Winging It
Welfare
American politicians from both parties love to give lip service to fighting poverty. Republicans have been known to characterize poverty as a moral failing, for which the prescription is bootstraps and heterosexual marriage. Democrats point to the many anti-poverty programs they’ve enacted over the last hundred years, proposing few new policies that would do much to upend the status quo.
The COVID-19 pandemic created an unusual set of circumstances for the social safety net, and materially changed circumstances for the nation’s poor. First, the Trump administration injected a couple trillion dollars into the economy, nearly $800 billion of which went to ‘super unemployment’ benefits for the jobless. The government sent checks to families, paused student loan payments, and provided rental, eviction, and housing assistance to some of the poorest Americans. The amount of cash provided in various forms of welfare was so impactful it cut the poverty rate by nearly half in 2021 - for at least a few months.
Under Biden’s rescue bills, SNAP food program benefits were increased, the Child Tax Credit was expanded, and Medicaid benefits were boosted to help the poor receive better health care. Again, all these programs had positive effects on food security, child welfare, and health outcomes (minus, you know, the global pandemic that’s killed over a million Americans and continues to kill a couple hundred a day.)
This month, however, the federal government shut off the enhanced SNAP benefits for the 32 states who still provided them - 18 Republican-run states had already cut them off, for whatever reason. Despite attempts to gut the program more than ten percent of the country is on SNAP. And, contrary to the belief that only poor and homeless rely on SNAP, it inordinately effects children and seniors:
Now, with those emergency allotments cut off, the average recipient will get about $90 less per month in food aid than they’d been getting for over two years; a family of four could see their monthly benefit cut by about $328 a month; and seniors could see their benefits drop from $281 a month to just $23. An estimated 31 million Americans have now been thrown off what’s been called “the hunger cliff.”
And, as usual, racial minorities are hit hardest:
One study from the Urban Institute found that the extra allotments kept 4.2 million people above the poverty line in the last quarter of 2021. That reduced poverty by 10 percent, and child poverty by 14 percent. The reduction in poverty rates was highest for Black and Latino populations.
SNAP benefits are being cut as the nation is experiencing the highest cost of groceries in history, as food producers and grocers prop them up through greedflation, despite the supply chains they previously blamed having been largely unsnarled. Families losing their SNAP are going to have to make less money go farther at a time when groceries are more expensive than they’ve ever been. Food banks in states that cut SNAP early have been overwhelmed, and the rest of the country’s charities are bracing for the worst.
This did not have to happen, of course. The SNAP expiry was a bi-partisan effort, with Democrats conceding to Republican extortion demands around passing a budget to prevent a government shutdown, last year while Democrats still controlled both houses of Congress. The Dems have also allowed the Child Tax Credit and expanded unemployment to expire under their watch, rather than fight for these two wildly popular programs.
It’s unclear why the party that passed such sweeping reforms has refused to champion them, because despite Beltway opinion on the popularity of welfare programs, polls show the majority of Americans were supportive of the SNAP increases.
Medicaid, too, is set to kick as many as 14 million people off its rolls when Biden ends the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (lol) later this year. The pandemic has become endemic, and public health systems remain strained to the breaking point, but hey, why not say the emergency is over and kick five percent of the nation’s poor off their meager health insurance?
The most plausible explanation for why the Biden administration is doing all of this is the upcoming budget and debt ceiling fights - this week he unveiled a new budget that claims to strengthen social programs and combat the debt boogeyman. It’s all a bit convenient given his party just lost control of Congress and won’t be able to pass any of it. The fringe Republican Freedom Caucus has responded to the Dem’s ludicrous olive branch of balanced budgets with demands to roll back essentially everything the administration has done, so I’m sure that’ll end well. In the mean time, millions of children are sliding back into food insecurity and poverty, and millions more are losing some or all of the basic services they’d come to enjoy over the last two years. All because Dems are afraid to be seen supporting welfare programs, despite those programs being quite popular! Cool stuff.
