Great Chorus Concert In Manhattan

I've mentioned here a few times that I sing in a chorus, but I've never promoted the concerts on this site.  Well, next weekend we have two concerts, one in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn, and they're going to be really fabulous.  It would be great to see some Manhattan Contrarian readers there.  For tickets, follow links below, or you can buy them at the door.  Here are the specifics:

Gregory's Legacy

Perhaps the single greatest influence on western choral music has been the body of plainchant popularly attributed to Pope Gregory. This hour-long program features works inspired by Gregorian chant, culminating in Frank Martin’s stunning a cappella Mass for Double Choir.
 

DESSOFF EXPRESS:

Gregory's Legacy
 
Friday, May 13, 20167:30 pm
Church of Notre Dame
405 West 114th Street (just east of Amsterdam Avenue)
New York, NY 10025
 
Sunday, May 15, 20164:00 pm
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
139 John’s Place
Brooklyn, NY 11217

Tickets: 
$35 Preferred
$25 General Admission ($15 Senior/Student)
Click here for tickets or available at the door.
For more details, please visit dessoff.org.

JACOBSON: Psalm 114
Liber Usualis: Gregorian chant processional
BAIRSTOW: Let all mortal flesh keep silence
LOTTI: Crucifixus a 8
CASALS: O vos omnes
DURUFLÉ: Quatre Motets sur des thèmes grégoriens, Op.1
BRUCKNER: Christus factus est, WAB 11
MENDELSSOHN: Mitten wir in Leben sind, Op.23, No.3
MARTIN: Mass for Double Choir

 

Getting Economic Policy Right Actually Matters -- A Lot

It is said that the rise of Donald Trump to presumptive Republican Presidential nominee is the result of anger of the electorate with the Republican "establishment."  I certainly don't have any evidence to the contrary.  But the problem I have is that the term "Republican establishment" has been used to describe what I see as two distinct groups:  (1) one group consisting of a Washington power elite, including many Republican members of Congress and the Congressional leadership, whose interest is in maintaining a large and ineffective federal structure that passes out lots of money and favors (the money and favors of course going to "our people" rather than "their people"), together with businesses, lobbyists and consultants looking to get in on some of the money and favors; and (2) a second group consisting of a principled movement (including many Congresspersons -- mostly younger ones -- think tanks and, yes, many campaign donors) seeking to advance sound policy ideas of limited government, lessening of government restrictions on economic activity, lower taxes and lower spending.  

Admittedly there can be some overlap between the two groups, let alone substantial co-opting of members of group 2 into group 1.  Still, I think the distinction is critically important; but I'm not sure that Trump or his supporters see there being much of a distinction at all.  Certainly, the focus of Trump's presentation is on attacking the "establishment" and "political correctness," while over on the policy side his prescriptions are vaguely-defined and shifting.  What exactly does being a successful businessman who does "great deals" have to do with being a good President?  

At Town Hall today, economist Thomas Sowell reminds us of the last time we had a highly successful Republican businessman as President:  Herbert Hoover (1929-1933).  Sowell's column focuses more on foreign policy issues, but I'll look at the economic policy side.  It turns out that Hoover's main economic policies bear a remarkable resemblance to those proposed by Trump.  The two big ones were trade protectionism and raising wages by government coercion.  They led to disaster.

I don't know if they even teach kids any more about the Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930.  In my education -- both high school and college -- it was repeatedly cited as exactly what not to do in economic policy; but maybe today it has gone into a memory hole.  The economy had entered a recession by mid-1929, and the stock market crashed in October of that year.  But by spring 1930 the market was edging back to its levels of early 1929, and many were optimistic that recovery was beginning.  Then came the Smoot-Hawley tariff in June 1930.  Here is a brief history of the tariff from the Economist magazine.  Famously, a group of no less than 1,028 economists submitted a petition to Hoover urging him to veto the bill; but he signed it.  Then the bottom fell out of the economy.  Trade relations with other countries were soured, and many retaliated.  Imports to the United States proceeded to decline 40% from 1930 to 1932.  From a Wikipedia summary:

Frantic attempts to shore up the economies of individual nations through protectionist policies such as, the 1930 U.S. Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tariffs in other countries, exacerbated the collapse in global trade. . . .  By late 1930, a steady decline in the world economy had set in, which did not reach bottom until 1933. 

