No, the SNAP Bill is not Nanny

And MAHA isn’t authoritarian

So Make America Healthy Again finally found its way to Madison this month when lawmakers gave a pair of Republican-sponsored bills each a hearing, and while groups such as Wisconsin United for Freedom were ecstatic, and rightly so, some libertarian-ish types were reaching for their Tums.

That’s because one of the bills, authored by state Sens. Chris Kapenga (R-Delafield) and Rachael Cabral-Guevara (R-Appleton) in the Senate and by Rep. Clint Moses (R-Menomonie) in the Assembly, would ban the use of food stamps, officially known as SNAP benefits when translated into Woke, to buy sugary beverages such as Coke or Pepsi or candy.

Nanny state! a number of people have grumbled to me.

So let me assure liberty lovers everywhere, as the dean of libertarianishness in Wisconsin by virtue of age alone, they can put down the heartburn meds: It’s OK to support the SNAP bill and you can do so without sacrificing your principles. It’s more than OK, actually, it’s the right thing to do.

But it’s complicated.

Before we lie down on the couch to talk about it—and I promise I’ll keep our session notes to myself—let’s briefly mention the second MAHA bill, which is a straight-up no brainer, also authored by Moses and Cabral-Guevara. Their original bill would prohibit school boards and independent charter schools from providing food that contains brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, azodicarbonamide, or red dye 3 to pupils as part of free or reduced-price meals provided under the National School Lunch Program or the federal School Breakfast Program.

Moses has offered an amendment that would apply the prohibitions to all public and private schools and to all school-served meals. Notably, the legislation does not prohibit those schools from allowing private vendors to serve food containing those ingredients on school premises or at school-sponsored activities.

Now you don’t have to be very sciencey to understand why this bill is a good thing. Any foods containing substances known as propylparaben and azodicarbonamide probably aren’t very good for you or your kids. If you can’t pronounce it or spell it, or if it looks like it belongs in your high school chemistry book, don’t eat it, that’s my motto.

Same goes for red food dye. Democrats have tried for a score of years or more to get red dye 3 banned, only discovering its magical benefits after Health & Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said it needed to go away.

To be sure, at a public hearing last week, Moses pointed out the evidentiary links between synthetic dyes in food and ADHD in children. Moses also pointed out that potassium bromate, another targeted substance, is banned in the European Union, China, and Canada.

“It is still allowed in the U.S. and commonly used at large bakeries that produce bread, rolls and pizza dough,” Moses testified. “Potassium bromate is a flour that strengthens dough and promotes rising in bread and rolls. Animal studies have shown links to kidney tumors. It has been classified as a possible human carcinogen.”

And what about those chemically-sounding ones, propylparaben and azodicarbonamide?

“The European Union restricts combined concentration of parabens in cosmetics and completely banned in food,” Moses testified.

And azodicarbonamide?

“The European Union and Australia have banned azodicarbonamide,” Moses continued.

The only question I have is, back in the day, during all those years when Big Food controlled the GOP with its lobbyists and Cash Cow Farms, and Democrats were actually on the right side of these issues, at least rhetorically, how come they couldn’t couldn’t get these substances banned? After all, they were in complete control of the federal government for some of those years.

A week ago, after Kennedy announced plans to pursue a federal red dye food ban (and a ban on all petroleum-based synthetic food dyes), Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) tore into Kennedy at a congressional hearing for proposed HHS personnel and grant cuts, claiming Kennedy was cutting personnel needed to keep food and drugs safe. Along the way she boasted that she had worked for 20 years to get red dye out of foods.

Kennedy replied: “So give me credit, I got it out in 100 days.”

Kind of makes you wonder whether DeLauro and her Democratic compatriots really wanted to confront Big Food over those dyes and other toxic chemicals, or whether it was just the usual progressive misdirection, their tendency to say they are against exactly what they are protecting.

In the end, it has taken the emergence of a powerful MAHA movement to get any of this on the table, and now that it’s on the table even the woke state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) is on board with Moses’s bill, especially the amendment that would apply the requirements to all schools and all school meals.

“Measures designed to prevent universal harm should be applied to ensure that all students are protected and that all schools, and their vendors, are held to a uniform standard,” said Kim Vercauteren, a policy initiatives advisor within the DPI.