Climate
One thing America will spend money on is corporate handouts. Last year’s hilariously titled Inflation Reduction Act included $369 billion dollars’ worth of climate provisions. The idea was to spur investment in clean energy, with the goal of de-carbonizing the economy. So who are some of the first companies at the trough, scooping up fed dollars to go green? Fucking oil companies, of course:
Oil companies are starting to plough cash into projects to capture and lock away carbon dioxide, to retool refineries for making biofuels, and produce low-emission hydrogen, all supported by the IRA’s green subsidies.
“There’s a lot of activity in this space, a lot of interest, particularly with the IRA,” ExxonMobil chief executive Darren Woods told investors last month.
Is there, Darren? Maybe if your company hadn’t covered up and lied about reports of the climate impact of its god damned business for fifty years, we’d have more of a head start, eh?
One thing oil companies produce a lot of at their drilling and refining plants is carbon. So it’s no surprise their lobbyists convinced Oil Industry BFF Joe Manchin to include carbon capture credits in the IRA, while they fought the bill:
Even as they opposed the legislation, oil companies and trade groups lobbied centrist West Virginia Democrat senator Joe Manchin, one of its architects, to include tax credits for carbon capture, hydrogen and biofuels alongside wind, solar and battery power incentives. API supported tax credits for carbon capture.
Who better to capture the carbon at a dirty petroleum refinery than…the owner of the refinery! And they can use those juicy carbon credits to offset their other carbon emissions, and convince investors they’re carbon neutral or whatever - a claim the climate villains at Saudi ARAMCO are making…because they don’t count any of the carbon their oil generates after they sell it, obviously.
Companies are being paid by the government for carbon capture technology that hasn’t even been proven to work yet:
Direct air capture, a promising but so-far unproven carbon management technology, is eligible for a tax credit of up to $180 a tonne under the IRA.
BP’s US boss Dave Lawler told the Financial Times the company was “really excited” about the IRA and that the climate law made the US the “most lucrative” place in the world for green hydrogen development.
It sure is! When you can get guaranteed dollars from the government for sketchy-at-best carbon cleanup efforts, that’s good business. Even companies trying earnestly to wrestle with the carbon capture and storage problem are putting out estimates that sound as shaky as their tech:
[Chris] Kendall believes Denbury will be pumping 50mn-70mn tonnes of CO₂ a year into underground storage by 2030, more than the roughly 40mn tonnes that are captured and stored globally each year.
I mean that’s cool and all, but that’s also nearly a decade away? In the mean time, billions of dollars are being invested in unproven methods of lessening the impact of the oil and gas industry…without actually forcing them to move away from their core dirty businesses. I am sure glad they passed a third of a trillion dollars in subsidies for these folks while taking away food and health care for the poor.
Beer
Okay that’s enough doom and gloom for one week. Let’s talk about shitty beer:
BBB National Programs’ National Advertising Division, an ad-industry self-regulatory group, determined that Molson Coors Beverage Co. should stop marketing its light beer products by implying that those produced by rivals have little or no flavor.
A thing I did not know is that the US has a National Advertising Division which, despite sounding governmental and official, is not. It is a voluntary group that a lot of large brands belong to, and its decisions are not legally binding, though said brands nearly always comply with its findings. It’s basically a neutral forum for large companies to go and complain about the marketing tactics of their rivals.
Listen, my disdain for the advertising business is no big secret (despite or perhaps due to the fact I work in it) but it is kind of…wholesome? that large brands have a little Model UN where they argue that they shouldn’t be saying nasty things about each other, because it’s rude to say ‘Coors Light? Tastes like stale urine!’ even if it’s a true statement.
I do love a good brand dispute, though, and I find myself extremely curious what other sorts of cases the NAD hears - apparently they review as many as 150 in a year! Wow!
Many cases concern the telecommunications industry. AT&T Inc. in 2020 agreed to stop using the phrase “5G evolution” in its marketing after a decision from the National Advertising Division, while Verizon Communications Inc. this month said it would appeal the group’s instructions to discontinue the tagline “You need a better network.”