Then there was Hoover's policy on wages.  There was no federal minimum wage in 1929 (the first one at the federal level was adopted in 1933, immediately after he left), but that didn't stop Hoover from using government coercion to try to fix wages at above-market rates.  From a summary by economist Lee Ohanian in Forbes in 2009:

Hoover . . .  held [meetings] at the White House with major industry in late 1929 that included General Motors, Ford, U.S. Steel and DuPont, and advised them not to cut wages.  Hoover told industry that maintaining wage levels would minimize the severity of a downturn and help him keep peace with labor. . . .  Following these meetings, industry publicly acknowledged their compliance with Hoover’s wage program as they held wage rates fixed.  But declining prices and productivity, coupled with Hoover’s program of fixing wages, significantly increased industrial labor costs. Shortly after Hoover’s meetings, the industrial sector began to contract rapidly. Between October 1929 and September 1930, industrial hours worked had declined by nearly 30%.

Now I admit that it is not possible to segregate out any one or two things as being the only or even the main factors that caused the Great Depression or led to it being so long.  Some believe that other factors -- such as contraction of the money supply or failure of the government to enact a "stimulus" -- were of equal or more importance.  But few believe that the tariff and wage policies were not at least significant factors in bringing on and then prolonging the Depression.

In his four brief years, Hoover did enormous damage to the Republican brand.  The Republicans lost record numbers of Congressional seats to the Democrats in the 30s, and were locked out of the Presidency for 20 years.  As late the the 1980 election, the memory of the terrible economic times of the early 30s was still used against Reagan ("Hoover with a smile" according to Democrat House Speaker Tip O'Neill).  But Reagan's economic policy was the opposite of that of Hoover.

Trump?  While he has been unspecific, it is clear that trade protectionism, including increased tariffs, is something he plans to pursue.  And according to the Wall Street Journal this morning, Trump spoke favorably yesterday about raising the minimum wage.  How high?  No word.

But the experience of Hoover shows that it is very important to get economic policy right.  To help out Mr. Trump, I'm going to offer my economics lecture of the day.  The simple basis for all sound economic policy is the proposition that all wealth comes from people buying and selling stuff with each other (the term "stuff" here includes both goods and services).  The process of people buying and selling stuff (sometimes going under the name of "capitalism") may not lead to outcomes to everyone's liking, but it is just a fallacy to think that the government can increase wealth by imposing restrictions on people buying and selling stuff. 

In the area of trade, consider this.  Suppose you work for a company that makes widgets and sells them for $100 each.  Now someone in China figures out how to make the widgets there and deliver them to the U.S. for $90 each.  (Or it could be your own company that figures out how to make the widgets in China and get them to the U.S. for $90 each -- it doesn't make any difference.)  The fact is that the customers don't care where the widgets are made and they aren't going to pay more than $90 any more.  This is not a consequence of "bad trade deals."  It is an inevitable consequence of people having the freedom to buy and sell stuff as they see fit.  As for you, the market is telling you that your labor is too valuable to waste it making these widgets any more.  It may be a very painful process for you to find the next thing for yourself, but that doesn't mean that the market is wrong on this.   