During his testimony, Moses himself said the state bill would bypass the need for federal action—it’s not clear what will become of Kennedy’s plan—and he pointed out that the measure, which would take effect July 1, 2027, would give school districts time to work with vendors to provide the appropriate foods.

Vercauteren also pointed out that the measure did not ban those substances except in school-served meals.

“Assembly Bill 226 will not prevent all additives from being consumed in schools,” she testified. “There will still be unhealthy options in vending machines, school stores, and served at concerts and competitions. AB 226 restrictions also do not apply to food that is provided by a private entity or items that do not constitute a school meal.”

Cabral-Guevara echoed that reality: “This is not an effort to prohibit what food manufacturers do, nor does it ban consumers from buying certain foods with their own money. It simply requires schools to make menu selections from vendors that are healthier than food options with these additives and preservatives.”

It’s progress, and it’s progress everyone can thank MAHA for.

What’s on your shopping list?

More problematic is the SNAP bill, first introduced in the Senate in March, which also received a public hearing last week. This measure would prevent food stamps from being used to purchase candy or soft drinks.

At the hearing for that bill, Kapenga laid out the basics of the food stamps program, pointing out that SNAP, or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is a federal benefit program created with the intent to help qualifying low-income families afford nutritious foods. In Wisconsin, the program is called FoodShare and is administered by Wisconsin’s DHS. The federal government pays the benefit, Kapenga said, and the federal government and the state share administrative costs.

While the aim of the program was well-intentioned, Kapenga said, the SNAP program had wandered way off course.

“Today, recipients of the program can use SNAP dollars to purchase virtually any food item at the grocery store—candy bars, liters and cans of soda, you name it,” Kapenga testified. “According to the USDA, soda is the number one item purchased with SNAP benefits. And according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, more food-stamp money is spent on soda and sweets than other foods, including fruits, vegetables, eggs, pasta, beans, and rice combined.”

If the country is going to get serious about resolving chronic health problems, Kapenga continued, then the nation needs to look squarely at how people are getting the foods and drinks that lead to obesity and other health issues.

The SNAP bill does just that, Kapenga said.

“This bill targets this problem by requiring DHS to apply for a federal waiver from the U.S Department of Agriculture to modify our SNAP program to prohibit the purchase of candy and soft drinks with FoodShare benefits,” he testified. “Under this legislation, DHS must seek any waiver necessary for this to happen.”

Kapenga echoed testimony on the bill banning certain substances from school meals: “This bill doesn’t ban people from buying sweets and soda with their own money—they just won’t be able to use SNAP dollars, paid for by the taxpayer, to purchase them. Why should taxpayers foot the bill for millions in candy and soda under a program whose aim to help the impoverished afford nutritious meals?”

The bill is the right change at the right time, Kapenga testified.

“Around the country, other states are introducing—and passing—similar legislation to this bill,” he testified. “And it doesn’t just make sense for the taxpayer, but also for the health and future of our nation.”

Cue the libertarians (and Big Food and progressives)

All this sounds very noble, not to mention healthy, but what if the people don’t want to go along? This apparently is a question nagging at some people who sympathize with the ends but not necessarily with the means. And by some who don’t even sympathize with the ends.

Yes, some libertarians say, we need stricter eligibility for food stamps program participation. Yes, we need to solve the penultimate problem, which is people needing food stamps in the first place.

Still, they say, once a person qualifies, who is the government to tell them what to buy? Well that’s a nanny, of course, go look it up in the dictionary. After all, if the goal is to demand personal accountability and to empower people to make responsible choices, how is that accomplished by stripping these people of any choice at all?

Here in Wisconsin, industry groups such as the Wisconsin Beverage Association have made that pitch—“expanding, not restricting, choice is the best way to support American families in achieving balance and improving health”—and so did the progressive Kids Forward (the restrictions would be “harmful and misguided, and do not address systemic barriers, instead it takes away freedom of food choice from families”).

Funny how on so many issues these days Big Business and progressives align, am I right?

The objections, though, have been sharpest and best articulated on the federal level, especially during debate on last year’s Farm Bill, when congressional Republicans tried to apply similar restrictions. And so last May, a number of center-right and libertarian-ish groups wrote a letter to the House and Senate agriculture committees urging them to reject the proposal. Signing onto the letter were such groups as the Hispanic Leadership Fund, the Consumer Choice Center, the Rio Grande Foundation, Center for a Free Economy, and the R Street Institute.

