Jasmine's Foodstamp Challenge Grocery list

Jasmine says: "What’s in the picture/the $58 breakdown:

1.      a dozen eggs  ($3)

2.      4 lbs potatoes ($3)

3.      1 lb broccoli ($2)

4.      1 lb green peppers ($2)

5.      1.5 lbs tomatoes ($3)

6.      1.5 lbs onions ($2)

7.      2 lbs carrots ($2)

8.      a head of cauliflower ($3)

9.      a small butternut squash ($1.5)

10.  a head of garlic (50¢)

11.  a bunch of cilantro ($1)

12.  a can of sardines ($2)

13.  a package of sausage ($3.75 after 75¢ coupon)

14.  a small brick of cheddar cheese ($2)

15.  1 lb black beans  ($1.5)

16.  1 lb red lentils ($1.5)

17.  2 lbs brown rice ($2)

18.  a small container of rolled oats ($2)

19.  a bag of white flour ($2)

20.  18 corn tortillas ($1.5)

21.  9 macintosh apples ($2)

22.  1 lb white spaghetti ($1)

23.  7 days’ worth of coffee beans ($5)

24.  1 lb tofu ($2)

25.  1 lb frozen peas ($1)

26.  a container of plain yogurt ($2)

27.  a jar of roasted red peppers ($1)

28.  a small bottle of olive oil  ($3 on sale)

Total= $58.25

            "Looking at this picture and this list, it might seem like we’re Gwyneth Paltrowing the challenge because we have so many vegetables. In fact, this will represent a reduction in our normal vegetable intake. I like to have vegetables in my eggs most mornings (like a slice of frittata) as well as vegetables at lunch and dinner, but on this budget, though we can each have an egg for five of the breakfasts and one dinner, we can’t have two eggs and we probably can’t have anything in them. For the most part, our lunches will be leftovers from dinner, which is how we normally eat, but breakfasts will be smaller and totally rely upon the bread and pancakes I will make myself.

            "The most meaningful dollar value on the list is $2 for the bag of flour. If I had to buy bread for our breakfasts, lunches and dinners we would have to get rid of a lot of the food there. We will probably eat two large loaves of regular bread and two flatbreads to go with the dal we will have for one dinner and one lunch. I bought white flour because it’s half as expensive (although we normally use mostly whole wheat), and because I wanted more money for vegetables or dairy or things to go with the bread. It’s a small difference, but it shows that even when you’re willing to do all your own baking you can still be stifled into less-healthy choices by this brutal budget.

            "As Republicans often say, and have even said in reference to their reducing SNAP benefits, difficult choices have to be made. Dan would not hear of no or worse coffee. Thus we have no sweets at all (and not nearly enough fruit to stand in for dessert). I will be giving up herbal and black tea for the week as it does not fit into the budget, which for me is much more of a sacrifice than a chocolate here and there after dinner. Then there are the things that SNAP doesn’t cover, which we are just lucky enough to be able to afford. How would we pay for toilet paper, toothpaste, shampoo, cat food and cat litter? Would we have to sell our cat? Would we have to pay someone to take our cat?

            "The last note is almost too tender a nerve to be touched directly or said openly. SNAP does not cover alcohol. And while we will still use toilet paper and feed our cat, we will not drink of the vine for a week. And there have been many times I was short of money when I made just the opposite choice. But that’s the point of this challenge: the benefits don’t give you choices, and the more you need them, the fewer choices you have. A person down on his or her luck might want a bottle of wine more than a week’s worth of oatmeal, or be willing to sacrifice a few days’ food to have something swell like a steak once in a while, but when you’re starving you likely don’t think like that, and you certainly don’t when your kids are hungry."

Stay tuned for menu details as meals commence (dinner Friday, Oct 2 is the first), as well as thoughts from Jasmine on how time spent on food, cooking, and shopping with her mom as a kid affects her thinking about cooking, food budgets, and this challenge.

Foodstamp Challenge requisite food picture

Here's the photo of Jasmine, our $58 worth of food, and the GoogleDocs (Thanks, Google!) spreadsheet she used to budget it all:

Jasmine & Dan: the Foodstamp Challenge for Bernie

In addition to thinking about how this quarter's fundraising totals show the spreading devotion of people to a real leader like Bernie, rather than a focus-grouped construction, we can also think about the thrift of the Sanders campaign, vs that of the Clinton campaign.

We can see how Bernie gets more bang for his (campaign) buck in how far he has come in the polls since the start of his campaign, compared to what he's spent.  With $25m in the bank, Bernie has spent about $16m to get to where he is, way up in NH, neck-and-neck in IA, and advancing in national polls.  By contrast, Hillary's got $32m in the bank, meaning she's spent about $43m to get from where she was in April to where she is today.

