On Dec. 16, 2017, the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture held a committee hearing on “Pros and Cons of Restricting SNAP Purchases.” SNAP is a federally financed food assistance program that faces many of the same dilemmas policymakers face over education savings accounts. Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of The Hamilton Project, provided testimony that speaks volumes to current debates over ESAs. I have no idea whether she supports, opposes, or has even ever heard of education savings accounts, but several of the points she raises seem very relevant to ESA debates today. Likewise, it does not matter whether you love, hate or are indifferent to SNAP.
Let us start with Whitmore Shanzenbach’s description of the SNAP program:
You could cross out the word “SNAP” and put in “ESA,” cross out the word “food” and put in “education,” and finally replace “nutritional” with “educational,” and you can see the policy parallel. The topic of the panel, basically “Should we let SNAP beneficiaries buy only nutritious food with SNAP?” gets answered with not just a “no” but with an emphatic “NO!” Whitmore Schanzenbach points out profound difficulties in “only letting people buy good stuff” below. It’ a long quote but TOTALLY worth your time to read:
With my incredibly advanced graphic skills honed over a long lifetime of practice, I have noted a few things in this quote, reproduced below, which should make the Spidey-senses of ESA supporters tingle:
Okay, so let us run this through the translato-meter. First, we do not agree on what constitutes “healthy food.” If you do not believe me, google the phrase “Is eating bananas good for you or bad for you?” Spoiler alert: There is no consensus. “Consumers have vast differences in their tastes and preferences” in education just as much as food. Oh well, we can just put together an expert panel and let them decide. Baby Boomers and Gen Xers will, at this point, remind us of all about when we took this approach, and our “experts” created something called the “Food Pyramid” that told everyone to stuff themselves with bread nonstop. Strangely enough, Americans got more and more obese…
Oooops!
Putting my political science hat on, Whitmore Schanzenbach has established practical difficulties that would make a sensible person scream and run away from nanny-statism. There is, however, so much more! If the government decides which food you can buy with SNAP, lobbyists are going to come out of the woodwork. The apple growers will try to have oranges banned, and vice versa. Doughnut makers will make elaborate claims about their health benefits and why other pastries should be verboten, etc., etc., etc. Welcome to the political mosh pit of evermore with no escape, ever.
Now, having said all of that, SNAP does have vigorous ongoing efforts to prevent fraud and will not allow you to buy whiskey at the grocery store with your SNAP card. This is not an argument against guardrails on an ESA program; every state has them. It is, however, an argument in favor of a light touch by authorities, one that recognizes diversity in preferences and with the wisdom to recognize that we do not know the optimal way to educate every child. If we are curious about this latter question, we should let people figure it out for themselves. We just might learn things.
Micromanaging people’s lives is a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
