Joe Biden’s Program To End Hunger–Free Meal Tickets To McDonald's

You have to hand it to the President.  Amidst the threat of recession, a dangerous nuclear option in Ukraine, chaos at the Mexican border, and dwindling gas reserves, he decides to end hunger and not surprisingly has designated $8 billion taxpayer dollars to do it.  He has offered the electorate, soon to vote in November, free meal tickets to McDonald's.

Biden’s program will do what, exactly? ask most economists.  The term ‘food insecurity’ which has become the catch-all for everyone from those who might be settling for less than a nutritious meal to those few remaining families in the hollers of Kentucky who rely on corn pone and fatback, raises the ante for bad eating habits.  There is something systemically wrong with the nation’s food delivery system, something institutional, something corrupt and nasty within the capitalist system.  

Not only that the pernicious systemic racism that has infected the country has exacerbated the problem.  Black people who might otherwise risen out of poverty to make a living wage, have been prevented from doing so because of white privilege.  Those who are food insecure , therefore, are blameless, victims of a predatory system badly in need of reform.

Of course this is hyperbole, political exaggeration, and fol-de-rol to prove a point.  Decades of Food Stamps, generous welfare benefits, Aid to Dependent Children, and school lunches – government largesse with no strings attached – have done little to improve the nutrition of the poor.  Welfare mothers with market baskets filled with Oreos and chips are not uncommon, and despite calls to end a program which is an inefficient giveaway and replace it with more logical cash transfers, the old program is still in place. 

The proposed cash transfer program would get rid of an onerous bureaucracy, keep government out of individuals’ lives, force consumers to make their own economic choices, and most importantly to limit the time anyone can be on the dole; and yet the old, failed system remains in place.  Congress, for all its liberal caterwauling, simply cannot imagine writing a check to the poor and giving up all the favors dispensed by the food industry to influence the welfare market basket.

And time limits?  Racist, unconscionable, and dehumanizing.  Poor people should forever be cared for by the State, always embraced by its generosity and compassion.

What is lost in the debate – as in all debates about progressive programs – is the idea of individual responsibility.  Everyone now and again falls into temporary ‘food insecurity’ because of loss of a job, illness, or family circumstances; but the most savvy and understanding of the American economic system will have anticipated such temporary shortfalls.  Those families with scant savings will have adjusted their diets to compensate for restricted disposable income – coupons, less expensive food alternatives, sales, and bargains.  

European immigrants to the United States in the early Twentieth Century did exactly that -  economized, increased jobs and work hours, and made do.  Without a doubt they were not eating the most nutritious, wholesome food, but they soon would be.  Immigrants knew that the land of milk and honey was nothing more than a myth, a fantasy of stupendous proportions.  Work, family, reserve, and parsimony were the principles of the day.

So gigantic giveaway schemes like the President’s Program to End Hunger, are economic depressors, disincentives to manage, to navigate and negotiate the difficult waters of the free market, and to rise above poverty. 

What are the first steps designated for such a program? A conference, the overall goal of which was to "end hunger and reduce diet-related diseases and disparities”. The conference outlined ‘new actions’ that business, civic, academic and philanthropic leaders will take to try to improve food access and affordability, help consumers make healthy dietary choices, support physical activity and enhance nutrition and food security research.  Conferences are notorious revenue-suckers, feel-good, happy talk events to create community, solidarity, and purpose but which end in papers, proclamations, policy statements, and little more.

The conference goals also highlighted the characteristic progressive tendency for inclusivity – i.e. nothing related to food or nutrition can be left out – a policy which results in diffuse thinking, the creation of competing interest groups, and the lack of focus on purpose and outcomes.  What exactly is the goal of Biden’s program?  Only tautology: The goal of the program to end hunger is to end hunger. 

At least $2.5 billion of the $8 billion in new commitments will go to startup companies focused on finding solutions to hunger and food insecurity. More than $4 billion will go to philanthropy efforts to improve access to nutritious food, promote healthy choices and increase physical activity.  This has been tried over and over again with little success.  The changes in dietary behavior are less due to government hammering about doing the right thing, than a gradual shift in marketing priorities that reflect the populace’s concern with better nutrition.  

