy, shirtless and muddy with half of a cigarette tucked behind his ear, and he barged onto the bus and grabbed his lunch. “Bologna again?” he asked, studying his sandwich.“I’ll take yours then,” another boy said, grabbing for his bag.“No fighting,” Anderson said, as she handed out 15 meals and walked toward the back of the bus, where a young mother in a tank top and pink slippers was sitting with her 2-year-old son. The mother opened the toddler’s fruit cup and, a minute later, the little boy stood up on his seat, laughed and tossed the fruit cup out the school bus window.“How dare you?” the mother said, turning to the toddler, slapping his bottom hard enough for the bus to go quiet, then pulling her arm back to slap him again.“It’s okay,” Anderson said, hurriedly reaching into another bag for a replacement cup of fruit, breaking the rule about seconds.“It is not okay with me!” the mother said. She turned back to her son, who was wailing, and yanked him back into his seat. “Sit on your butt,” she said. “What did I tell you about wasting?”Anderson watched the mother for a few seconds and wondered if this would be one of the times when she needed to call child protective services to make a report. It had happened three times on buses already in the past two weeks, once for possible child abuse and twice for possible neglect. Stress, anger, desperation — these were behaviors she had been told to anticipate on the bus at a time when a record 10 percent of children live in homes unable to provide adequate, nutritious food. “Low-income families are being pushed to the very edge,” one of her training manuals had warned. But now Bible walked back from his driver’s seat and put his hand on the young mother’s shoulder. “It’s hot. We’re hungry. Nobody is in a good mood,” he said. “So I’d like to tell a joke. Have you heard that this bus has 2050 air conditioning? That means 20 windows down and 50 miles an hour.”The mother appeased him with a smile. The 2-year-old went back to eating his sandwich. The meal ended, and the bus emptied out.“We got them through it,” Bible said.“Thank goodness,” Anderson said.“Fifteen minutes and 750 calories,” Bible said.“And again tomorrow,” Anderson said. [More about rural hunger that you maybe didn't know]
At 12:14 p.m., the House opened debate on an amendment introduced by Florida Republican Steve Southerland that would have allowed states to increase work requirements for citizens to receive food stamps. Shortly after, Cantor spoke on the floor in support of the amendment. While there were more than 100 amendments debated over the two days of deliberations, Southerland’s amendment was the first and only that prompted Cantor to take to the floor.
At 1:22 p.m., the Southerland amendment was approved in a near-party-line vote, 227 to 198. Only one Democrat went for the amendment, and only six Republicans went against. It was a partisan poison pill, the last amendment of the day. And it was enough to kill the measure.
At 1:54 p.m., the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act, colloquially known as the farm bill, was defeated 234 to 195, with 24 Democrats backing the legislation and 62 Republicans voting against it. It was the last in a series of embarrassing defeats for the House Republican leadership, who have struggled for three years to corral the conservative wing of their conference.
After the vote, Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson, the senior Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, said, ”The farm bill failed to pass the House today because the House Republicans could not control the extreme right wing of their party.” When asked if the Southerland amendment was specifically what sunk the bill, Liz Friedlander, a spokeswoman for Peterson, told TIME: “I think that’s fair to say.”[More]
“We were over 40 and we ended up…at 24,” Peterson told the Hill.[More]This is all water under the dam, so to speak.But what I found hilarious was this effort to explain how to make SNAP a work-tested entitlement.
Speculation aboundson Cantor's motive, and I certainly have no insights. It doesn't look like something your No. 2 man should do unless he's itching to be No. 1, though.
Indeed, the 24 Democratic votes were a clear drop from the 40 that Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the Democratic floor manager, had predicted.
“I did have more Democrats,” Peterson told reporters after the vote. He said the “last straw” had been a Cantor-backed amendment that opened the door to states imposing more work requirements on able-bodied food stamp recipients.
Cantor sought to shift the blame back to Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, accusing the California Democrat of choosing “partisanship over progress.” And Republican aides insisted that Peterson should not have been surprised by the work amendment.
But after all the frustration of the past year, Cantor’s sudden prominence — coming down to speak after being otherwise silent — infuriated those close to Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas (R-Okla.). And this all played out in an atmosphere in which Lucas had been working — with some success — to try to stem the Democratic bleeding on the nutrition issue. [More]
Under this new system, those able-bodied poor who needed public assistance and showed up at their local welfare office before 9 am would be assured a work assignment for 8 hours that day. They would be paid at the end of the day the minimum wage for that work in cash. If they needed more, they could come back the next day and work again. This is only for the able-bodied poor. The disabled who could not work would be served by other programs designed for them, which can provide generous assistance on top of Social Security disability payments without requiring work.Does anyone notice the slight problems with the above program changes?
The local welfare office would attempt to place those seeking assistance in a private sector job, like private temp agencies do all across America every work day. Indeed, ideally the local welfare offices would be contracted out to private temp agencies, which would be paid a fee based on successful placements of those seeking assistance in private sector jobs. But all those who showed up needing assistance would receive some 8 hour work assignment for the day paying the minimum wage, even if it was just to spend the day cleaning up the local public parks.
Those who needed child care while they work would bring their kids with them to an on-site child care facility. All other public assistance for the able-bodied would be provided only in return for those who showed up for work in these job assignments. That would include Medicaid vouchers for private health insurance for those who showed up for enough days of work each month to qualify. [More].
Last week during the news we has a report about the growing cost of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - SNAP - which used to be called food stamps.The video we used to illustrate the the story was of shoppers checking out using SNAP cards. While the video was essentially accurate, the shoppers were all African-American. During the week I did some research and discovered such images may inadvertently perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes. The most likely SNAP recipient is not an adult African American - it is a white child under 18. Children receive just under 50% of all benefits . Whites account for 43%, African Americans 33% and hispanics 19%. The growth of the program cost is largely due to growth in those eligible - a result of the recession and wage stagnation. Even so, the cost could be much higher as only about 3/4 of those who qualify participate in the program. Only 10% of SNAP recipients receive cash welfare payments, and the average duration of benefits is 9 months. Most surprising to me was that in the last few years rural use of SNAP has exceeded urban participation rates - the percentage of those eligible who sign up. These numbers and images matter because this year the ag budget will be fiercely debated between ag programs and food assistance. When farmers realize SNAP cutbacks will impact kids in their local scholl, not just adults in the city, they might decide to split those dollars differently.It is also germane, I think, to point out the fraud rate for SNAP is significantly below the rate for crop insurance and farm payments. And it bears repeating: economists have found changes in eligibility have been a small factor in the expansion compared to the recession and job losses. More importantly, SNAP costs will decline as unemployment improves, just like it was designed to do.