In honor of Bernie's thrift, and also to help adjust our own personal budget for a period of reduced income, my wife Jasmine & I have decided to take up the Food Stamp Challenge, to consume in a week only food (and drink) that would fit into a week's SNAP benefits budget, or about $58 for two people.  Many celebrities have done it, eating for a week in a way that they would never seriously sustain long-run (sometimes failing) in order to illustrate that the calls for cutting or constraining SNAP funding is a Scrooge-like act of bullying the vulnerable, rather than cutting wasteful spending or attacking lavish benefits for the undeserving.  We have a different goal, though, which we can aim at mainly because Jasmine is such an able, educated & informed, and multifaceted cook of nutritious and delicious foods, and already highly economical in terms of both groceries and the food we eat (I contribute nothing but a mouth and an appetite--and I make the coffee every morning).

Our goal is to discover not how "wacky" it is to try and live off of foodstamps for a week, but to recreate a SNAP-only lifestyle in the best way possible, thinking about the time, effort, knowledge & skill it takes to eat decently off of foodstamps (Jasmine's knowledge & skills--none mine: I'll be the "taker" in this undertaking).  That's if it is indeed possible to eat well off of food stamps: Jasmine is a far better candidate than Cory Booker or Gwyneth Paltrow to truly put this to the test.

(Also this will be useful because we may well qualify for foodstamps as we undertake a long period of mostly unpaid labor volunteering for Bernie and writing.)

Stay tuned here for Jasmine's posts telling about our foodstamp challenge, photos & all!

Money in Politics and devotion to a cause (Bernie)

Today, after the end-of-the-third-quarter campaign fundraising dashes for Bernie, Hillary, and the rest of them, the campaigns revealed how much money they took in during the first full quarter of fundraising.  Bernie raised $26m ($2m on the last day!), an increase from the $15m he raised up through June 30.  Hillary Clinton's campaign raised $28m, a drop from the $47m she raised previously.

It's true that Hillary did outraise Bernie, but the main story-line of this campaign news "event" is that Bernie's on the rise and Hillary's having problems.  She held 58 fundraising events in the period, while Bernie only held 7, and Bernie has had 650,000 individual contributors and has average donations of about $25, while for Hillary . . . well, her campaign won't say, but given how many of her big-dollar donors have been donating the maximum $2,700, it's probably less than half as many as Bernie's campaign has--maybe as few as 1/20th.

But beyond just the comparisons of how much money, and expectations, there's something else going on here, the comparison of how much money it takes each campaign to get campaigning done.  If Hillary had to take time out for a fundraising event two out of every three days in the quarter (many exclusively open only to those who could fork over hefty donations), then she's not campaigning as much as Bernie is, even while she's got more money.  And while Hillary has more campaign staffers hired, both as price consultants as well as "ground troops" in important states, Bernie might actually have more labor going into his campaign if you count not only hired help, but volunteers organizing events.

Here in Hamilton, we passed the hat around our group of about 30 people to spring for 2,500 4"x 6" campaign hand-out cards that were spread all around Whitesboro, NY, and other places in the course of canvassing.  None of this came out of the Sanders campaign coffers.  Does Hillary have such free labor on offer, or operations like "Coders for Bernie"?

I doubt it: Hillary's campaign is bought-and-paid for, because people just don't like Hillary enough to devote anything more meaningful than dollars to her campaign.  Hillary lacks charisma not just in the classic sense, but in the sociological sense: she doesn't have Charismatic Authority (Thanks, Max Weber!).  Her husband did, and millions of people wanted to do what he said because it became clear to them that it was the right thing to do, especially when he said it.  Bernie has the same capacity, which is why my wife & I quit our jobs to move to Virginia to volunteer for Bernie, and so many other people are devoting time & effort, not in return for paychecks & résumé lines, to the political revolution that Bernie is calling us to.

Bernie Sanders vs Hillary Clinton--"We can win" vs "We're afraid to lose"

I support Bernie Sanders for President.  I knew of him when he was a politician in Vermont (and met him in middle school), and when he decided to run for president, I decided to quit my tenure track job teaching political science at a liberal arts school in upstate New York to volunteer for his campaign, because the movement to start a political revolution that will elect Bernie president, and bring sweeping change (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives) in Congress and Washington in general is the kind of thing I can believe in a way that I could not believe in the mission of the the increasingly corporatized institution of higher learning where I'd been teaching for the previous half-decade.

I now have no regular income, having insurance through Obamacare, and am moving with my wife to Virginia, an early primary state, to volunteer for Bernie and write books.  I did this because I believe we can win.