But what is the alternative?  Over the years, what policymakers come up with over and over again is a tariff, and that also seems to be where Trump is going with China and Mexico.  Slap a $15 tariff on widgets from China, and suddenly your $100 widgets have a market again.  In fact, the owner of the business may even raise his price to $104.  I'm sorry, but this is a terrible idea.  For you, it means maybe you can hang on in your job for a few more years -- until somebody in China figures out how to make the widgets for $84.  Your wages meanwhile will surely stagnate.  Extra profits will go to the boss, not you, and some will go to the campaign contributions to the pols to keep the tariff in place and increase it.  Everybody else in America has to pay $14 extra for every widget they buy, making all those people poorer.  The higher value jobs that you and your colleagues could and should have found go undone.  And all of this is before China imposes some countervailing tariff on the United States.  Studies of tariffs always find that the costs to others in society exceed the value of jobs "saved" by huge multiples -- often $200,000 or $250,000 in cost per $40,000 job saved.  This is a total loser strategy.

Is there any chance that Trump can come to understand the disaster of tariffs and minimum wages?  Got me.                        

The One Thing That More Government Money Will Definitely Do Is Fail To Fix The Problem

I just can't get over the infinite naivete of the progressive mind in its belief that spending government money to fix a problem will actually fix the problem.  Can anybody name a single example where that has ever occurred?  Actually, it is completely impossible for a government agency to fix the problem it is supposed to address, because fixing the problem would run directly counter to the fundamental imperative of all bureaucratic agencies, which is to grow the agency and its staff and budget.  Bureaucratic agencies do not operate contrary to their fundamental imperative.  Period.

As just the tiny example for the day, consider the case of TSA and its airport security screening mission.  Think about the subject for as long as three seconds, and you will realize that forcing the public to wait in long and unpleasant lines is the surest way for TSA to put pressure on Congress and the President to grant it more staff and a bigger budget.  Suppose they get a big budget increase; what then?  The answer is that things may improve marginally for a few months, but then will immediately revert to the norm of long and unpleasant waits.  Hey, the tactic worked once!  Of course they will do it again!

And yet there we have the lead editorial of the New York Times today, "Safe Ways To Shorten Airport Security Lines."   And what, pray tell, is the answer?  Easy:  Give TSA more money!  And more staff!  And not just that:

In addition to more money, the T.S.A. needs greater flexibility to increase spending when demand for air travel surges. For example, Congress should allow the department to tap into more of the money the government collects from a security tax levied on tickets when traffic grows faster than projected. In the past, Congress has diverted some of that revenue to the general fund. . . .  [Also,] give local T.S.A. managers the power to spend more money on overtime during busy periods without consulting headquarters.

OK, you knew that was going to be the answer, because for the New York Times, more government money is the answer to every known human problem.  And what about the evidence that government spending always and everywhere makes worse the problems that it is supposed to solve?  Please, we can't be troubled looking at actual evidence.  

Along similar lines but on a more consequential scale, David Horowitz's Frontpage Magazine today has an article by John Perazzo titled "How The Liberal Welfare State Destroyed Black America."   It's a familiar story, often discussed here, but it needs to be repeated endlessly because with anything less than endless repetition it just doesn't ever seem to sink in.  Perazzo runs through evidence of how the massive liberal welfare state launched with the War on Poverty in the 60s -- $22 trillion in spending (constant 2012 dollars) over about 50 years! -- has made things worse for the black family on literally every dimension.  He covers the famiiar litany of poverty, child poverty, decline in marriage, and explosion in illegitimacy, particularly emphasizing improvements in these metrics pre-War on Poverty followed by precipitous deterioration post-War on Poverty.  

During the nine decades between the Emancipation Proclamation and the 1950s, the black family remained a strong, stable institution. Its cataclysmic destruction was subsequently set in motion by such policies as the anti-marriage incentives that were built into the welfare system. As George Mason University professor Walter E. Williams puts it: “The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn't do, what Jim Crow couldn't do, what the harshest racism couldn't do. And that is to destroy the black family.”

However, progressives get to feel really good about themselves because the government is spending boatloads of someone else's money to address the problem.

Annals Of New York Obliviousness

If you are looking to be entertained by a tidbit of New York obliviousness, you might want to check out the lead article from the New York Times Real Estate Section this past Sunday.  The headline is "When the Landlord Is a Friend."