Of course the private sector has taken advantage of consumers by distorting information on dietary requirements.  Serving size is pitifully small and hardly worth eating, so the actual food eaten is loaded with salt and fats.  Claims for ‘healthy’ and ‘nutritious’ foods have been challenged in courts under truth in advertising laws, yet the private sector has always found ways to exploit consumer trends and profit from them.  Not only that, ignorant consumers have compensated in unhealthy ways – eating far more ‘low-calorie’ food than necessary; substituting extra carbohydrates for fats to achieve caloric satisfaction. Shifting to 'whole grain' cereals loaded with added sugars. 

Not surprisingly obesity is a major cause of health distress in the United States.  Worse is the current move to de-stigmatize overweight.  It’s OK to be fat say politicians, celebrities, talk show hosts.

The bad news is that nothing has done the trick for reducing obesity, a pathology so linked with income, culture, consumerism, psychology, and social patterns that it is one of the most resistant to change.

"In America, no child, no child should go to bed hungry or parent," Biden said. "No parent should die of a disease that can be prevented”, a comment which expands the scope of the program even more widely and runs into decades of past efforts to reduce the amount of salt and fat in adult diets.   Efforts of the American Heart Association and other institutions have warned for decades about the pernicious American diet with little success.  Pour one level teaspoon of salt on a plate and see how little, unsatisfying, and unacceptable it is.  Most Americans eat three times that recommended daily limit.

Increasing school lunches?  Attempts to provide more nutritious meals have ended up in enormous plate waste the economic cost of which is  nationally  over $600 million per year.   Kids don’t want carrot sticks and salt free, bland, yucky foods.

So, Biden panders to the American electorate just prior to the midterm elections which his party is in danger of losing badly.  The Biden Administration has already been a free-for-all giveaway, with trillions in social welfare and bridge-to-nowhere infrastructure programs, billions in student loan debt forgiveness, and much more.  This is only the latest ill-conceived, politically-motivated, senseless proposal to get votes in November.

The good news is that much of the electorate sees through this faux-largesse, and these economically dangerous, free-wheeling, spend like a drunken sailor giveaways.  To most Americans who want to see more jobs available, economic opportunities increase, and sane immigration and energy policies to promote economic growth and national economic security instituted, these Biden absurdities do not go unnoticed.

The Right’s Electoral Sweep In Italy, Mussolini, And Joe Biden’s Childhood Dreams Of Power

“Do you think it really matters?”, the President asked his wife in bed the other night, just after the results of the Italian conservative, far right electoral victory was announced.

“Not in the least, darling”, Jill replied.  “You know those….”  Here she stopped short of using the ethnic slur common in her neighborhood in the 50s.  Even in bed with her husband she thought it wise to hold her tongue, although tough Irish Joe had heard Italians called nothing but guineas and wops when he was growing up.  

Ethnic stereotypes were, in an age of still-assimilating America, the best way to identify neighbors.  It mattered what nationality you were because it signified who you were. Irish were drunks, Italians were loud and garlicky, and Poles were rural and dumb.  Ethnic epithets – they were not considered slurs in those days – rolled off Joe’s mother’s tongue as easily as Springtime poetry.

“Those Italians”, continued Jill, have never gotten over Mussolini.  Fascists to the core”.

“Yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking”, replied the President.  Joe was a closet admirer of Il Duce when he was a boy in Delaware, a state that most Americans couldn’t name or locate.  He wanted someone to put Delaware on the map, to be a superhero of Newark, Dover, and Newcastle, and he waited for the political Messiah to come.  His mother caught him with a picture of Mussolini, arms at his hips, chin thrust out, and lips downturned in a show of absolute defiance and superiority, tore it up, and said, “Shame on you, Joey.  Mussolini is our enemy”.

So Joe had always had a love-hate relationship with Italians.  He had been schooled in Roman history, Renaissance brilliance, and modern popular culture – who wouldn’t want an all expenses paid trip to Rome? – but his progressive advisors always reminded him of Italy’s less than honorable fascist past.  He was always reminded of the joke making the rounds after Italy’s ignominious defeat in the war (“How many gears in an Italian tank?  Four – one forward and three reverse”). Italians were never to be taken seriously.  After all hadn’t they had 62 governments since 1946? And most of them weak, venal, and silly.

