SNAP Reforms

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The Senate’s Progressive-Democrats object to States having even minimal fiscal responsibility for managing Federal outlays to them for welfare programs. Their latest objections concern reforms to SNAP payments. Currently, the Federal government forks over 100% of the funding for a State’s SNAP program, and the State is solely responsible for disbursing those funds to eligible recipients. The current reforms, enacted last year, require those States with error rates—paying out to fraudulent recipients, for instance—above a low level (10%) to begin picking up a small part of the SNAP tab, with effect in 2028.

Progressive-Democrat Senators, en masse, object, and they’re blocking a farm bill unless they get that deadline extended. Their real goal is to functionally eliminate the deadline.

There is an alternative that would render this sort of Progressive-Democrat…foolishness…moot, and it’s one I’ve proposed before. Maybe its time has come, in response to Party’s studied intransigence to any reform that would reduce dependency on Party government.

Designate a nearby year as Year0, and add up all the Federal funds transfers for any purpose to each State in that year. Lump that sum into a single payment for the year. In each subsequent year, reduce that lump sum payment by 10% of the Year0 transfer, until the transfer is reduced, in about 10 years, to $0.00.

Federal transfers—taxpayer dollars—in general should not be getting made to any State except in exigent circumstances. The good citizens of Texas should not see their tax remittances pushed on over to New York or California. The good citizens of New York and California should not see their remittances relayed to Illinois or Iowa. Each State and territory in our union should keep its citizens’ tax remittances solely for the benefit of that State’s/territory’s citizens.

Exigent circumstances: when a State-wide or region-wide emergency arises that’s beyond the resources of that State or region, then Federal transfers (a going in allocation, to start the discussion, would be 50% grant and 50% loan at market interest rates) would be an appropriate means of assisting the State or region in dealing with the emergency.

The Evils of Dynamic Pricing

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At least according to Massachusetts’ Progressive-Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren.

To hear Senator Elizabeth Warren tell it, dynamic pricing is the biggest scam since Madoff. She has her war bonnet in a twist at the idea that brick-and-mortar retailers could do what e-commerce sellers have been doing for decades.

The trouble with her position is that all pricing in a free market economy is dynamic, as Hennessey pointed out in his article. Warren is pretending that she’s only talking about prices being changed in “real time,” but she carefully declines to specify what time frame constitutes “real time.”

The only time frame within which it would be wrong to change pricing, though, is between price agreement and delivery of the product to the specific purchaser, as illustrated in a couple of dumba** TV ads involving pizza delivery and hamburger joint ordering (even though the latter’s price changes occur before the customer makes his order).

Canceling dynamic pricing, though, is strongly consistent with the Senator’s socialist goal of government controlling production, which would give, also, control over pricing to government.

Next up: Warren comes out against dynamic pricing in the stock and bond markets. That’s the epitome of prices changing across traders, where one trader gets one price, and another trader gets another for the same product. That’s a fast-moving environment, though, where traders acting at different times, even measured in seconds, will get differing prices, and an environment (now slightly different from dynamic pricing per se) where traders offer different prices within the same bid-ask spread. Even in the stock and bond market, though, the agreed prices don’t change in the time between acceptance and fulfillment. But a freely operating stock or bond market (much less both) is anathema to a socialist.

Hate Speech According to Leftists

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The latest example is provided by the Portland, Oregon, Portland Public Schools school district. The district has banned a mother

from her children’s school for a year because she engaged in sidewalk advocacy against its secret gender curriculum and social transitions of gender-confused students, claiming her “hate speech” violated its harassment policy….

That ban included preventing her from witnessing her son’s graduation from Meriwether Lewis Elementary School. Her daughter remains at risk of the school’s indoctrination program, a program of which the school district is so embarrassed, I surmise, that it felt constrained to keep it hidden away from concerned parents.

Regardless of the district’s apparent embarrassment over its program, or its dishonest desire to keep its treatment of the parents’ children from them, it has made its attitude toward speech very clear with the ban and its claimed reason for it.

Hate speech, according to the district, is any speech that disagrees with its Leftist ideology. Contra the Just the News characterization of the school district’s position, though, this attitude—toward free speech and toward transgender abuse of children—isn’t far-left; it’s increasingly becoming mainstream Left.

