Biden Inflation Explained

Our Tax Dollars at Work

A review of the extremely ramped up spending on SNAP during his time in office leads me to believe that all of the grocery store inflation we’ve seen over the past six years can be tied to providing all the millions of new immigrants, and poor, and basically anyone who applied for SNAP benefits, free food money into the hundreds, even thousands per month.

Under the cover of the “Covid emergency” Biden raised the per-person SNAP benefit from $ 159 dollars per month, to $ 259 dollars and change per month. They quickly ramped up those amounts with a 23% increase in benefits tagged along with a cost-of-living increase that then took those amounts to $ 298 per person, or $ 994 per family of four per month. In total we spent near half-a-trillion dollars on SNAP benefits during the Biden administration.

You simply cannot pump those amounts of money into a finite system and not see inflation, a case of too much money chasing too few goods.

I’ll allow that my point may be pure conjecture, but anyone around long enough to understand human nature and sees the amount of a half-a-trillion dollars spent in just four years realizes immediately the cause and effect.

My first sales job was with a major soda bottling company. Going out into the field and selling a full line of soda to the unwashed masses. That job was quite the education. I didn’t begin in sales, they hired me in accounting. When I would first walk through the cafeteria of the plant, soda machines lined a full wall. And all of that soda was free. Go to lunch in the cafeteria, punch a button, get a free soda. In any of the dozen flavors or more sold.

Within a few weeks of employment I began to notice something that management noticed as well. People would talk, eat slowly, drink the free beverage, and the soda would warm sitting there on the table. So half-consumed, the employees would just leave the bottle there, punch up another serving ice cold from the machine, and in going back to work after their hour long lunch would leave behind two, even three half consumed bottles of soda.

I even saw more than one person come through the cafeteria, walk down the machine aisle, and punch every button as they walked by, the loud thud of a soda bottle tumbling down the metal slide one after another. They laughed exiting the cafeteria, leaving over a dozen bottles warming in the trays.

Within two months of the start of my employment there management raised the price of a soda to a nickel. “Free” was so abused by those receiving the benefit, that to prevent abuse they had to add some nominal fee to prevent the abuse. And though it was just a nickel to purchase a full bottle of twelve ounce soda, waste fell to zero overnight. No more three half-bottles left over a lunch, no more punching the machines to just hear the bottles rattle down.

“Free” led to abuse, a nominal fee ended it all.

We can all apply that lesson to what we all refer to as “Food Stamps”, or EBT, or whatever program moniker we use to describe the free food program that is SNAP benefits. But no matter what you call the benefit, or what distribution method exists, we are giving families literally thousands a year to get free food.

Absent any personal cost. Absent any effort. With the EBT card it is so simple that recipients wake up each month to find their card regenerated overnight.

If you have some depression era mentality that we are supplying the destitute with the ability to purchase a pound of hamburger and a box of Hamburger Helper to feed their starving family, please disabuse yourself of that notion. There are no limits to the spending, you can purchase expensive crab legs if your tastes desire.

And they do. You can go online and view video, after video, of SNAP recipients showing off carts full of Gatorade, an array of snacks and sodas, and foods across the spectrum of available choice.

Free murders the discernible buyer. There is no need to view price, there is no need to worry about expense, fill the cart with whatever the family might enjoy, it is all free.

And of course there is a black market of scam and scandal to the program. You go shopping with a neighbor who doesn’t qualify for SNAP benefits, though at this point they must be hard to find, as the Biden Administration had an open enrollment policy on the program. And you fill the neighbors basket and walk them to the car having used your EBT card to purchase their groceries. The neighbor then gives you fifty cents on the dollar. Two hundred dollars in groceries spent on the EBT turned into a hundred dollars cash. For gas, for tattoos, for nails. Money being fungible, it transfers easily to the nail salon.

Back before the SNAP benefit was card loaded, back when they were called “food stamps” because they came in a book, like the old “Green Stamps”, and were paper with a monetary value that spent just like cash, I worked at that same bottling company, but this time in the field in sales. As part of my territory I had the downtown area of East Baltimore, home to a few “fresh markets”, or stalls inside a giant warehouse building that sold fresh foods.

The vendors freely admitted to me that they paid fifty cents on the dollar for food stamps that went into their bank just as cash. Their problem was making sure purchases from food wholesalers were sufficient to match receipts. You can’t purchase a single ham and claim through the register you sold six hundred ham sandwiches. The auditors know a single ham won’t stretch that far.

So one scam caused another.

The food stall vendor would begin to order his own personal provisions for home through the vendors. So he could show enough food purchased to match the sales totals claimed in fraud, due to all the food stamps he’d bought. You can’t buy a hundred dollars worth of meats and breads and then claim you sold five thousand dollars worth of sandwiches from that paltry purchase, the food stall owner was some idiot Greek, not Jesus Christ with the loaves and fishes.

I had to laugh, and marvel at the scams being run in these small markets. Every vendor was in on the scam. Some hot foods weren’t included in the program, but in demand by the food stamp recipient. No bother, just sell a hot sandwich and ring it all in as a cold meal, food stamp “approved”. And worse, the food stall owner would tell me they just loved the end of the month. Poor food stamp recipients got desperate for cash, and the price of return went from fifty cents on the dollar to as low as twenty cents on the dollar. Grab a hundred in food stamps to process through the bank as a hundred dollar bill, hand out a twenty. Those stall owners would do that all day long if they could, and never order a single ham.

Spreading a billion dollars into any market today causes a ripple. Move that needle to half-a-trillion and it can cause a wave of inflation. We just lived through it, and are still feeling the after effects of the tsunami of cash the Biden Administration poured into the grocery system in America.

There is talk of Trump implementing two important requirements in the future of SNAP benefits. First, forcing everyone to re-apply to root out fraud and abuse. To find those illegals who are using the program. And second to create a work requirement to gain benefits for the able bodied recipient. I doubt either requirement will ever see the light of day. If the American Liberal votes a Democrat into the office of the Presidency in 2028, we will see SNAP return to an entitlement to all, as an enticement to vote “D”, your mommy-state benefactor.

Did you enjoy the Biden years of inflation, as your actual after tax dollars had a fight with your taxable dollars for food at the grocery store, and your after tax dollars lost and lost big?

Did you?

Because it is my full and complete conjecture that SNAP raises, new approvals, and the influx of millions of illegals placed under benefit caused it all.

Prove me wrong. Check the numbers.

You can’t give third world behavior “Free”, what do they care about food waste, they’ve no skin in the game. Drink half the soda, it gets too warm for their taste, grab another, as John Belushi said in that great film “Animal House”, have a beer, it don’t cost nothin’”.