THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XIII, Issue # 207, August 21, 2011
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
FOOD STAMPS TO SAVE THE ECONOMY
By Dennis T. Avery
THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION'S CLUELESS APPROACH TO DEALING WITH AMERICA'S CURRENT ECONOMIC PROBLEMS:
USING THE FOOD STAMP PROGRAM AS AN "ECONOMIC STIMULUS" TO END THE RECESSION & PROMOTE ECONOMIC
RECOVERY -- LIBERAL PERCEPTIONS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOVERNMENT SPENDING ON FOOD STAMPS & THE
LEVEL OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY -- THE ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES OF KEEPING PEOPLE ON THE UNEMPLOYMENT & WELFARE
ROLLS -- THE ULTIMATE SOURCE OF FUNDING FOR THE FOOD STAMP PROGRAM
FULL STORY:
President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture thinks food stamps are an “economic stimulus”! I can’t think of a sadder or
more realistic commentary on the Obama administration’s clueless approach to economics. Agriculture Secretary Tom
Vilsack says that each dollar of food stamp spending generates $1.84 worth of economic activity out there in the “great
economic beyond” that he apparently never saw in his legal career.
If food stamps were such an economic stimulus, why haven’t we put everyone on food stamps and made ourselves all
filthy rich with the profits? But that would be ludicrous, wouldn’t it? Even Obama wouldn’t pretend that far.
Years ago, I worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and for the Food Stamp Program itself. We knew that the tax
dollars we spent on behalf of the government for the food stamps were part of the country’s safety net for the poor and
unemployed. Hopefully they got the food stamps on a temporary basis, until they could find productive jobs. At that
time, however, many of the people receiving food stamps regarded them as a “right.” They staged protest marches
demanding more food stamps per family — and too many of those marching were in their third generation of food stamp
eligibility.
That was before President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act and proved that keeping people on the unemployment
and welfare rolls really did create its own permanent and very expensive clientele. People can exist on welfare, they don’t
thrive on welfare.
President Calvin Coolidge handled his recession neatly and quickly — by doing nothing. He said, “The business of
America is business,” and he watched as the market forces moved in to restore prosperity. Coolidge was ridiculed by the
intelligentsia, of course, who secretly believed they could have handled Coolidge’s recession more humanely. With
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, they got their chance — and failed.
If government spending had successfully “primed the pump” during the Depression, as Franklin Roosevelt and his
administrators were so fond of saying, why did the country’s Roosevelt-supervised 20 percent unemployment last until
1940? And why was the recession actually ended by a guy named Adolf Hitler, who put everybody to work making guns,
bombers, and submarines?
How could Larry Summers, an economics professor in good standing from Harvard, support the Obama stimulus program
after the Roosevelt failure? And I mean any stimulus program, let alone the awful Democrat graft-and-union-payoff
program that Nancy Pelosi designed for us on the model of her father’s Baltimore machine-politics.
Summers must have wanted to believe it would work, out of the goodness in his heart. I no longer give points for good
intentions. The road to hell is already paved partly with stimulus dollars.
My sister’s Michigan community got a ten-foot-wide walkway from here to nowhere as a “recreation asset.” Is this what
rust-belt Michigan most needs? And taxpayers got the debt. John Stossel’s community in New York’s posh Upper West
Side got free bicycle helmets. And we pay back the $2.6 million for the bike helmets — plus interest from here to eternity.
When I worked on the Food Stamp Program, I knew that the public not only paid for the stamps, but also for the local
administrators who determined who got them, and for my federal pension plan, and for the highways on which I
commuted to my big federal building.
But where do the federal dollars come from? Those federal dollars had to be taxed from someone with a productive job
that made things or sold things or serviced things and therefore earned profits that the government could take away.
That’s what “community organizers” and career politicians and “goodhearted economists” too seldom understand. We
may soon all be on food stamps after all.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Political Economy -- Philosophies, Systems, & Public Policies:
Government, the Economy, & Economic Prosperity
Social Welfare Policy -- The Modern Welfare State
Dennis T. Avery, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., is an environmental economist. He was
formerly a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global
Warming Every 1500 Years. Readers may write to Avery at P.O. Box 202, Churchville, Virginia, 2442; send him email
adressed to cgfi@hughes.net; or visit us at www.cgfi.org
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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