As background, for my entire life, New York has been characterized by famously contentious relations between residential landlords and tenants.  Regular fodder for the local newspapers is the evil landlord who endlessly schemes to make his tenants' lives miserable and to harass them until they give up and leave the building.  In the middle of the winter the heat suddenly won't work.  A plumbing leak will go unrepaired for weeks.  The front door lock is mysteriously broken.  Eventually the tenant can't take it any more and is forced to depart into the wildly overpriced housing market.  Boo! Hiss!

Now, why would any businessman in his right mind treat a good (or even less than good) customer in such a reprehensible way?  This kind of thing is just about unheard-of in the rest of the United States outside New York.  What's so different about us?  (Here's a clue:  they have some of the same issues in San Francisco.)  The answer, of course, is that New York has rent regulation, keeping something around half of all apartment rents at below fair market value.  In some cases -- particularly in top Manhattan neighborhoods and where tenants have been in place for many years -- the rents can be very far below fair market value, sometimes by thousands of dollars per month.  The rules provide ways for a landlord to raise the rents up to market level, but usually only if the tenant leaves first.  You can now see how the incentive to get the tenant to move can be powerful.  Somehow, the geniuses who created rent regulation never thought that a 70-year war of attrition between landlords and tenants would be one of the consequences of their effort to achieve perfect fairness and justice through government fiat.

But over the past 20 years or so there has been an excruciatingly slow loosening of the rent regulation regime.  An extremely-restrictive system called "rent control" has been gradually supplanted by a somewhat-less-restrictive system called "rent stabilization."  De-regulation at vacancy became possible.  Some old buildings are demolished, and many new ones have no rent regulation.  Rental apartments in buildings that convert to condos become unregulated as tenants move out.  With these and other incremental changes, we have gradually, gradually gotten to a situation where the majority of the rental apartments are outside the regulation system.

And thus, just this past Sunday, the New York Times has discovered that it is actually possible for a landlord and a tenant in New York to be friends.  The long feature article is filled with examples of landlords going out of their way to be nice to tenants:  studying up on how heating systems work, personally doing plumbing repairs, even inviting the tenants over for beers!  Could dogs and cats be next to learn to live in peace?

Of course, if you read through the article with even a slightly critical eye, you will immediately realize that not one of the rental apartments being discussed is under the rent regulation system.  All are newly renovated or in very small buildings, things which would clearly mean that rent regulation does not apply.

But somehow, this being the New York Times, the subject of rent regulation (or lack thereof) being a reason why landlords and tenants can suddenly get along just fine never gets mentioned.   

"Money In Politics," Hillary, And The McDonnell Prosecution

Among the phony prosecutions pursued by the feds recent years, one of the flimsiest has to be the prosecution of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell.  Of course, he was convicted; and his conviction was affirmed by the Fourth Circuit.  His appeal reached the Supreme Court last week.  The smart money is betting on reversal.

Out on the campaign trail, we have Bernie and Hillary telling the world that if elected they will appoint Supreme Court justices to get the Citizens United case reversed, and then advocate for legislation to criminalize most if not all private "money in politics."  But meanwhile in the McDonnell prosecution we have a great illustration of how this strategy would not only not solve the alleged problem, but would make things far worse.  Granted, the facts of the McDonnell case are not pretty.  On the other hand, the more you get into those facts, the harder it is to figure out how, as long as we have privately funded political campaigns, every single politician in the country will not be equally subject to conviction under the same theory.  So from Bernie and Hillary we get the only remaining answer -- that only money from the government itself can remain in politics.  But wait a minute:  money coming from the government is far and away the most corrupt money of all, always and everywhere used to advocate for the growth in size and power of government and to oppose all attempts to rein the government in.  The disease may be bad, but the cure is far worse.