“We believe that having the federal government pick and choose what consumers can buy would be a significant overreach and is highly likely to result in higher taxes for consumers,” the groups wrote. “…This misguided proposal would remove a wide variety of everyday grocery items from SNAP eligibility, thereby infringing on consumer choice and creating a bad precedent that would most affect families in the unenviable position of receiving government help to pay for their groceries.”

Simply put, the groups asserted, the government was going where the government had no business being.

“We object to the premise that government officials know better than individuals,” they wrote.

“Consumers, whether they are SNAP beneficiaries or not, should be allowed to make their own educated decisions in determining for themselves what foods and beverages to serve their families. They should not be subjected to top-down directives from policymakers and bureaucrats in Washington.”

Such a drastic measure would inevitably come with unintended consequences, they continued.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) just this month weighed in on a new proposal in Congress and similar ones in 10 states. Given that the restrictions would have no direct fiscal implications, the intent behind the measures seemed to be merely one of control, Alec Mena, CAGW’s state government affairs manager, wrote on May 2.

“These proposals would have no direct fiscal effect, as total SNAP funding levels would remain unchanged, but they would limit personal choices and individual freedom and expand government control over food and beverages,” he wrote.

Such efforts are misguided ways to confront obesity and chronic health disease, Mena continued, adding that what is needed is education.

Others liken food stamps to vouchers, and vouchers are meant to empower people, not dictate to them, they say. An education voucher empowers parents to shop the education market for a better fit and product for their children. Housing vouchers free lower-income people from the shackles of substandard housing controlled by subsidized landlords and empower them to shop for adequate housing in a more competitive market.

Likewise, they argue, food stamps should empower parents to make the best dietary choices for their families.

What if the government told you you had to spend your school voucher to send your kids to schools that all have the same government standards you are trying to flee? What if they said your choice was unhealthy in an educational sense? What if they concluded that parochial or neighborhood-run schools weren’t educationally sufficient?

Who is the government to make that judgment? they ask.

Like comparing apples to doughnuts

All of these are well-reasoned arguments, and all of them wrong. Comparing food stamps to education vouchers is especially misplaced.

Taking the last argument first, a voucher is not a voucher by any other name. Food stamps are vouchers of a sort, but they differ in philosophical purpose and application. Allowing parents to make fundamental educational judgments affecting their children’s future is way different from allowing them unfettered judgment in a time-limited conditional welfare program.

The very purpose of school choice has nothing to do with a government benefit and everything to do with a core state government function. It is a format for public school funding that, if fully implemented, would flow to every child in the country. It is not a welfare handout but a permanent and integral framework for providing the best education for families, with parental choice at the heart of the concept.

It was born of a desire to break apart a gigantic government school monopoly and force educational institutions to compete. It is by its very nature designed to be parentally governed.

Food stamps share not a single strand of DNA with that kind of voucher. They were not borne out of any desire to break free from dismal government grocery stores and to shop in candy land. The program’s reason for being is to help provide food security and nutrition, not choice. It is a temporary welfare benefit for a subset of the population that is by its very nature designed to be government run.

That’s why SNAP comes with time limits and work requirements. If it can impose those conditions—and it can and should—it can impose lists of what can be purchased. The real debate in SNAP should have nothing to do with choices but about who qualifies for access to a menu of items the government has decided is nutritious and acceptable and that it is offering to buy for the recipients.

To answer the libertarian point about who decides what schools are educationally sufficient, the analogy is fatally flawed. Attempting to interfere with the educational choices of families in a school choice system (imposing government school standards, for instance) would by definition undermine the very reason for school choice. Limiting choice in a system built for choice makes it pointless.

But interfering with or controlling the types of consumer choices available through a welfare program does not subvert its reason for being—the provision of nutritious food for families. Rather, by definition it makes the point; it establishes the standard to be applied, nutrition, in the very name of the program, just as voucher schools establish the standard to be applied in its colloquial name, school choice.

