Already the narrative is being pounded home by leftist-sympathetic traditional media that suppressing federal government spending will prove as cataclysmic to America as Ramses’ stubbornness did to Mosaic Egypt. Don’t buy it, as illustrated in a case in Louisiana.
Recently, the Acadiana Advocate delivered a story about the impact of reduced federal spending on farm subsidies. In particular, it lamented projected cuts to U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that help food banks and schools purchase food from small local farmers.
It agonized a bit over the lost income this market distortion would cause farmers, but the main problem it conveyed was the distribution of free or subsidized food would be attenuated. Individuals associated with food banks and similar organizations were reported wringing their hands over the possibility of increased “food insecurity,” which allegedly a seventh of Louisianans suffered.
But it’s worth understanding just what this means. “Food insecurity” is a government definition which is a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food. It’s in large part caused by what is termed inadequate intake, as defined by surveys revealing such statistics as worry that food would run out before having money to buy more; food having been bought just did not last, and were without money to get more; having to cut the size of meals or skipping meals because there was not enough money for food; eating less than feeling they should because there was not enough money for food; and being hungry but did not eat because they could not afford enough food.
Yet note how all of this is in the eye of the beholder: it’s how a person feels about whether he has enough chow, constituting a very subjective lens. However, when viewed in more objective terms, what may appear in Louisiana to be a problem of inadequacy turns out to be much less so.
That’s because, the most recent statistics show, Louisiana households have among the highest costs for food among the states, even as the actual price of food in the state is among the lowest. Possibly it could be argued that some kind of special conditions in Louisiana exist that would make food more costly for a portion of Louisianans, such as more of them living in “food deserts” and rural areas, but a perusal of proportions of food insecure state populations compared to what households spend and actual pricing reveals a number of states with as much or more of their populations insecure but where less is spent on food that is relatively more expensive.
No, the implication for Louisianans is they spend more of food because they feel permitted, as part of the culture, to eat more. The state’s cuisine is hyped for tourism purposes but it has a real-world disadvantage, along with an apparent penchant for choosing food perhaps niftier-tasting but less healthy, in making Louisianans among the most overweight and obese people in the country.
In other words, a greater portion of Louisianans may claim food insecurity subjectively than in any objective sense. And it is a public policy debate worth having whether heavy federal subsidization that moves money out of taxpayers’ wallets into the pockets of farmers and food banks leads to exaggeration of the problem if not encouraging unhealthy weights.
No doubt other media reports along this vein of how horrible less government spending will be will surface as the Pres. Donald Trump Administration tries to make this course correction, and perhaps to a smaller extent replicated by Louisianan policy-makers. View any such claim with a critical eye and resist accepting blindly any such conventional and intellectually-lazy narrative.
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