For the most favorable view of the facts of the McDonnell case from the government’s side, check out its brief here.  While he was governor of Virginia, McDonnell and his wife “solicited and secretly accepted more than $175,000 in money and luxury goods” from a businessman who wanted the state-controlled University of Virginia to conduct clinical tests on his company’s product.  In return, McDonnell allegedly talked up the product to various university officials, invited the businessman to a reception where university officials would be present, arranged meetings between some officials and the businessman, and followed up as to why nothing was happening with the businessman’s proposals.  But in the end the university declined to conduct the trials.

 McDonnell was convicted under 18 U.S.C. Section 201.  That section makes it a federal crime for a “public official” to “corruptly demand[ ], seek[ ], receive[ ], accept[ ], or agree[ ] to receive or accept anything of value . . . in return for . . .  being influenced in the performance of any official act.”  McDonnell’s lawyers rightly point out on appeal that the government cannot name the “official act” that McDonnell agreed to or did perform in return for the gifts.  Is setting up a meeting or talking up a product an “official act” that a politician cannot legally perform on behalf of anyone who has made a contribution to his campaigns? 

At scotusblog, Lyle Denniston has a report on the Supreme Court argument last Wednesday.  If the drift of the justices' questions proves a good predictor of the outcome, as it almost always does these days, McDonnell is very likely to get a reversal.  Justices from both sides of the political divide (Roberts, Breyer, Kennedy, Kagan) actively picked the conviction apart during the questioning.  Much of the questioning centered around what is the “limiting principle” that would make it such that not every elected official who arranges a meeting on behalf of a campaign contributor is guilty of a federal felony.  Seems that the Deputy Solicitor General who argued on behalf of the government didn't have a good answer to that one.

If you think that McDonnell's conduct really must be illegal somehow, consider this about President Obama from one of the amicus briefs filed on behalf of McDonnell (by the American Center for Law and Justice):

During President Obama’s reelection campaign, in 2012, Hoffman [founder of LinkedIn] and Pincus [founder of Zynga] each gave a million dollars to Priorities USA, the Democratic Super PAC. Since then, they have had the opportunity to spend time with Obama. In a private forty-five-minute meeting in the Oval Office in 2012, Pincus gave the President a presentation on what he calls “the product-management approach to government.” Obama telephones him now and then, sometimes at home, and Pincus and his wife have been Obama’s dinner guests.  In June, Hoffman helped organize the guest list for a dinner party for Obama in San Francisco, and he has had conversations with Obama at several meetings and dinners at the White House. 

Legal or illegal?  As a clue, it is not a sufficient answer to say "Obama controls the prosecutors, and therefore he will never be prosecuted for this."

Meanwhile back in New York, official corruption is all over the news.  U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, fresh off convictions of the two most powerful legislators in our state (Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos), has active investigations going of campaign fundraising practices of both Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio.  Bharara, of course, has been paying no attention whatsoever to the statutory requirement of some "official act" in return for the alleged pay-off.  The Skelos conviction, in particular, is on very weak ground.  The most important piece of Skelos's alleged crime was leaning on his friends in the government of Nassau County to approve a contract with a company that agreed to employ his son.  But Skelos himself had no official position with Nassau County, and no say in the approval of the contract.

In the New York Post yesterday, Nicole Gelinas asks if we are "tired of New York's pay-to-play politics," and laments that the Supreme Court may be "about to make it harder to secure corruption convictions."   Are New York's politics really more corrupt than those of any other state?  Sure they are, but in my view it's not because our politicians are any more corrupt, or really any different from the politicians anywhere else.  Nor is it because corruption convictions are too hard to obtain.  The difference in New York is that we have adopted full-blown progressivism; and therefore our government is bigger and more intrusive than that of any other state, and engages in massive state capital allocation, all in the effort supposedly to create perfect justice and fairness between and among all people, and to remove all downside risk from human life.  We merciless persecute our most successful businesses (banks, oil and gas) and periodically subject them to prosecutorial shakedowns, while doling out special permits and billion dollar handouts to loser businesses that only exist at the sufferance of politicians (casinos, solar, taxi medallions).  As a result, literally everyone in New York who has enough money to contribute noticeably to a political campaign has some "business before the state," and some interest in some state decision of some kind.  Cuomo takes money from people who want to ban fracking, or want approval of casinos, or want subsidies for solar panel factories; de Blasio takes money from the teachers' unions on the eve of a multi-billion-dollar contract settlement, or from people who want to ban horse-drawn carriages from Central Park, or from taxi medallion owners.  Are any of these "bribes"?  How do you tell?

