It's really hard to help people

The Washington Post has run a few stories recently about people receiving food assistance in the US.  The most recent is this Thanksgiving Day column.

Here at the Fuzzy Wups B^n, this is a topic of frequent and heartfelt discussion.  How can one claim to promote universal pie making without addressing the fact that the wealthiest country in the world has a sizable population of people who can't afford to buy their own food?  Like a good scientist, your pie maker would answer this with another question: What does it mean to address that fact?

Read the linked column.  Notice how many people on that list drove to pick up their donated food.  Notice the questions that implied some kind of right to expect a donated turkey for their own kitchens.  Notice the reference to "Condo Fees."  The people receiving this aid are most certainly not going to appear next to Sally Struthers, and are more likely to suffer from obesity than malnutrition in the classic sense. 

So how does one frame the policy question here?  What's the desired end state, what situations must be avoided, and how can we measure progress?  There are reams of papers on these questions and their implications for the design of everything from a community food drive to USAID's allocation of the surplus American wheat crop abroad.  This post, this blog and this pie maker's career could very well be spent diving in to this and deriving formulas to optimize the allocation of donated food, labor and money.  That, however, is a deeply impersonal approach and invites precisely the sort of callousness that lets us debate grandly while avoiding the fundamentally intractable problem at the heart of all of this: Why do the recipients need help, and why do we care?  Does the cause of the need impact our response to it?

Put aside any grand theory of social justice or personal responsibility for a moment.  Imagine that the aid recipient is not some faceless statistic or cameo in print.  That down-and-out was, is or someday will be a relative of yours. 

Odds are good that relative, we'll call him Uncle Bob, saw this situation coming.  Odds are even better that you, dear responsible reader, saw this situation coming, and probably even tried to warn Uncle Bob.  But Uncle Bob didn't change his ways, and now he's in pretty tough straights, and even though you're feeling pretty stretched by rising gas, food and rent prices Uncle Bob needs your help.  Denying Uncle Bob would, at the very least, hurt Aunt Bobbie and the Boblets physically and mean teaching any kids in the family that being good is not enough and family might not be there for you.  Heck, odds are good the "trouble" everyone saw coming was just Uncle Bob trying to do the right thing, at least from his perspective.  Most of us have an "Uncle Bob" somewhere in the family.

So you are stuck.  Do you cut off your uncle, let him suffer the fate he knowingly brought down on himself and his family?  Are you ready to explain to the kids who have to watch this fall that, as much as we all love Uncle Bob, he needs to learn his lesson like a grown up?  Even as we watch Uncle Bob and Aunt Bobbie begin to suffer stress and poor-nutrition related diseases?  No, blood is thicker than water, family comes first, and that boat/house/college fund/really nice oven purchase gets pushed back because letting Uncle Bob, Aunt Bobbie and the Boblets starve is just not an option. 

Now, how do we help Uncle Bob?  The "end state" is a self-funding, pie-making family, and the hard constraint is that Bob, Bobbie and the Boblets get 2000 Cal/day every day.  Everyone knows that Bob's not so good with money, so giving him cash is not going to solve this problem, and may be offensive besides.  Losing money is bad, losing dignity is much worse.

 First, Uncle Bob needs to accept the help.  The most dignity-preserving way to do this is to simply ring up the Bobses' groceries with your own, let them use an extra room in your house, and/or fill their cars with gasoline because (a) they are family and (b) they do stuff around the house and run the odd errand for you (not as much as you'd do with the kitchen you'd planned to extend into that bedroom . . . but who really needs to have a bigger Thanksgiving meal when family is so close!  All the time!  Because they can't keep their own house!  Yay family!).  What this approach says to Uncle Bob is that you're just helping him out through a rough spot, freeing up his time and money to put towards more pressing needs. 

Let's unpack that that last sentence.  If feeding and housing Bobbie and the Boblets is not Uncle Bob's highest priority, if "getting back on his feet" means returning to the situation two years ago when things weren't acutely bad but clearly getting worse, then the situation evokes a sense of moral outrage and hopeless frustration.  If the law, not family ties, compelled you to help Bob, you'd understand, and maybe join or even lead a local TEA Party group.  Your funds, your house and possibly your kid's education being sacrificed to pay for someone's very bad decisions, however well meaning, is galling.  Is Uncle Bob's dignity really worth so much? 