It was the Il Duce episode that was at the heart of Joe Biden’s ambivalence towards Italians.  Take Antonin Scalia, for example, the Emperor of the Supreme Court, as haughty and dismissive of others as Mussolini, a man without a drop of compassion for the poor, yet looking so much like his goomba Sicilian family that he could have been an organ grinder rather than a jurist.  

That was the thing about Italians, you never knew what was up,  and how this neo-fascist could have emerged from the same immigrant roots as those of Mario Cuomo who evolved into a principled liberal was always perplexing.

Yet the President always secretly admired Scalia and wondered about Cuomo.  Antonin Scalia was an enforcer, a claimant to the intellectual crown of America, a powerful, influential man of innate resources.  Of course the more Biden turned left and became the progressive’s progressive, the more he kept his closet door closed.  No one would ever find out about his secret admiration for history’s big men, big macho Nietzschean heroes.

In public the President shared his concern about the Right’s decisive victory in Italy.  A sad day for Italy and for Europe, he pronounced, raising the specter of authoritarian rule, playing the fascism card, conflating the solid conservative policies of new Prime Minister Meloni with National Socialism and the Hitler-Mussolini alliance.

In private, he wondered if an electoral victory in Europe, achieved thanks to conservative policies on religion, family, sexuality, immigration, and political independence, could have repercussions in the United States.  In fact Italy rejected every one of Biden’s policies.  Italians wanted no more howls of racism, no more open door immigration policies, a return to traditional sexual values and religion, and a rejection of internationalism. 

“Thank God those goombas don’t vote here”, the President said to himself.

"Oh, and let's not forget that Meloni is a woman", he added.

It is easy in these days of facile progressivism to ignore anything that does not conform to the Left’s meme of race, gender, and ethnicity.  Italy is deeply racist, wrong, fascist, and ignorant, said the leader of the Progressive Coalition Of Black and Brown Peoples Of America; and the Right’s victory only showed the depth of a worldwide systemic racism.

  “They have deliberately sunk boatloads of refugees from North Africa”, she said, “in acts of overt genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Italy has never wanted colored foreigners and never will.  The new government will do its best to keep Italy lily white, pure, and fascist”.

Of course the election in Italy does in fact mean a lot to Biden, the progressive Left and the Democratic Party in America.  More and more Americans are fed up with the tens of thousands of illegal migrants walking across the Rio Grande.  They are tired of the fiction of sanctuary cities, of the swelling ranks of the dependent and idle.  They are fed up with black this, black that and the weird convolutions of sexual transformation.  They are sick and tired of the assault on organized religion, the sanctity of faith, and the assault on  religious freedom.  They have had it with the hammering denigration of white people as predators, subhuman tyrants.

True, the young Joe Biden had gotten beaten up by guinea punks on the playground, and had watched how these goomba thugs had ruled Delaware cities while his Irish compatriots only governed them. 

You have to hand it to the Mafia, Joe once confided to his wife long before his sojourn in the White House.  Authoritarian, family-oriented, and as ambitious in their pursuit of power and territory as their Roman ancestors, you had to admire them.  And here they now were back in power in Italy, La Cosa Nostra meets Il Duce, and before long Italy will become more xenophobic and nationalistic than Poland, or Iran for that matter.

America was different, reflected the President.  We turned back the ur-fascist Donald Trump, rejected his calls for authoritarian rule, and will continue to fight anti-democratic forces everywhere.  “Democracy matters”, he reiterated to his public, and not coruscating nationalism.  Not only that, God was on the side of progressives, a holy force of goodly transformation, leading to Utopia.  “We will never be turned back”.

It will be this combination of supreme arrogance, self-righteousness, and ignorance of history which will be progressives’ downfall in the midterm elections in November 2022 and beyond.  Joe Biden may choose to see the Italian elections are irrelevant, but no one else does.