Supreme Court lets Trump pause full SNAP payments for now

We are often told in no uncertain terms that the US is the richest country blah blah blah. That is a very poor measure of whatever you are wishing to advertise.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the US has a Gini coefficient of about 46.5 which indicates income inequality on par with Russia and China.

The food stamps issue is anecdotal evidence of this.

I am not sure what is meant by "their system". I could point to quite a few things that the US does much differently than other countries with similar economic systems that contribute to a rather ordinary Gini coefficient.

An obvious one is the infatuation with what is called supply side economics for at least the last 40 years. Another is the absence of any well thought out minimum wage system that I am aware of.

I suspect that ideology is such that anything to do with fundamental government egalitarian programs for the population or prudent regulation is met with howls of socialism. The pause of the SNAP payments is evidence (as I understand things - all a bit confusing) of this irregularity.

Countries that are worse include many in South America and those in the lower half of Africa.

I was going to say 'largest economy' until I remembered there's a good many around here who don't grasp the distinction between that and 'richest'. I took a page from the Trump playbook and spoke to the lowest common denominator since the lack of precision did my premise no harm at all.

Parity of the US Gini coefficient with the same metric for China and Russia just means all three systems have failed. Everywhere we look, oligarchies are running amuck in dead democracies.

For the US, the essence of 'their system' is the culture of worship of individual wealth at the expense of the common good. That systemic flaw is the reason why the American experiment is over. It looked for a minute like the US might have found a successful way to build a society based on liberty and justice, but in the end it devolved into runaway capitalism and now it's unlikely to come back from the exponential rate of disintegration.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe eventually the people who howl about socialism will discover that the defining characteristic of socialism isn't a welfare state, it's a population of citizens who share ownership and control of the places they work. It's still theoretically possible for Americans to claw back the wealth they produced and lost, and get back to work on the liberty and justice thing. I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Tens of millions of Americans using food stamps to get by in the richest economy on the planet. I wonder how hungry Americans need to get before they realize their system has failed.

It's gonna be one hall of a Thanksgiving in a couple of weeks.