If plan A was to provide for physical needs directly via in-person support, what's Plan B if Uncle Bob moves away and still needs assistance?  This is much trickier.  We know Uncle Bob and the Bobses cannot to be trusted with cash, if they would accept it at all.  There really isn't any sort of fig leaf we can put over the provision of aid to make it seem transactional without dredging up things done decades ago (remember all those times Uncle Bob used to help out around . . . ).  This is where things start to get interesting, as the family drama now mirrors a national policy discussion. 

Here's what we want:
(1) No unfettered cash.  Not enough of it will turn into food or acceptable housing for this to be a good idea.
(2) Minimal cost.  The anger that this situation causes is directly proportional to the amount of time it delays your oven upgrade.
(3) Adequate nutrition.  No point if they starve anyway.
(4) Dignity preserving.  Breaking relationships to make a point violates both the requirement to keep the Boblets fed and keep the family whole.  This is the most galling, but also the most necessary.

So what we do?
Option (A): Ship them, or arrange for delivery of, weekly supplies of staple foods.  This is like going shopping with them, but instead of your silently suffering face they see an untipped delivery guy.
Let's evaluate:
(1) Yes. (2) No, emphatic No (3) Yes (4) Maybe . . . depends how much input they have.  It's really tempting to use a pipeline like this to exercise control ("show me three REAL job applications or it's rice, beans and greens again next week!")

Option (B): Grocery store gift cards.  It's saying "we want to make sure you're able to eat well."  Stores that allow them are generally more expensive than stores that don't, but you don't have to worry about the funds going to non-food things like gasoline.  Until the store starts selling gasoline.
Let's evaluate:
(1) Probably (store may redeem for cash or give it as change) (2) Maybe (3) Probably (4) Yes, if the Bobses like the store.

Option (C): Carefully monitored debit card.  It's saying, generally to Aunt Bobbie rather than the Bobses as a group, "We trust YOU to actually buy food, but if anyone tries to buy anything else, that's it!"  The behavioral economists reading this probably wonder why we hate Aunt Bobbie so much, tho, since this option means she has to deny Uncle Bob access to this line of cash herself, and probably quite frequently.  Uncle Bob's dignity comes at a steep price indeed.
Let's evaluate:
(1) Maybe, it's mighty temping to slide that card into a gas pump when other accounts are dry.  (2) Yes (3) Probably (4) Mostly

Option C, incidentally, is how our elected representatives have chosen to implement this type of assistance on a large scale.  They only allow purchase of select products from select retailers, rather than having to carefully monitor the cards directly, but the effect is the same.  These automatic controls make them more like gift cards to low-end stores, essentially combining the best of Options B and C. 

Here's the truly awful part.  We went through all of this and rather than making any progress towards our "end state", we're just barely avoiding the "no one starves" constraint while trying to minimize your costs and the offense to Uncle Bob's dignity.  So what of the questions "why does this situation exist?" and "why do we care?"  Uncle Bob is the reason the problem exists, and will continue to exist pending a significant (and unlikely) change in behavior.  We care because we want to be people who care, and don't want our children to see us be uncaring. 

The help is needed because people make really bad decisions sometimes.   Sometimes those seem like a good idea at the time, or would have been good ones a year, decade or generation ago.   But we who desire to help are powerless to change people's minds directly.  There is no escape from this fact. 

Vegan Taquitos

It's been said that going vegan, or at least vegetarian, is difficult because the food is boring, or just awful.  It is, according to popular belief, also healthier.

Not necessarily.  We at the Fuzzy Wups keep corn tortillas (made from vegetable oil), a few cans of black beans and flour handy for nights when we're down to a few leftover vegetables and we don't want to go out.   Oh, and peanut oil.

Vegan != Healthy

 The recipe is a bit involved, and not compatible with a future pie-maker crawling around in the kitchen.

