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Thursday, September 13, 2018

Does Jeff Johnson know anything about SNAP, the Agriculture Department program of building demand-side aid for farmers?

This link. Data and trending over time.

Has Jeff Johnson any comprehension of why the Ag. Department is the key agency involved in setting program criteria?

Will he admit what SNAP means to his treasured rural voters?

The point being the program intent is to boost prices and demand for agricultural commodity farm production. Is he as dumb as Mary Franson in misunderstanding such a basic concept? Should Jeff Johnson publicly and forcefully disavow Franson and be honest about the Trump trade war making an increase in purchasing subsidies stateside a way of propping farm prices, and hence helping farmers without giving them direct subsidy checks?

The Trump trade war is wreaking havoc with rural Minnesota farming commodity prices in the international market. So, will Jeff Johnson reckon people who'd vote for him are too dumb to figure out that SNAP is win-win, propping up producer income by boosting domestic demand, while advancing healthful diet practices of those needing SNAP assistance to feed families?

At a guess Jeff Johnson will work on the dark side of the force, with simplistic and false dogma castigating those needing food help as slackers, etc. Because it is his party's dogma and he's a party man. Cognizant farmers know better.

_____________UPDATE____________
You decide. The Johnson campaign site says:

My Principles

Some of the core principles that guide my thinking on government and the issues:

I believe that government can only exercise authority granted to it in the Constitution.
I believe that people make better decisions about how to spend the money they earn than government.
I support school choice and the empowerment of parents to control the education of their children.
I believe the right to keep and bear arms for personal protection is a fundamental individual right.
I am pro-life.
My Christian faith guides every decision I make.

Taxes & Spending

Government’s appetite for overspending in Minnesota goes hand in hand with the desire to push government programs and regulations into every corner of our lives.

I believe we need to cut taxes and reduce the size and power of government. We’ll start by cutting income taxes, the death tax and license tab fees, ending the taxation of social security benefits and instituting an Automatic Taxpayer Refund when government over-taxes Minnesotans.

Taxes and spending issues are not only economic, they are moral. Empowering Minnesotans starts with us deciding how our hard-earned money is spent--not government. Reducing spending levels and increasing take-home pay will result in a badly needed explosion of economic activity, growth, and opportunity.

Walz understands the bigger picture. He's not from the Twin Cities like Johnson.

Walz lives among and understands farm needs for sound floor pricing for at-the-elevator deliery, where boosting via SNAP is certainly not the only factor, but it adds a positive impact.

SNAP is less a help on the squeeze than Cargill market dominance on one side and then the seed and agrichem giants on the other, but that's private sector squeezing of farm familes, and the government can only do so much to help. (Besides cutting direct subsidy checks to farmers, which Johnson's website rhetoric seems to consider problematic.)

____________FURTHER UPDATE______________
It is more than that. Walz has been to Congress and knows that districts such as Collin Peterson's exist and have needs in balance with others.

Johnson's been a Twin Cities Babbitt representing a Twin Cities Babbitt Chamber of Commerce cell, and little else, and knows little of any bigger picture his pastor has not mentioned to him. If he's ever had a hungry day, or a weather worry before a harvest, it does not show. Yes, crop insurance of the kind Jim Deal's firm sells can give comfort over weather uncertainty, but aside from selling futures to Cargill or other speculators to hedge on price drops, farmers are wholly at the mercy of the market. Bias that market with a questionable trade war, and farmers and consumers cannot be left out to hang twisting in the wind. As Johnson's simplistic web content suggests proper.

____________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
A basic and necessary understanding is that every assistance program is based on human decency toward others, and if that premise is denied any argument based on the denial has to be regarded as suspect. Readers wanting more info can start with Wikipedia here and here, and follow links.

Franson's "Don't feed the animals, they may become dependent" outlook drew negative attention, e.g., the story was broken by a blogger, here, covered by a statewide media outlet, here and here, and nationally, e.g., HuffPo. With Franson's legislative income, taxpayers are feeding her.

Sorensen at Bluestem Prairie blog has an interesting post about Johnson and his understanding of agricultural reality, here. Whether an impaired viewpoint is at play in the Johnson campaigning is for each individual voter to decide, at her/his ballot time. Johnson can be viewed has having a narrower perspective and experience range compared to Walz, a veteran with years of srvice, a teacher for years, and a Congressional CD1 Representative voted in and returned to office.