My Personal Experience Says Otherwise

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Matthew Hennesey, writing in the WSJ‘s Free Expression columns, was concerned about the heavy exposure to the unbridled freedom of everything being abundant and—from the student’s perspective—free and how this gives those still impressionable minds a false sense of the effectiveness of socialism to the point that it seems like to each according to his wants and from each according to what he feels like giving. And then the child faces the world as it is after “graduation” [my euphemism quotes].

College is where young people get a first taste of living on their own. But it’s a false freedom. The cost of things most adults must budget and pay for—food, transportation, housing, entertainment, even laundry—is bundled on campus. There are no price signals. Everything comes out of the big payment made before the semester starts. And who picks that up? Mom, Dad, and maybe Sallie Mae.
…As a result, “they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.” Everything feels free. When, after graduation, these kids hit the real world, the shock is too much to bear. They have no sense of opportunity costs and trade-offs. They revert to a defense of the all-inclusive economic program they know and love.

The ill discipline, though, is a mark of the degradation of parenting as well as of the schools themselves. My first two years in college, I lived within the allowance my parents gave me. That upfront cost? One semester of each of those two years came from the fruits of my summer jobs. My second two years, I had no parental allowance, I had USAF Sgt’s pay courtesy of an ROTC scholarship. The upfront cost, though, was entirely picked up by the USAF, via my ROTC scholarship.

Nothing in the book store, from books to froo-froo to junk food was free the entire time. Nothing in the student union was free, also. The school’s cafeteria only served lunch and supper, no snacks or anything of the like. Nothing between meals. Snacks could be purchased in the student union or in the book store. The cafeteria might have served breakfast, too, but I wasn’t eating breakfast so I never noticed.

Now helicopter parents or lazily uninvolved parents—no middle ground constituting a measure of parental responsibility—ruin their kids before they get to college, and colleges now coddle those children while burying all of the costs in those upfront payments that the students never experience and indoctrinating them rather than teaching them.

Rationing Energy

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It seems that the cost of energy to end users—us average Americans and our businesses—is higher in Progressive-Democrat-run States than in Republican-run ones.

Always On Energy Research and the Institute for Energy Research…completed an analysis of electricity rates and found that residents of blue states see higher electricity bills than those of red states.

Tom Pyle, Institute for Energy Research President:

While there are many factors that influence electricity rates, the one constant we see is that states that have pursued climate or net-zero policies above all else have some of the highest rates in the country[.]

For example,

California mandates 100% carbon-free electricity by 2045 and operates a cap-and-trade program, while its average electricity price has climbed from 16.6 to 27.6 cents per kilowatt-hour since 2018 [2nd highest in the US]. New York requires a zero-emissions grid by 2040, and its average price has risen from 14.8 to 21.6 cents per kilowatt-hour [8th highest in the US][.]

Other Progressive-Democrat States, from the report:

  • Hawaii’s average electricity price was 35.72 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, highest in the US (excluding DC)
  • Rhode Island’s average electricity price was 25.86 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 3rd highest
  • Connecticut’s average electricity price was 25.68 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 4th highest
  • Massachusetts’s average electricity price was 25.56 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 5th highest

By contrast,

  • North Dakota’s average electricity price was 8.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 51st highest—lowest in the US, even including DC
  • Oklahoma’s average electricity price was 9.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, lowest in the US, back to not counting DC
  • Louisiana’s average electricity price was 9.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 2nd lowest
  • Nebraska’s average electricity price was 9.55 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 3rd lowest
  • Idaho’s average electricity price was 9.74 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 4th lowest
  • Wyoming’s average electricity price was 9.75 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2025, 5th lowest

Beyond mere rankings, those are some pretty significant dollar differences in costs.

Mandating “green” sources for producing energy, which results in increasingly unreliable energy production and delivery, which results in increasingly unreliable energy at the end user level—that’s functionally rationing energy, even if that’s not the goal of the green funding industry, although the goal of the climate funding industry affirmatively goes much farther: the bankrupting of hydrocarbon-sourced energy producers. The only distinction here is that the rationing isn’t on the demand and price side, rather it’s on the supply side.

And as any pupil in a high school economics class understands, limiting supply without concomitant reduction in demand—via whatever mechanism—produces increasing prices to those end users.

This is what Progressive-Democrats running those blue States studiously ignore as they blithely enact mandate after mandate to use more “green” energy, use less hydrocarbon energy, limit atmospheric CO2 emissions, participate in cap and trade emissions programs, or some combination of them all.