So what's the answer?  We can have the Hillary/Bernie answer, where we do away with the First Amendment, nobody is allowed to push back against the growth of the government, and the only "money in politics" is government money.  Then the only voice we will be allowed to hear is the voice of government agencies seeking to expand their own budgets and power: the billion dollar government advertising campaigns to expand Obamacare; the EPA taxpayer-funded social media astroturf campaigns to generate hundreds of thousands of fake letters supposedly supporting EPA regulatory initiatives; the massive government promotion of expansion of food stamp dependency; the government fake "food insecurity" surveys fraudulently designed to sell the American people on the idea that millions are hungry; the government "anti-poverty" programs specifically structured to keep poverty high so that the public can be sold on yet more "anti-poverty" spending; the phony GDP accounting that fraudulently pretends that the most wasteful government spending is a 100% addition to GDP rather than a subtraction; etc., etc., etc. 

Or we can reduce (although not eliminate) "pay-to-play culture" and corruption in politics by shrinking the footprint of government.   

What's The Best Way To Reduce Poverty?

What is the best way to reduce poverty in America?  Anyone who follows the subject at all will immediately know the answer: the best way to reduce poverty in America is to reduce government "anti-poverty" programs.  If that seems counter-intuitive to you, it can only be because you do not follow the subject at all.  Those who follow the subject know that government "anti-poverty" programs are universally designed and structured to keep the beneficiaries in poverty, because the benefits encourage dependency and discourage work, and also do not count as "income."  Keeping the poverty rate high is the first priority of the "anti-poverty" bureaucracies, who need large numbers of poor people to justify their staffs and their budgets.  Call them the "Welfare Blob."

The public got introduced to this subject by the mid-90s welfare reform enacted by the then-new Republican Congress and President Clinton.  When Congress in 1996 instituted work requirements and time limits for basic welfare, many on the left predicted soaring poverty and disaster for the poor; but instead measured poverty (particularly among the key population of black children) immediately and rapidly declined.  Here is a chart from the Heritage Foundation showing that decline in the late 90s:

View fullsize

But the Welfare Blob was not so easily vanquished, and immediately went to work to re-establish itself.  Fortunately for them, they had 80 or more government dependency programs to work to expand silently and mostly out of sight from the public.  Here we are 20 or so years after the big welfare reform, and many of those other programs have exploded.  

As Exhibit A for today's lesson, we have what was once known as "Food Stamps," now "SNAP."  In 2000 it had 17 million beneficiaries and a budget of about $17 billion; by 2015 it was 46 million beneficiaries and a budget of over $74 billion.  That's some serious growth!  A big part of the growth came from changes after Obama's election, particularly loosening eligibility requirements and making it so that able-bodied single adults could get on food stamps and stay on them indefinitely without any work requirements.  The Obama administration also made a big push to promote food stamps and get as many people on them as possible.  (I reported on that here.)

Well, now food stamps are in the news, and for a very good reason.  A couple of states -- Kansas and Maine -- decided that they had had enough of indefinite work-free eligibility for able-bodied single adults, and so have reinstituted work requirements and time limits for people in that category.  And the result?  Of course, it is an immediate and dramatic decline not only of the number of program participants, but also in the poverty rate in the affected population.  Kansas started its program reductions in 2013, and now has three years of experience under its belt.  Here are some data from a Report from something called the Foundation for Accountability in Government:

The number of able-bodied adults who are in poverty has dropped significantly as more and more able-bodied adults have found work. Before Kansas’ welfare reforms, just 7 percent of the adults who left food stamps in December 2013 were above the poverty line.  They were not just in marginal poverty, either: nearly 84 percent were in severe poverty, earning less than half of the poverty line.  And even among those who were working, more than 80 percent were in poverty. . . .  Within a year of leaving food stamps, the number of able-bodied adults living in poverty dropped significantly and roughly half of those working climbed out of poverty entirely.  The average income among these working, able-bodied adults was just $6,730 per year prior to Kansas’ reforms.  But within a year of leaving food stamps, average income among workers grew to $13,304 per year.  This means that the average income among those working is now above the poverty line.     