Following the campaign with a magnifying glass (one of my main occupations until I move in a couple of weeks), Bernie's rise has been striking, and though I never bore Hillary Clinton ill-will (I just think Bernie's better, and will really stand up for what I believe in), I've become increasingly aware that one major impediment to more people switching from her to Bernie is the central motivation of fear.

Reading this post from Vox, where several Iowa voters said they liked Bernie, but were afraid he wouldn't be able to win the general election, reminds me of two conversations recently.  One was last spring, after I told colleagues I was quitting my teaching post.  One of them, in the philosophy department, ribbed me a little, saying that although he was impressed by bold move, he questioned what the point was, given the small chance that Bernie could beat Hillary or become president.  At the time, I reacted with pique: I asked him if he was a political scientist, or if he specialized in elections and political parties in his research (my specialty), angrily implying that he didn't know what he was talking about, and I did.  He backed down.

Whether my friend and former colleague has a more accurate vision of our country's political future than me with all my academic training, though, is not as important as what I've begun to realize is where he--and many other of my friends who do not want to see Donald Trump or any other Republican in the White House--are coming from.  They are not inspired by Hillary Clinton, and they don't really believe she'll improve our country very much.  But a Hillary presidency would stave off the major and disastrous changes that a president from the party that keeps trying to shut down the government would likely usher in.  While David Axelrod's observation that "Hillary: Live with it!" is not a very energizing rallying cry for a campaign, that is, in fact, exactly what many of my Bernie-skeptical friends kind of want--they feel comfortable with Hillary, and they could live with her as president, while they couldn't with any of the top Republican contenders (nor could the US economy, society, or middle class, probably, given how the Tea Party would be in the driver's seat even if a reasonable moderate like John Kasich were elected).

But why are they so afraid of Bernie Sanders?  As came up again recentcly when probing some of my liberal friends in DC, they just don't believe Bernie can win a general election.  But how can some voters in Iowa, professors at a liberal arts school in upstate New York (not political scientists--or very avid followers of politics), and DC insiders be guided in the primary by such sure perceptions of a general election 14 months away?

In some ways, this is a logical inversion of the ostensible point of primaries.  Like first-round elections of run-off systems, primaries allow you to "vote your heart" without "wasting your vote," since you can always vote for the merely "lesser evil" candidate in the general election (or run-off, in countries like France, Brazil, or Poland).  In other ways, voting in the primary on the basis of "electability" (which is just another word for "fear that my values and choices are too alien to the rest of the country, which wouldn't support the candidate of my heart in a general election") is also a bit of mathematical tomfoolery: if you think others see primaries as a chance to vote with their hearts (the reason primaries exist), but that you that you can foil them by casting your one vote more "wisely," then you haven't thought about the weight of your one vote in the entire primary electorate (one voice can be slightly more influential in caucus states like Iowa, but only marginally); and by contrast if you think others see primaries as chances to pick the most "electable" candidate from the party, then it doesn't really matter how you vote (unless it's really unclear which candidate is most electable) anyways.

But recalling these discussions, and reading alternate coverage of Hillary and Bernie in, for example, the Washington Post, I realized that there's something deeper going on in my friends who think like this: Most of them are comfortable with their lives and the way the world is, and in this they are like most journalists and political pundits whose stories about Hillary's woes almost always comprise or at least conclude with attempts to reassure readers that she's still the favorite.  These observes fear to discover that the state of the world is not what they have been telling themselves: it has seemed to them that things in this country are going "ok," that a status quo candidate like Hillary could beat any of the [adjective] comers on the Republican side, and that there's no way this country has problems deep enough cause a mass hysteria enough to put Donald Trump in the White House, or deep enough to need a political revolution to solve them, like the one that could (will!) put Bernie Sanders in the White House.

They're not only afraid of Bernie losing, it may also be that they're afraid of discovering that they're in a cable-news, hybrid-suburbia, full 401k & good health benefits, comfortable bubble that actually includes precious few (and fewer) Americans with each passing year.  Afraid to find out they're in the Truman Show along with only a few million other citizens of this country, while the vast majority have to scrape & hope & pray for their economic futures and those of their families.  In a country where over 30% of Hispanic children and nearly 40% of African American children grow up in poverty, there are still bubbles where affluent white people can be comfortable living with Hillary and the stalemated status quot.  They look at Bernie, and they are afraid to lose the illusions of comfortable America with good chances for all that Clinton allows them cling to.  Instead, they should awake to fact that we can build that country again, but only if all people of good heart and good conscience--people like me and you--approach this coming electoral struggle, the struggle to build a movement much larger than Bernie Sanders, and the struggle to rebuild America as a place with good chances for all, with the attitude of "We can win," not "we're afraid to lose."  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

The US Economy: Why Anemia is the new normal

August 19, 2015

The US economy continues to grow slowly, to add jobs without driving wages higher, to see increased profits from businesses without spurring new business investment.  Year after year, quarter after quarter, 75% or more of corporations report profits that beat estimates, but instead of raising salaries or hiring workers fast enough to bid up wages due to competition, they instead issue dividends or buy back their own stocks to increase Earnings Per Share (by reducing the denominator of that indicator--the number of shares).  Companies mostly borrow (issue bonds) at very cheap interest rates to do this.  And if regular people (not corporations) have any savings, the interest rates they get on these are incredibly low, too.

