Oh, Snap! Trump Has Ideas About Fixing Welfare

By MARK ANDERSON

The “food stamp” controversy that often emerges tends to spark a quasi-puritanical impulse in most people, who’ve been raised to believe that human beings must work for every morsel of food in their mouths and every breath they take — lest they be displayed as a mendicant in the town square and have stinky tomatoes thrown at them.

That was evident once again amid reports that the Trump administration’s new budget called for converting the SNAP program into part food basket, part regular purchases via the debit card that all SNAP recipients receive.

While I could not actually locate that specific SNAP proposal in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 that President Trump signed into law Feb. 9 — although HR 1892’s 700 pages can render anyone numb, dumb and legally blind — there were enough reports to suggest that someone had seriously floated the rather silly food basket idea.

Whether “the basket” becomes a reality or not, the real issue gets lost behind the postings plastered across our collective psyche by the kept press of the corporatocracy.

As some respected monetary reformers have explained to me over and over again—don’t worry, they aren’t the court economists who are paid to fail us — every production cycle in the economy stacks up inventories and prices higher and faster than the disbursement of wages and salaries.

So, there is always an annoying “gap,” a shortfall between the costly stuff flowing off the production line and the comparatively paltry wages that can never keep up with production prices. The gap translates into a chronic shortage of purchasing power — full stores and empty wallets.

Over-production, over-mining, over-processing, over-taxing our highways and bi-ways for deliveries, etc., have become the norm, creating a stressful, corrosive mode of living that harms people and the environment. No wonder there’s a drug epidemic.

To try to fill this gap, consumers run up credit-card debt and/or repeatedly “refi” their homes, etc. But in a debt-based money system where debt begets debt begets debt, the interest charges soon come home to roost and take over, sending ever-increasing amounts of money back into the banker’s vault from whence it came. Casinos cannot hold a carrot to this, as bad as they can be for the economic and social fabric.

Ok, so what does this have to do with food stamps? Kind of a lot.

Actually, SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps, to some extent does what needs to be done, which is to put more purchasing power into the people’s hands of people who are living in poverty and, in so doing, inject more labor and production costs into the economy.

So, when the SNAP cards are issued, the economy’s overall buying power goes up—but without the labor costs and other production expenses that always end up in the final price tags of goods and services, having surpassed wage and salary levels on a per-production-cycle basis.

In other words, the key way to free the economy and the country is to begin to separate work from income — radical though that may sound at first blush — especially with the Fourth Industrial Revolution telling us that “AI” and robots will automate production and make human labor increasingly obsolete.

Addressing how to carefully accept more automation, and therefore fewer jobs, forks into two paths: Universal Basic Income; or what’s called social credit.

UBI calls for dipping into tax dollars and transferring them from some people to others — based, however, on redistribution (with politicians buying votes based on promising who gets what).

Far better to use the social credit option, conceived almost exactly 100 years ago by engineer Clifford H. Douglas and create new money (distribution, not re-distribution) and mainly pay it out in the form of stimulus checks — regular dividends for all citizens who, only by virtue of their citizenhood, become part of “USA, Inc” — a populist entity that phases out the vitiated, monopolistic capitalism that has bought our press, pulpit and politicians.

The vision: Less work, more leisure time to pursues one’s dreams and an end to the “work state” that crawls right out of the worst dystopian visions that authors Orwell, Wells and others have conjured up and drives most of us into an early grave.

Someone once said we should be a nation of philosophers. I’d add: Who should war no more. Life’s too good for the deplorable economic system we have.

Mark Anderson is a veteran journalist who divides his time between Texas and Michigan. Email him at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2018

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