Johnson, a career lawyer and politician, has a Wikipedia page where readers can learn more. Huey Long said, "Call me Kingfish," while Johnson, in effect, said, "Buy Stanek Kingfish." Privacy rights advocates may dislike that viewpoint. Strib. FOX9. While data and phone privacy is not a key issue in the contest for governor, the outlook favoring police conduct as semi-sacrosanct was explolded when a Minnesota cop wrongly shot a white woman instead of wrongly shooting a black man (same loss of a life, different outcome, go figure).

Restraints against government actions within the Fourth Amendment are well premised, and secret government use of privacy invasion technology should not be regarded lightly; hence Johnson's position on the matter is relevant for this election.

___________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
So, food assistance programs for the needy serve as an indirect subsidy to agriculture by boosting domestic demand - demand side pump priming. What of direct subsidy, without intermediaries? This link. A diverse demand-boosting program is less subject to co-option by big lobbying agribusiness interests; although SNAP administrators do appear to have qualified sugar loaded carbonated beverages as eligible "food." (Unlike alcohol and tobacco products). Go figure who lobbied that. Sugar beets and subsidies is another interesting story, but a diversion.

____________FURTHER UPDATE____________
"The rural-urban divide" has become such a cliche that Strib uses it:

Who gives, who gets?

Perception aside, the numbers show the Twin Cities metro counties are the state’s economic engine, generating tax dollars that flow outward to every corner of the state. A June 2014 report by nonpartisan House Research shows the seven metro counties of Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott and Washington generate considerably more tax revenue than the other 80 counties combined.

In 2010, the latest year comprehensive numbers were available, those metro counties contained 53.7 percent of the state’s population but accounted for 63.8 percent of all state tax receipts. For spending, the split reversed, with 52.8 percent of state spending goes to the metro, while the remainder went to outstate Minnesota.

In broad terms, a greater share of education and human services dollars goes to the metro, while outstate does considerably better in distribution of highway dollars and local government assistance.

“The metro provides funding for greater Minnesota, not the reverse,” Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul, said at a recent legislative forum. “But Minnesotans don’t believe it.”

With the split of spending roughly proportional to population numbers, spending per person rural vs. urban is a wash, and there is a fairness to it being so. With tax revenue disproportionately urban, one relevant fact is Cargill is headquartered in Minnetonka, i.e., metro and not rural. All the high paying Cargill home office salaries are taxed into general funds, but Cargill is a worldwide agribusiness power, so the data of tax revenue generation needs a caveat, rural activity generates metro-Cargill cash flow to the state.

Relative to SNAP assistance, concise and reliable rural-urban demographic splits are hard to find online, with one key item, unfortunately behind a learned journal's paywall with only an abstract online, concludes:

Food Insecurity across the Rural-Urban Divide: Are Counties in Need Being Reached by Charitable Food Assistance?

Abstract
An extensive literature has described U.S. food insecurity and its determinants, but there has been little work on the geographic distribution of food insecurity and no work on the distribution of private food assistance by geography. To study the former, we use data from the Map the Meal Gap (MMG) project, which is broken down by Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. For the latter, we combine MMG data with data from the Hunger in America 2014 (HIA 2014) survey to determine the geographic distribution of charitable food assistance. At the national level, we find few differences across the rural-urban interface, but we do find differences within and across regions. We also find that regardless of how it is measured, the distribution of charitable food assistance is directed more toward counties with smaller populations—a finding that holds even after controlling for factors that influence the distribution of charitable assistance.

Bottom line of that item is that food insecurity, and consequent assistance, is largely uniform rural and urban, meaning Reagan's "welfare queens" and comparable Gingrich race-baiting were fiction, not fact. But we all knew that anyway, didn't we?

Again, a bottom line here: Walz is no Babbitt attuned to the dogma of Babbitt-like Chamber of Commerce politics and rhetoric. Johnson would likely be a fish out of water if not near some Chamber, somewhere. His narrowness of vision is in resonant balance with Chamber attitudes. He should take a giant step outside his mind, where Walz has the broader perspective as one of the good people who went to Washington, not a multimillionaire with an agenda for wealth propagation. Of course and in fairness, Johnson is not in the mega-wealthy camp, but seems, nonetheless, a Chamber of Commerce captive in mindset. Please note, use of "mindset" and not "mentality," as a conscious choice.

Opinions can differ.

LAST: Is Jeff Johnson with this or against it, and if against demand-boosting via food assistance for those in need, be they rural or urban, is he for direct checks to mega corporations in the agri-business segment of the economy? As a former Cargill employee where is he on the money talks question of direct payment subsidies:

About 75 percent of total subsidies go to the biggest 10 percent of farming companies, including Riceland Foods Inc., Pilgrims Pride Corp., and Archer Daniels Midland.