Buying Soda while on SNAP

Driftglass recently wrote about blackouts on progressive radio, yes in bigger cities there are left-leaning stations that actually broadcast progressive content, that dovetailed into a larger point he made on the podcast. He and Bluegal talked about how liberal podcasts and other media took a Christmas vacation while fox news was still in high gear and flogging a UUUGE STORY ABOUT FOOD STAMP FRAUD! Never mind that it was obviously fake, right wing media took a huge steaming shit in the mouths of their viewers that conveniently feeds into authoritarian stereotypes about handouts, fraud, freeloaders, and what skin tone the deviant "takers" possess. Right on time to feed into the "debate" about inevitable cuts, if not outright death, of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that will soon be taking place in the federal government. Or perhaps they knew that the New York Times would soon be publishing a story about those awful poor people buying luxuries like soda with food stamps, and the "fraud" frame would already be activated in the republican lizard brain.

The response to Anahad O'Connor's article in the NYT will get considerably less circulation that the original mugwump poor-shaming article, but The Center for American Progress did share it to their Facebook page, so hat tip to them because I never would have found it otherwise. Talk Poverty is a project of CAP that I had not heard of previously but under that byline Rebecca Vallas and Katherine Gallagher Robbins take the NYT to task for misrepresenting what the study actually said. I am presenting my comments on it in a vain attempt to draw more attention to the topic of contempt for the weak, which Umberto Eco included as part of point 10 of eternal fascism and which will continue to play the central role of our new white nationalist regime.

O'Connor's article is an attempt to discipline the poor, as Richard Hofstadter would have well recognized from his study of the Mugwump faction of the GOP during the Gilded Age. This is elite, shall we say "aristocratic", liberalism that wanted to take governing and legislating away from those icky partisans while forcing the working class to behave in a manner that the aristocrats approve of. Thomas Frank translated the idea of Mugwumpism from Hofstadter's study to today's heroic anti-tobacco crusaders and noble knights in the fight against sugary drinks by writing:

it reminds us of something about the patrician strain of reform he represents–that we have seen politicians like Bloomberg before. During the nineteenth century, a long string of saintly aristocrats fought to reform the state and also to adjust the habits and culture of working-class people. These two causes were the distinctive obsessions of the wealthy liberals of the day: government must be purified, and working people must learn to behave. They had to be coerced into giving up bad habits. They had to learn the ways of thrift and hard work. There had to be sin taxes. Temperance. Maybe even prohibition.

On the other hand, conservatives extol the virtues of junk food and sugary soda in particular. But only if you are hard-working and preferably white. Same goes for cigarettes, fast food, and alcohol. Like just about everything though, the contradiction is so wide you can drive a truck through it. If you are white and conservative, junk food is your reward for working. If you are poor, then you had better be dressing in rags, and eating nothing but bread and water. And how dare you mooch off the hard-working whites with food stamps. Again, this is the "don't breed 'em if you can't feed 'em" crowd who hates abortion, contraception, and family planning... for the poor. The corollary to Mugwumpism is "fuck you, starve." "Soon," the trump voter thinks, "those illegals, welfare queens, and big buck thugs will understand that their place is to serve me the fast food and bow their heads while doing it."


The point of the original article from the NYT was to spark outrage that poor people spend a greater proportion of their grocery budget (i.e. the money they steal from white conservatives in the form of SNAP) on soda. The title was In the Shopping Cart of a Food Stamp Household: Lots of Soda

 and the accompanying pictures were a cart full of two liters and a presumably poor person standing in the soda aisle at a grocery store. But... the actual difference, what the USDA actually found... with empirical evidence? SNAP families spend 5% of their budgets on soda. Versus 4% for non-SNAP. Put that into perspective, if you spend $100 a week on groceries for your family, that's basically a 12-pack of soda.

But you can bet that this bullshit article will be cited liberally when it is time to start cutting spending to justify those tax cuts. And oh boy oh boy are republican governors and state legislators going to have a ball deciding what poor people are allowed to buy with SNAP when the USDA is firmly under republican control.