Radical GOP governors; feeding children is bad policy

Without looking it up, I bet both governors are "pro-life", too.

It's disgusting that they want to force poor women to give birth just so they can quip to their base about starving their children.

 

Still never understood why EBT cards aren't limited to "healthy" food. Just tie it to WIC foods and be done with it. Then they can't complain about obesity and nutrition problems. I said it before but you can buy Red Bull with EBT. Get out of here with that

 

And this isn't even money coming from the state budget, they are turning down free money from the feds in order to hurt children in their states.

 

They are all despicable. Desantis turned down Federal money for appliance upgrades. Rick Scott turned down Obama money for a high-speed rail and then invested in a company to help fund Brightline

 

Governor Reynold's doesn't care about nutrition.

 

I suspect that the issue is that it is a bit of a Pandora's box. It sounds good on the surface, but then the massive lobbying campaigns start and we would end up with hard to explain regulations (item X, which most people view as unhealthy is allowed while item Y is not).

 

For sure. But eliminate the excuse

 

Definitely a lobbyists dream. But I think there's plenty of low hanging fruit (pardon the pun) that can easily be regulated away. Chips, soda, candy, etc. If they want to lobby for something more nuanced, maybe something like breakfast cereal or whatever, so be it. But they've done it with WIC so I don't think it's a massive hurdle.

I don't love EBT but I understand the need for it and am fine with it. I think a lot more people wouldn't push back on "welfare" if it was at least regulated to "necessities."

 

It feels like the modern GOP politician is in a constant race to be seen as the meanest and least sympathetic person on earth.

Meanwhile - Nebraska has accepted $27 billion in farm subsidies the last 26 years.
https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2023/0...-to-a-select-group-of-producers-report-shows/

Nebraska received about 1.5 billion from the Federal government in 2023
https://www.urban.org/policy-center... followed tax,aid from the federal government.

So, just to be clear, Nebraska making a stink about this 18 mil is just a political stunt - the sad thing, is it hurts children.

 

The phrase originally part of a speech at a Democratic National Convention (the speaker was either the late Sen. Ted Kennedy or former NY governor Mario Cuomo) "to a lot of Republicans the right to life begins at conception and ends at birth" comes immediately to mind.

 

Exactly, WIC has already done the heavy lifting, just copy over their limitations and run with it.

 

I suspect there is already a sizable lobbying effort underway to prevent what you want from happening. As you said, it makes perfect sense to do it that way and yet it’s not that way. I can only think of one reason why.

 

For sure. I'm sure if we looked into the lobbying efforts of companies like Nestlé and Kraft when it comes to this stuff it would be the least surprising thing we'd read today.

 

And some of my fellow cons ask me why I left the party?
We keep tripping over ourselves with dumb crap.

 

It's not dumb to them.

To have a slave labor force, you need starving people who will work for pennies and bowls of gruel.

 

I mean a fat kid is still a live kid, as I understand it.

Gonna starve them to health?

 

It can get somewhat difficult as to where you draw the line as to what is healthy and what isn’t. Some foods are clearly healthy. Some clearly aren’t. Then most are probably somewhere in the middle, with some necessary nutrients coupled with excess sugar, salt and other additives.

Also generally it has been found that the most efficient form of welfare is unrestricted cash.

 

If you read this book, you will see that most of the same states that now turn down such assistance in the name of some neutral sounding objection about the role of government were fine with government occupying the role when recipients could be racially limited.



In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by Southern Democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity. In the words of noted historian Eric Foner, "Katznelson's incisive book should change the terms of debate about affirmative action, and about the last seventy years of American history."

 

Nobody thinks like this. Just like the conservatives who claim that democrats support welfare in order to keep blacks dependent upon the government, it's assuming a dreadful motive to an action with which one doesn’t agree.