Daily Archives: 19 August 2026

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.