solarbird on Nostr: ## as we head into the SNAP shutdownAs we head into the SNAP shutdown – however ...

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as we head into the SNAP shutdownAs we head into the SNAP shutdown – however long it may last, and while I’d love be surprised and see it end tomorrow with the Republicans giving in on their whole refusal-to-negotiate shutdown bullshit, I’m leaning towards it lasting a while – I want to hand out a couple of critically important items, one short and easy, one long and difficult.

First, the easy one: food banks need your money right now. If you have spare money, now’s a great time to give them some. They’re going to bear the immediate brunt of the hunger, and will need every dime they can manage. Some states are stepping in – Washington State just advanced a couple million a week to local food banks – but not all. Particularly not red states.

No judgement if you can’t, obviously. Everything is terrible. But if you can, now’s a great time.

Secondly, the difficult one: I want to talk about the context in which this is happening, and why the money matters so much, and why it’s really quite important to give now if you can.

Topline inflation numbers – which we don’t even *have right now*, I remind you, thanks to the Republican MAGA shutdown – are not representative of a fixed basket of goods. They representing a *shifting* basket of goods, a *price basket* that is intended to meet the same needs, but does *not* always have the same *contents*.

Remember that term: *price basket*, both *fixed* and *shifting*. It’s important.

That’s because the topline inflation numbers are less about *mechanical cost* and more about *how much are people spending within a category*. While those two numbers may look similar at first glance, they are in fact very different.

Let me show you how different, simplifying by only using… beef.

If beef prices go up – as they have, through the roof, under Trump – then the bureau assumes that people will move to *cheaper cuts* of beef.

(Really, they assume that they’ll likely move to cheaper types of meat outright – that people will forego beef sometimes, and instead eat more chicken or fish, just for example. But again, we’re sticking with beef for this example.)

Let’s say people had been buying a lot of porterhouse cut beef last year. That’s not the most expensive cut of beef, but it’s on the higher end.

Let’s say porterhouse has gone from $10/pound to $15/pound over the last year. That’s a lot, obviously; I’m picking that big a jump because I want clearer maths, not just because that’s about the kind of price change we’ve seen in beef since Trump took over. Even though we have.

Let’s say that as a result, people who were buying porterhouse last year have shifted this year to buying T-bone stakes. Still a very good cut, nutritionally equal, but cheaper. This is the sort of rational decision the Federal government assumes people will make, and which they look for in sales.

Now we’re talking T-bone steaks. Let’s say that over the same period of time, T-bone cuts went from $9 a pound to $13 a pound. Still a big jump! Less of one, but still big, and still a cheaper cut.

Still with me? Let’s recap:<li>Porterhouse went from $10/pound to $15/pound over a year.</li><li>T-bone went from $9 to $13 a pound over the same year.</li><li>People bought less porterhouse and more T-bone as a result, shifting their purchase pattern to save money in the face of higher prices.</li><li>We’re about to calculate the inflation rate.</li>

How do you think this year-over-year inflation rate would be calculated?

$15/$10, producing a 50% annual inflation rate? No.

$13/$9, producing a 44% inflation rate? *Also* no.

Remember above, I said “price basket” would be important? This is why. They’d use the *current* price basket against the *year ago* price basket, *even though* the basket *no longer contains the same item*.

Which means that they’d calculate the price increase as such:

$13/$10, producing a 30% inflation rate.

Now something I want to make clear is that *if you are talking about cost of living, this is reasonable*. It *does* reflect real-life behaviour. They aren’t “cheating” by doing this *if* the goal is to measure cost of living, *which it mostly is*. (If prices go down, which happens regularly in food, they do adjust back the other way too. Just to get that on the record.)

So where a *fixed goods* price basket would show a 50% or 44% inflation rate, depending upon which kind of stake was in it, the *shifting price basket* – the *cost of living adjusted* basket – would show a 30% inflation rate, because that’s how much people are actually spending.

How happy you are about that change in your basket doesn’t really factor in so much.

Now that we’ve made it through all *that* noise – why is this relevant?

Because people already buying on the very low end don’t have as much manoeuvring room to change their purchase choices. And in *that* context, the *fixed* price basket becomes *more* important than the shifting price basket, not less.

Anna and I have extremely good budgeting. And even during all we’ve been through over the last couple of years, we’ve remained fairly price-***insensitive*** over what foods we choose to eat.

As a result, I know a few important things:<li>I know what we spent on a monthly basis a year ago, what that averaged out to over five months as of each month.</li><li>I know what we’re spending now, and how that’s averaged out over the last five months.</li><li>I know that where groceries are concerned, what we buy really hasn’t changed much, due to that price insensitivity. It’s changed some, but it hasn’t changed a lot.</li>

And knowing all that, I know that our average grocery spending per month has gone up ***61%*** from September 2024 to September 2025. *Sixty. One. Percent. *I have every number and calculation to prove it.

Does that mean all fixed-price baskets would show that kind of spike? Absolutely not. I’m sure I eat more imported and/or speciality foods than typical – Bonne Maison preserves from France, instead of Smucker’s. Maple syrup from Canada on Sunday pancakes, not Mrs. Butterworth’s table syrup, a mix of HFCS and flavourings. Stuff like that. Having been “food insecure” more than once in my life, if there’s one place I am spectacularly resistant to cutting back on quality, it’s *food.* As a result, we’ve been hit harder by food tariffs than most, and my fixed-basket inflation number is ***not*** going to be typical.

But while I’m confident that grocery costs at the lowest-income levels *haven’t* gone up 61% – they may have less opportunity for cost reduction via purchase changes than people higher up the income scale, but they do have some, and they’re also not getting hit as hard directly by the tariffs – I am just as confident of this:

Food costs for low income Americans have gone up a lot more than the official inflation rate will ever say. 3%? 4%? That’s fart noises. I don’t know what it is, but I’m confident it’s a lot more than that.

It is, after all, *always* a lot more expensive to be poor.

And *that’s *where we are as Trump and MAGA decide to cut off SNAP. There’s $6 billion in contingency funds that are supposed to be used in situations like this, and Trump is refusing to use it, just like he unconstitutionally refused to spend other Congressionally-ordered spending. His puppets in the FDA are saying that American hunger *isn’t* an *emergency*, so it won’t be spent.

And why *that*, in turn? Well, maybe it’s for just political pressure. Using hunger to force Democrats to let through insane doubling to tripling of health insurance costs is entirely his kind of shitheel manoeuvrer.

Maybe that’s all it is.

Or maybe it’s because he and Miller and Vance and all those goddamn ghouls want his fucking street riots so he can invoke the Insurrection Act, and if starving American citizens is what it takes to get his riots, starving American citizens is exactly what he’ll do to get his street riots.

You *know *I’m right about *that*.

So.

Let’s not give the fascist any goddamn food riots. No matter how much he might want them.

Give generously.



#economics #fascism #politics #uspol #uspolitics