Ingredients:
 Leftover veggies (We recently used two heads of bok choy and about 1/4lb of cabbage.  The point here is texture and depth of flavor.)
 Soy Sauce
 Garlic Powder (You can use fresh, but should save that for a dish that shows it off better.)
  Onion Power (It's a sweetener that's required if you've got greens in the mix and no onions)
  Other Spices (Make your kitchen smell really good.  Then the food will taste good and everyone will be happy.)
  15oz can of black beans (Don't drain, any style will do.)
   1/4 Cup flour (I use a 50%/50% mix of whole wheat and all purpose, but experiment by using up your oldest stuff.)

 Preparation:
(*) Stir fry the leftover veggies until they are nice and soft, like you might feed to a teething baby.  Add soy sauce, garlic powder and onion powder while heating to ensure they get mixed in properly.  Add other spices as needed to make the kitchen smell very good.  Do not add too much chili unless you call the fire department first.

(*) Mix the vegetables and can of beans in a bowl.  Stir in the flour(s).  Add flour until the mix reaches the consistency of crepe batter.

(*) Heat tortillas, roughly 6 at a time, in a microwave for 30-45s until easy to roll

(*) Pour enough oil into a wok to submerge a rolled taquito.  Heat the oil until it reaches 350F.  Extra points if you can rig something to automatically control your burner's flame. 

(*) Spoon 2-3T of filling into each tortilla and roll it up.  This takes practice and your pie maker considers 75%-80% success to be pretty good.  Mistakes = vegan nachos, a future pie-maker's favorite.

(*)  Using good tongs, place the taquitos, up to three at a time, in the hot oil, wait about 45s-1min, flip, wait another 30-45s, and remove when golden brown.  It may be necessary to hold onto a taquito for 10-20s after putting it in the oil to prevent it from unrolling. 

(*) Serve with your favorite sauce.  We typically use sour cream because we're not vegans. 

Of Values, Interests and Policy

Foreign Policy's blog ran a great piece last year describing policy as "The Opposite of Thinking."  The author's point is that the purpose of policy is to do all of the difficult thinking about policy in advance, such that the people tasked with carrying it out don't make rushed decisions.  Or, for that matter, any decisions.

Your pie maker has been chewing on this idea for a while, and recently came to see it in terms of the "Interests vs. Values" theme of this blog.  Policy is derived from perceived interests of the polity, a set of rules believed to advance the prosperity, power and identity of the decision makers.  Values are rules that help define the identity and meaning of prosperity of the decision makers and shape how they view the use of power.

Because of their connection to identity, values are difficult to discuss and largely impossible to change through dialogue.  However, people of conflicting values can often find common interests, and the US system of government assumes that we will make policy based on that common ground. The prescribed path, in other words, is to go from values to interests to policy. 

However, this idea breaks down when a policy becomes a value unto itself.  If "Lower Taxes" or "Universal Health Insurance" or any policy position replaces the value which lead to the interest from which the policy was derived, discussion is over, the interest involved will be compromised and the original values ill served. 

Change the name to Redtails

A bit cartoonish, but a good start.

Last year about this time, I was riding to work with my orange Camelback backpack with a bright red flashing light clipped to the back.  I passed at least two cars with obvious, perhaps excessive Washington Redskins decorations, and, while waiting at a stop sign, an undecorated car rolled down its window so the driver could cheer my "great Redskins colors".  It's fair to say that the team has a sizable fan base and that they are generally pleased with its name. 

That said, Councilman Grosso had an excellent idea that (almost) won an international rebranding contest.  The titular winner, "Warriors", is so banal that it probably reflects lack of knowledge of the Tuskegee Airmen rather than a serious preference.  American bomber pilots knew that a Redtail would not go haring after Messerschmitts in pursuit of glory; he would stay on their wing and make sure they got home (read the book). There are only a few of them still alive today, and theirs is a story that we must not forget.

The "Redtails" name fits existing cheers and songs with only a syllable to change. "Redtail-gating" will, by rights, become a regional pre-game culinary specialty.  This could include grilling pies, and, of course, plenty of pork.  The team's colors, even my riding gear, are already appropriate.  Most importantly, it would honor a group of men who made an incredible contribution to our nation just as the opportunity to collect their oral histories fades away.

This is not about political correctness.  There is little more powerful for a group's identity than owning its slurs and marching onward to victory.  The Washington Redskins cannot claim to be doing that, however, and have not turned a controversial name into that of a champion.