Many observers have been waiting for interest rates to go up, but they've been near zero for years now.  As we approach the seventh anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers (the match that lit the 2008 recession), why do we continue to have such low interest rates, low wages, and low business investment, even as corporations prosper and the number of jobs rises?

It's because inflation is too low--so low that our economy is actually close to a much scarier phenomenon: deflation.  Month after month there are new reports of inflation being too low.  This is why the Federal Reserve has refused to raise interest rates for the past several years.  A rise in interest rates that might help people's savings accounts would send the already anemic economy into a new recession, as borrowing & spending slowed ground to a halt.

The Federal Reserve has kept interest rates at near zero for years, and spent many years (until last fall) engaged in "Quantitative Easing," shoveling huge amounts of money "out the door" of the Fed in order to buy bonds, increasing the total supply of money in the economy.  Why haven't these huge increases in the money supply caused inflation.  Even with the supply of dollars up, and easy terms to borrow more dollars, the cost of products & services hasn't gone up--in fact, gas, oil, and some foods have dropped!

Moreover, internationally the demand for dollars has been outstripping supply.  The number of euros, Chinese yuan, Brazilian reais, Russian rubles, and other currencies it takes to buy a dollar has gone up--the dollar is more expensive, and stronger than its been in a decade.  If the Fed has kept the supply of dollars up, the "price" of dollars in other currency should have come down, but the opposite has happened.  And now, with a new devaluation of the Chinese yuan last week, it takes even more yuan to buy a dollar.  This means that Chinese products are about to become even cheaper in the United States.  American producers will have to lower their prices in order to compete with such products--when prices come down across the board, this is the definition of deflation (and leads to shrinking profit-margins, laid-off workers, and less consumer spending: a downward spiral).

In general, despite everything the Fed has done to try to get inflation up to a healthy level (2% is deemed by the Fed, the IMF, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, and most economics to be far enough from zero to avoid the threat of a deflationary death-spiral, the like of which the United States and the whole world experienced in the 1930s), nothing seems to work.  Monetary policy seems incapable of returning the dollar to an appropriate rate of inflation that could tolerate a normal set of interest rates, where you'd make a decent return on a Certificate of Deposit or other reliable means of savings.  Why?

The answer is Fiscal Policy.  If Monetary Policy has to do with interest rates and the impact that a central bank (ie, the Fed) has on the supply of money in the economy, Fiscal Policy has to do with the government budget's impact.  Across the country, states have been "tightening their belts" for almost a decade, firing teachers, other government employees, cutting spending in response to the aftermath of the 2008-09 recession.  By cutting the number of dollars they emit into the economy, governments are shrinking the money supply that the Fed has been trying to maintain.

But state governments' spending is tiny compared to that of the Federal Government.  And it has had a huge negative effect on the money supply.  This is because every year since 2009, the US government has been reducing the (net) amount of money that it puts out into the overall money supply.  The US government puts money into overall money supply every year by spending more money than it takes in in taxes--running a budget deficit.  It does not do this all the time (for example, at the end of Bill Clinton's presidency, the US ran a surplus for several years: it was actually taking money out of the money supply, instead of adding it--but during that period, inflation was rising, so it fit in exactly with the goals of macroeconomic management).  But the US has run a budget deficit in all but four years since 1970, meaning the budget is a major factor contributing to the money supply--a budget in deficit increases the money supply, and can help avoid deflation.

But while the US budget deficit spiked in 2009 from about $450 billion to over $1.4 trillion ($1,400 billion), beginning in 2010, the budget deficit has been cut every year, and in 2015 it's projected to be just $425 billion.  By cutting the budget deficit every year, the US government has been gradually closing the tap on its contribution to the money supply, working directly cross purposes with the Federal Reserve's efforts to return inflation to a normal level where it can safely hike interest rates.  The continued voracious appetite for budget-cutting in the US Congress will certainly exacerbate this situation in the future, and doom us to a new normal of economic anemia.

Until the Congress ceases stymieing the Federal Reserve's efforts to manage inflation, interest rates, and the money supply, we are in for low inflation, low interest rates, continued wage stagnation, and businesses continuing to return cash to investors, instead of investing it in new production.