Housing vouchers are more akin to food stamps—a temporary benefit program, not a permanent funding mechanism—but here again the arguments fall short. That is to say, there are conditions on the use of housing vouchers, conditions on the choices voucher holders can make. They can’t live in dorms, for example. Nor can they use the vouchers to live in substandard housing with broken windows or inadequate heating or obsolete appliances. The government considers moving your children into those places to be the housing equivalent of buying children food that exposes them to harmful health outcomes.

All of which circles back to the point of the SNAP program. Again, the very name, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, says it all. The program is meant to be supplemental, that is, it doesn’t strive to cover all of a family’s food and beverage purchases. As such, parents can use their own portion of their budget to buy Little Debbies and Coke.

Nutrition is the second word in the name of the program. It should go without saying that a government program that is meant to provide nutritious food to the needy—I know I’m crazy for suggesting this—should provide nutritious food to the needy, and somebody has to decide what’s nutritious. Ideally that should be Congress and the various state legislatures, which create and fund the program. That is exactly what this bill is doing.

Those who say these legislators are stripping consumers of choices about what to feed their families miss the point entirely. Restricting SNAP does not take away one single choice from any family. Not one. These families are accepting a benefit from the government that supplements their food budgets, that is, it expands their food budgets and gives them options they would not otherwise have. SNAP enables them to buy items the government has generously deemed nutritious for them to buy. They can choose to accept the benefit and, if they do, that adds rather than subtracts choices for that family’s food portfolio. They can spend the rest of a now larger food budget on whatever they want, including soft drinks and candy.

Again, the SNAP list of approved items supplements and adds choices, it does not subtract a single item.

That said, I agree that the list should not be derived top-down by bureaucrats, but it’s important to reiterate that’s just not the case here. The Legislature—the elected representatives of the people—are deciding. In other words, taxpayers are deciding just how they are going to allow their money to be spent.

As far as empowering people to make choices and empowering them in their lives, conditional benefit programs—from time limits to work requirements to, yes, nutritional food choices—do just that: They incentivize the recipients to prepare for life after welfare benefits.

A couple of final observations. As noted above, opponents of this and similar federal legislation maintain that such restrictions expand government control of food and beverages. But as libertarian U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie observed earlier this year—and Massie supports restricting the SNAP list from sugary purchases—allowing those SNAP purchases is effectively a tax subsidy to Big Food and Big Beverage: “Paying out billions of dollars to millions of citizens to buy junk food and sugary drinks is ultimately a subsidy to the corporations who profit from those products. That’s why corporate lobbyists are lobbying Congress to be able to use food stamps to buy their stuff.”

So restricting the list is ending at least a portion of those subsidies to Big Food and Big Beverage. The SNAP eligibility of their products has long been rubber-stamped by the federal and state bureaucracies. Restricting the list loosens a little of the bureaucratic control of food and beverages by returning it to lawmakers.

Finally, as Moses pointed out in hearing testimony, there are already a boatload of items on the prohibited SNAP list, making one wonder what all the fuss is about and where it is coming from (see Big Food and Big Beverage above).

“SNAP already has prohibitions on products such as alcohol, tobacco, foods that are hot at the point of sale, and any nonfood items such as pet foods, cleaning supplies, paper products, hygiene items and cosmetics,” Moses testified.

Many SNAP recipients have serious health conditions, also, Moses cautioned.

Well that’s perhaps the best question of the week.

Oh, I see the American Heart Association has an answer for that: We need to educate people rather than oppress them, you know, a complete flip from its pro-oppression Covid stances.

Moses shot right back:

“The American Heart Association (AHA) showed up and testified against the bill,” he testified. “AHA is about promoting healthy lifestyles and a healthy heart. AHA says it’s worried about hurting SNAP participation and wants us to focus on education instead. AHA has promoted trans-fat-laden margarines as a ‘heart healthy’ alternative to butter. We now know that margarine has led to many cases of heart disease.”

Also, Moses continued, PepsiCo still pays AHA to sit on its public health forums.

“AHA has partnered with many large food corporations raking in fees through their Heart-Check certification program,” he testified. “I’m starting to wonder who funds AHA programs and how much they really care about our citizens health.”

All in all, I’d say there’s a slam-dunk case for passing the bill to ban the sugary products from SNAP purchases.

Well, I see the libertarians are all in their beds, sleeping peacefully now. My work is done.

I’m tempted to top the day with a Coke, but, well, with this column and all …