Changing the name is the right decision because the mood in Washington needs a lift, a reminder of when people let their better selves soar and a deeply divided nation served with distinction for our common good.  It's the right decision because the Tuskegee Airmen were a great example of the discipline and focus that a football team needs to win.  It is the right decision because nothing would honor their courage in war and peace more than stadiums singing "Hail . . . to the . . . Redtails."

Wanted: Pork

For those who wonder why Congress seems to be stuck in a cycle of constant fiscal crisis, your pie maker suggests that the problem lies in a lack of pork in its diet.

At its worst, so called "pork barrel" spending made up a tiny fraction of the federal budget and funded many useful roads, dredging projects and interesting military prototypes.  Almost more importantly, it gave deal-making politicians something tangible to (a) show their constituents that voting for them was a good idea and (b) a means of directly rewarding supporters in their own districts. 

The real key is (b).  Right now, a Republican from a safe district will almost certainly lose his job if the Club for Growth says so because they can mobilize more money for a primary campaign and whip up a core of energetic RINO hunters.  With nothing to offer the local business community but the hope of saner government in the future, who could they convince to stand against the tide and possibly see their businesses blacklisted by the local talk-radio set?

The system was not without its problems.  There were a few incredibly ill-founded projects, and groups like research universities had begun using direct appropriations to subvert merit-based funding awards.  However, eliminating one of the leadership's key tools for whipping votes to bring about good governance was the work of daydream believers.

The sad truth seems to be that we need pork.  When it returns it should come with stricter rules on what could be funded via earmarks and perhaps rules-based agreed limits on the percentage of any agency's budget that can be directly earmarked.  That has two huge potential benefits:
(1) Deal-making Congressmen will have something to show for their efforts, and
(2) Congress would have a clear, if small, role in the setting of Executive priorities.

Most importantly, however, is that pork lets us talk about real interests instead of ephemeral values.  As any good pork pie recipe will tell you, a little bit goes a long way towards helping disparate ingredients come together.  

The perils of "G"

In a standard college-level course on macroeconomics, a student will see an equation along these lines:

Y = I + C + G + (Ex - Im)

The economy's total output (Y) is a function of private investment (I), private consumption (C), net exports (Ex-Im) and the subject of today's post, government spending (G).  This will not be a discussion of "output gaps", "multipliers" or other econometrics, but rather an attempt to humanize a discussion that for the last three years has focused on abstractions instead of narratives.  In other words, this isn't a post about what size "G" should be, but about assessing whether or not it supports pie making.

Here's a cautionary tale of "G" gone wrong.:

  The first is an article from The Washington Post about food stamps becoming a town's economic engine.  William Easterly tells almost exactly the same story in his book, about a "temporary" relief program rewards the very need it is supposed to eliminate.  However, it would be cruel at best, and socially destabilizing at worst, to just cut off this support suddenly without some kind of replacement. 

    At first, this story supports Ronald Reagan's assertion that "the scariest seven words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"  Here "G" supports economic output, but Congress certainly did not intend to have food assistance become a treadmill of dependency.  However, its tools are blunt and correcting their unintended consequences means overcoming both bureaucratic inertia, which generally favors reducing its own costs over providing effective services, and entrenched interests such as unions, Big [Industry] and the banks that hold stakeholders' mortgages and lines of credit.  
    Small wonder, then, that much of the debate and sound bites as we enter our "fiscal Great Harbor" focus almost exclusively on the size of "G" with little or no thought to where it actually goes.  This is a half-baked discussion.  There are clearly good, important things that the government provides which doubtless enhance national pie making capacity.  But a simple focus on the top-line number forces us into a form of hasty generalization, equating all of the outputs with their best or worst manifestations.

     As a free and educated people we should be able to engage in a more productive debate.  If you agree, and can help roll a crust or hold a baby for your pie maker, let him know.  He'd like to discuss whether we can define good "G" in a way that could survive rulemaking and support pro-pie interest groups.

Happy Pi Day!

It's March 14th, or 3.14.  However, as your pie maker is a good engineer, he'll be celebrating Pi Day on the most convenient approximation.