Wait, they can appeal too? And it actually goes before a panel of their peers?
Those that do go before a panel of five people drawn from the National Advertising Review Board, which is composed of around 80 marketing executives and academics.
Delightful! How do I get on this jury? I’ve got experience! It’s not all gentlemen’s disagreements, though. If the board’s decisions are ignored, the will absolutely rat you out to the FTC:
Those that don’t comply with its findings are referred to the Federal Trade Commission, which will often review business practices beyond the ads in question, she said.
It does make sense that with government agencies underfunded and stretched to their limits when they aren’t being stripped of their authority by the courts, the Brands would get together and dispense their own frontier justice. Really, it’s for all of our sakes, because it’d really ruin the experience of drinking a light beer if we saw too many ads saying they didn’t taste good.
Wings
What goes great with shitty beer? Shitty wings!
According to the complaint, which was filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, the fast-food chain has knowingly deceived customers by presenting the fare as de-boned chicken wings, when in reality, the item is simply “slices of chicken breast meat deep-fried like wings.” The plaintiff, Chicago resident Aimen Halim, says the “boneless wings” are more akin to chicken nuggets, unbeknownst to Buffalo Wild Wing customers.
I am not sure Bee Dub would call itself a fast food chain, as it’s definitely more of a place you sit down to consume high calorie, deep fried meat and potatoes, but whatever. This may seem like a trivial complaint, dear reader, and I assure you that it is, but it is still very fun:
“… Surely, if Buffalo Wild Wings was being transparent with its customers, it could readily change the name of the Products (e.g., ‘boneless chicken’), or disclose on its menu that the Products are actually made of chicken breast meat. Indeed, several of Buffalo Wild Wings’ competitors are careful to name their products ‘Boneless Chicken’ or ‘Chicken poppers,’ rather than ‘Boneless Wings,’ to prevent consumers from being misled.”
Surely! Surely!! How dare Buffalo Wild Wings label one of its many, similarly colored and textured products ‘wings’ while giving no thought to the impact this could have on its customers, who presumably are led to believe the restaurant has patented some kind of miraculous technology that can debone a chicken wing and create a perfect little nugg.
The plaintiff’s lawyers go on to accuse the chain of profiteering off the product’s status as a ‘wing’, because if it were simply a boneless popper it would be worth less money? I don’t really understand the argument, since don’t wings have less meat on them?
Let’s compare: BWW’s Boneless Not-Quite-Wings are 10 for $12.99. Dominos sells 8 pieces of its Boneless Chicken for $9.99 (for pick-up). That’s a difference per piece of…five cents? Chili’s - another mid market sit down restaurant that…also has Boneless Wings on the menu (???!!!) charges $11.89 for an unknown number of Wings. I don’t know if BWW is really greedflating the fried chicken breast pieces game here.
Also! If you order a portly thirty BWs at BWW, the price drops below $1.20 per, making them cheaper than Domino’s. Fuck!
Anyhow, as an active cheerleader for food lawsuits, I support greedy class action lawyers filling up federal court dockets with spurious nonsense like this, mostly because it gives federal judges less time to do things like declare contraceptive pills un-Constitutional, and it probably makes the judges miserable too, which they deserve.
Short Cons
The Atlantic - “The collective result of these maneuvers is that the Court now has more discretion to say with constitutional permanence what national policy is, how future policy gets made, and who decides what’s in and what’s out. And the justices keep choosing themselves.”
ABC News - “Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese billionaire with business ties to Steve Bannon, has been arrested on federal charges out of New York.”
Mississippi Today - “Gov. Tate Reeves’ wife Elee Reeves wrote a children’s book about a turtle named Fred. The governor’s office then quietly gave $10,000 in federal Head Start funds to a new nonprofit called Hope Rising Mississippi, launched by some of the same members of a failed former child welfare initiative, to pay for printing thousands of copies of the book.”
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