OK, there is some naivete there, particularly failing to give any recognition to the possibility that many of the people may have worked in the illegal and/or underground economy while they were on food stamps.  Still, the results are dramatic.

In Maine, the time limit and work requirement changes came later, December 2014.  So there is only a year of experience, and I have not been able yet to find data on poverty reduction.  However, the number of able-bodied adults without dependents on food stamps experienced an immediate and drastic reduction, from 13,332 in December 2014 to 1,886 in September 2015, according to a Heritage Foundation report here.   A reasonable expectation would be that half or more of the people who lost the food stamp benefits will leave poverty within a year.

Needless to say, the Welfare Blob cannot abide the existential threat to its existence posed by these kinds of changes that reveal that the "anti-poverty" programs actually increase poverty.  In this post back in 2013 I compared the desperate campaigns of the Blob to maintain every last dollar of "anti-poverty" spending to the Brezhnev Doctrine, named after 60s-to-80s-era Soviet superthug Leonid Brezhnev.  The Brezhnev Doctrine held that any nation or territory that once fell within the communist orbit must never exit, the logic being that if anyone could escape then the whole house of cards would be in imminent danger of collapse. 

As the data from Kansas and Maine have started to come out, the Blob has sprung into action.  On April 1 the New York Times ran a big scare article with the title "Thousands Could Lose Food Stamps as States Restore Pre-Recession Requirements."  (Yes, it was April Fools' Day, but I think they were serious.)  The article contains quotes from advocates working for places with names like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Food Research and Action Center, and using words like "hard hit" and "cruel."  Of course the article does not mention the intentional cruelty of the Welfare Blob of trapping people in poverty in order to maintain jobs and perks for bureaucrats.  

And then we have the op-ed in yesterday's Wall Street Journal from former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Diane Schanzenbach of something called the Hamilton Project, titled "In Defense of Federal Food Aid."  Rubin and Schanzenbach again fail to mention the effect of food stamps of trapping people for years in poverty.  Instead, they turn to perhaps the most fraudulent of all the fraudulent government statistics, the so-called "food insecurity" data, to justify maintaining the bloated current levels of food stamps:

The rate of food insecurity in the U.S. spiked during the Great Recession and it continues to remain unconscionably high in the world’s wealthiest nation. In 2014, according to the Agriculture Department, nearly one in five U.S. households with children—a total of 15.3 million children—were food insecure, which means at some point during the year they lacked adequate food.

Do you think that if Bob Rubin signs his name to something you can trust it?  In fact, this statement is blatantly false.  The government "food insecurity" statistic comes from the answer in a survey to this question:

“We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more.” Was that often, sometimes, or never true for you in the last 12 months?   

"We worried whether our food would run out before we got money to buy more" is obviously not at all the same thing as "we lacked adequate food."  Indeed, the "food insecurity" question has been specifically designed to elicit a positive answer from most or all food stamp recipients (who are likely to "worry" that they might "run out" of food, since the design of the program requires that they manage a budgeted monthly amount) and thus to remain at a high and stable level no matter how much food aid is dispensed and how much money the taxpayers spend on the project.  The Wall Street Journal should be embarrassed that they ran this op-ed.

Meanwhile, the reductions in poverty from the reductions in the food stamp program are a very small piece of the puzzle.  Poverty could be hugely reduced through massive reduction in "anti-poverty" programs across the board, but that is not currently in the works.