Testing the Danegeld

Is it really keeping them pacified?

Submitted by Dixiecrat

The Great SNAP Experiment: Danegeld or Delusion?

In the annals of welfare state apologetics, few programs have been more assiduously defended than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The bureaucracy calls it SNAP, but those who remember when the program was administered with actual paper know it as food stamps. With 42 million Americans enrolled, SNAP has become a nuclear waste issue: touch it and die politically. Yet here we are, courtesy of the current government shutdown, watching the program’s benefits expire for millions without the usual congressional panic to restore them. Call it an unintended natural experiment. For the first time since the program’s modern form in 1964, we are about to discover whether the underclass can be pacified indefinitely with prepaid debit cards or whether the entire enterprise has been a sophisticated form of Danegeld, tribute paid to prevent the barbarians from storming the gates.

The analogy is thrown around on social media. The original Danegeld was silver extorted by Viking raiders from Anglo-Saxon kings too timid or too weakened to fight. Pay the danes, went the logic, and they will sail away. They never did. The tribute merely whetted appetite and advertised vulnerability. Charles Murray, in his prescient “Losing Ground”, warned that something similar was happening in America’s inner cities. Recall that our cities have high Gini coefficients with wide income and wealth inequality as they are ground zero for the Democrats’ barbell coalition. Transfer payments act not as charity but as protection money, buying social peace at the price of dependency and demoralization. SNAP, with its $120 billion annual price tag, is the most visible installment.

The program’s defenders insist the comparison is grotesque. Hunger is not piracy. Malnutrition is not marauding. Yet the pacification theory does not require literal violence, only the credible threat of disorder. It’s the mob threat of nice rich playground you got here shame if we burned it down. When Mayor Eric Adams of New York warns that cutting SNAP will produce “looting in the streets,” he is not predicting famine but signaling the unspoken compact. Keep the EBT cards loaded, or the underclass (violent, resentful, and concentrated in vote-rich urban wards) will make life untenable and governance impossible. The threat is rarely articulated so baldly, but it hovers over every budget negotiation like the ghost of the ‘60s riots.

Now we have the shutdown. As of this writing, the Treasury has ceased issuing new SNAP funds, and states are burning through reserves. In California, the nation’s largest recipient pool, benefits will lapse entirely by mid-November. The New York Times frets about “food insecurity” while TikTok shows black women in shower caps asking who gonna feed dey keedz. Neither asks the deeper question, which is one we have wondered for decades now. What happens when the pacification fails?

History offers clues. The 1996 welfare reform, named with Clintonian marketing acumen the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, imposed work requirements and time limits on cash assistance. The Cassandras predicted catastrophe: millions of children starving, crime waves, urban collapse. Instead, caseloads fell by two-thirds, child poverty declined, and the republic survived. The sky did not fall. It merely cleared of the smog of dependency. SNAP was explicitly exempted from those reforms, preserved as the untouchable entitlement. We are about to learn why.

The pacification theorists operate on a simple behavioral model. The very poor, lacking bourgeois inhibitions or future-time orientation, will riot if caloric intake falls below a certain threshold. Remove the danegeld, and a long hot autumn begins. Yet the model is brittle. It assumes a static underclass, perpetually on the brink, rather than a dynamic population that we can see from statistics is more foreign both legal and illegal. Keep in mind that this may be a self-deportation play by Trump’s team. The 2020 pandemic payouts ($600 weekly unemployment bonuses, paused rent, frozen student loans, stimulus checks, expanded SNAP) produced not gratitude but labor-force exit. When the spigot closed in 2021, employment rebounded fast and yes, Virginia landlords jacked rent to make up for lost covid cash flow. People, even poor people, respond to incentives.

The current pause is imperfect (temporary, politicized, accompanied by the usual partisan noise), but it is revealing nonetheless. Church food banks report a surge in donations in anticipation of this SNAP pause, so the much-maligned “faith community” is filling the gap the state vacated. These are not the responses of a population conditioned to helplessness but of one reacquainting itself with older virtues or one aware that the Danegeld must be paid one way or the other.

The counterargument, endlessly rehearsed by the poverty industry, is that these are mere patches. The real suffering is invisible, borne by children whose cognitive development will be stunted by a few missed meals. It is a systemic issue of oppression and deprivation! Yet the data are stubborn. The USDA’s own studies show that SNAP households have higher food expenditure than non-SNAP households of similar income, suggesting the program supplements rather than sustains. Does anyone in these SNAP TikToks look starving? Obesity is the public-health crisis in the SNAP population. The average beneficiary consumes 2,200 calories daily, well above subsistence, and BMI is negatively correlated with income. We have seen the pictures and videos on social media. The program’s $119 average monthly benefit per person buys not bare survival but the industrial foodstuffs that have colonized the American diet.

More damning is the fraud. The GAO estimates $1 billion annually in trafficking. EBT cards swapped for cash at 50 cents on the dollar. In any big city, undercover stings have caught minimarts and bodega owners running the scam with impunity. This is not petty theft. It’s a feature not a bug. It is the predictable corruption of a system that treats the poor as conduits for government cash. The Danegeld analogy sharpens. Yhe Vikings took silver and gave nothing in return. SNAP beneficiaries receive benefits and give back only the illusion of quiescence. SNAP did not alleviate Floyd riots on June 1st, 2020.

The deeper rot is cultural. SNAP’s unlimited duration creates what some experts delicately refer to as the dependency class. In 1964, when the program began, 5% Americans received food stamps; today it is 12%. The poverty rate has barely budged. The program has not failed to reduce hunger if that is even a thing now compared to 1964, which one can question by the obesity rates of our underclass. It has succeeded in normalizing dependence. The shutdown, by forcing a cold stop, may shock the system into recognizing what reform has long postponed. That the poor are not a permanent caste requiring perpetual tribute to keep calm but a group that will always exist and always threaten but rarely follow through.

The political class is apoplectic. Progressive Democrats decry cruelty, theatrically weeping about the potential starvation victims. Conservative Republicans, fearing the optics of starving children, nearly proposed a SNAP only vote as a quick fix. Both miss the opportunity. The shutdown is not a policy choice but an experiment. If the underclass does not riot, if food pantries, churches, and neighbors absorb the shock, then the pacification theory collapses. The danegeld was never necessary. It was merely convenient, a way for left wing elites to purchase absolution without confronting the behavioral roots of poverty. It was another link in the patron-client mechanism.

The shutdown will end, of course. The debt ceiling will be raised, the continuing resolution passed, the EBT cards reloaded. But the interregnum will linger in memory. For a few weeks, America conducted an experiment no think tank could design: what happens when the pacification stops? If the answer is nothing ever happens rather than riot, then SNAP’s defenders will have to confront an uncomfortable truth. The program is not charity; it is tribute. And tribute, as the Anglo-Saxons learned too late, is the price of cowardice. Maybe they do riot. What conversations are we allowed to have then? A couple hundred bucks prevents chaos… so why do we tolerate these violent rioters? Why do they get to hold everyone else hostage? If ruralites are told to go to the city to get a job, why are these urban residents unemployed and needing our tax money? Can we stop the convoluted lies propping this all up?

The barbarians are not at the gates. These are shock troops. They will riot only if Democratic leadership thinks it is useful. The gates were opened from within, and the silver handed over willingly. The shutdown is merely the moment we notice the treasury is empty, and that the Vikings, far from starving, have grown fat on our fear.