The Administration has also said that the tax cuts will pay for themselves. I’m betting that they applied the same analytic rigor to those estimates as they did to this one.
Unfortunately, you also seem to believe that the Administration also applied the same degree of rigor to both estimates, leaving us at an impasse.
I haven’t even reached a discussion about the degree of rigor applied. Right now I’m still working to convince k9bfriender that an estimate was made.
We have excellent evidence that USDA has issued a press release with a number in it. Let us know when you have some means of backing up that number.
You are saying that the USDA went out to food wholesalers, negotiated prices with them, and after doing so, determined that they would have a 50% savings?
Or did they “estimate” by simply assuming that they would only have to pay 50% of what walmart pays if they buy it in bulk?
I’m pretty sure the comparison number isn’t what Walmart pays in bulk but what SNAP recipients pay at retail, after Walmart’s mark-up. You get that much at least, right? “the retail cost” is not what Walmart pays wholesalers, but the price that customers buy the food from Walmart at.
…I think we can all agree that an estimate was made.
But like many in this thread, who have had experience in the grocery trade, with margins, with wholesale suppliers, who understand the complex logistics chains, the estimate doesn’t make any sense. The numbers don’t work. Want to understand why they won’t work? Read the thread. Its been laid out to you. The only possible way to make this work is not to “buy in bulk” (because supermarkets already buy in bulk to an extent the government would never match) but to “lower in quality”.
I’m relaying what the USDA said:
So yes, it sounds like they have negotiated prices with suppliers, albeit for other contracts. I suspect that experience has given them a far better handle on what they can obtain food for in bulk quantities than you or I have.
I wish that were true. Earlier k9bfriender said this:
AFAIK, he has not retracted that statement.
…there is no need to retract. They released an estimate. That doesn’t mean they actually put in a good faith effort into creating that estimate. They just released a number. How did they come up with that number? Care to enlighten us?
Right, and when you look at those programs, you see that they are not getting any where near the cost savings that they are planning on getting here.
They do not have more experience than grocery stores, not even close.
You didn’t quote me in full. I said, “so they never made any cost estimates, they just pulled a number out of their ass.”
If I go to a contractor, and I ask them how much it would cost to do a build-out, and he replies “$155k”, with no itemization or anything at all to back it up, that’s not an estimate, that’s a number pulled out of his ass.
The USDA’s number is an estimate, only in that it is a number that they called an estimate. It is not an estimate in that they id not do all the research and negotiation to have any sort of realistic estimate.
Let’s see a cite that the Harvest Box plan is trolling or kidding. Mere repetition does not back up the claim.
I don’t believe they made an estimate, because they flat out said they didn’t make an estimate.
The supposed “estimate” here explicitly excludes distribution costs, because the process of distributing the crates would be left to the states to handle. Unless you believe that the states have developed teleportation devices that run on unicorn farts from selflessly volunteering unicorns that don’t charge for their gaseous services, then the entire process -and cost- of moving the food is explicitly not accounted for in the estimate. This amount of money is not trivial.
But it gets worse.
We have no idea of the thought processes that went into calculating this estimate, other than that they don’t include at least one major part of the food distribution process. Which leaves me with no confidence whatsoever that they bothered to account for another major detail: figuring out which people get what. That would of course be part of the distribution process, and in the fantasy world where this boondoggle would be implemented would most likely also be left to the states. Which means that during the process they were going through for estimating this plan that they have absolutely no implementation details of they have no particular reason to factor in the costs of creating, updating, and applying the (extremely hackable) database of demographic and medical information on all the people on the program.
Which implies something even worse.
If we presume that this so-called estimate doesn’t trouble itself with the problem of actually getting food to people, and getting the right food to people, then there’s no reason to think they’ve bothered even thinking about the fact they’d need custom crates at all. The could simply have looked at the lowest bidder cost of the raw materials for a starvation ration of food for one person and multiplied it by the number of people on SNAP. (Which may or may not include the number of dependents on SNAP.) No accounting for multiple boxes, varying contents of the boxes, varying quantities in the box. Hell, they probably didn’t even account for the cost of the packaging - the crates themselves.
Because seriously, this idiocy was never planned to work - if it was they wouldn’t have waved dismissively and said “all details of the plan are being left as an exercise to the reader/states”. This whole stupid proposal, including that so-called “estimate”, is just bullshit to shock people who don’t accept their bullshit unthinkingly, and give the people who do accept their bullshit unthinkingly a cute-looking completely uncited number to wave around and yell “It’d be cheaper, trust them!”
begbert2 - My thoughts exactly. From what I could find, NO consideration was made to how to deliver or manage this. Let alone other major obstacles.
How was that 12.9 billion a year arrived at? It looks like bullshit to me, I suspect the numbers are based on ‘wholesale’ vs. ‘retail’ and nothing else.
That’s careful planning to Republicans. You’ll recall how they howled about replacing the ACA for years without bothering to come up with a replacement or how they scribbled their tax plan in crayon during coffee.
I’m sure! But when someone accuses your party of doing awful things, and your response is, “Well, we’re winning, so nyah”, that sure ain’t what comes across.
I am not sure why all the opposition to this plan. Surely it will be bid out to KBR to be executed with the same cost saving efficiency that they displayed in Iraq.
The traditional free market conservative idea (ala Milton Friedman) was to move welfare programs more toward means tested cash transfers and away from more complicated and less transparent subsidies (SNAP is only somewhat complicated, stuff like housing subsidies and price controls are way more complicated, and inefficient).
It’s more IMO a populist idea to be highly concerned what aid recipients do with a given amount of aid assuming it’s the right amount if they did the most efficient thing with it. One reason Friedman’s idea of cash transfers (like EITC) with reduction of more complicated bureaucratically administered subsidies never happened (the EITC looks somewhat like his negative income tax, but reduction in other complicated subsidies hasn’t really happened) is that lots of voters who don’t view themselves as govt aid recipients*, are concerned what recipients do with their aid. It’s not necessarily actual conservative voters depending which kind, and it includes lots of voters who don’t consider themselves conservatives.
All that said, it’s not really illogical to care if lots of aid gets spend on luxuries (not saying that’s so, but ‘what if’). That could indicate recipients getting more than they actually need, not just that spending on luxuries will catch up with them ‘later in the month’. Your assumption is that there aren’t recipients getting more than they need. But actually there always will be, some. No system could tailor benefits to never be too much for some without making them too little for others. Those are Type I and Type II errors that have to be balanced.
*of course it can be widely debated who is a ‘govt aid recipient’.
Yes.
In the 1970’s, I managed the Reagan Cheese distribution program in three counties. We had no idea who was supposed to get it, had to arrange our own storage contract for semitruck loads of bricks of cheese on skids as well as get them out to people who could use them. We had no access to food stamp household names or addresses. I even got together with the University of Illinois Extension serves to develop recipes to use the cheese. The first year we had no support monies and then the Beer warehouse that stored the product got paid to hold the cheese for more than our three counties. All of the surplus cheese ended up in the food pantries that we helped develop at that time as well as the homless shelters that had to be set up when Reagan closed the Mental Health facilities and put the lunies out on the streets. Thanks GOP for reviving the soup kitchens of the Great Depression.
As a retiree in subsidized housing, I get $15 of SNAP food a month - down from $60 in 2010 when I first applied. I can get milk and cereal and maybe bread for a month for that now. I usually spend over $100 a month for food for the apartment. I might get a fish fry out once a month and the $3 menu from McD as infrequently.
I have no idea who gets cash from Snap. I was a food stamp counselor thirty years ago…nice pension.