Kerby Anderson
The incoming Trump administration seems dedicated to reducing the size of government. What about reducing the size of the American waistline? Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders sent a letter critical of the food stamp program to Trump’s nominees to head the departments of agriculture and health and human services.
When the food stamp program was launched, it was intended to address the issue of hunger in America. While it is still true that some pockets of hunger remain, the bigger problem is that Americans are, well, bigger.
The governor argues that the food stamp program is one reason for obesity in America. She lamented that “this Nutrition Assistance program is undermining the health of millions of Americans, on the taxpayers’ dime, by encouraging families to eat highly processed, unhealthy junk food.” The governor is asking for a waiver from the current federal guidelines.
Jack Butler, in a recent commentary, quotes Chris Edwards (Cato Institute) who documents that nearly a fourth of the food stamp benefits go to such items as sweetened beverages, salty snacks, sugars, and candy. Edwards argues that even though we keep hearing the word nutrition used for food stamps, much of the food consumed is not nutritious.
Butler also notes that Senator Marco Rubio last year sponsored a bill that would have required the Department of Agriculture to collect data on the health effects of the food stamp program to see if the program could be improved. Senator Rubio argued, “In the midst of America’s obesity crisis, taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be spent on junk food.”
Changing the food stamp guidelines makes sense if you want to make America healthy again.

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday I talked about “debanking,” which occurs when an individual is denied banking services because of their political stance or business venture. What happens when this happens to a nation? We call that action “financial sanctions” and have seen many examples of that in the last decade.
The U.S. and its allies were able to freeze Russian financial accounts and shut off the Russian central bank’s access to hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign reserves. The IMF was able to suspend the Taliban’s access to various funds and financial instruments.
As legitimate as these actions might be (punishing Russia for invading Ukraine or punishing the Taliban for terrorist activities), they concern other countries. Will the U.S. or other international agencies one day punish them for a policy they enact? That is why many countries are looking for another currency than the dollar, which still serves as the world’s reserve currency.
That is why the BRICS nations have been talking about developing another currency. That is also why they and other nations are turning to bitcoin. Harvard PhD student Matthew Ferranti argues for that in his research paper, “Hedging Sanctions Risk: Cryptocurrency in Central Bank Reserves.”
These banks have begun to acquire gold and bitcoin. But, he warns, they might not be able to collect enough gold and should consider the digital asset of bitcoin to hedge the risks of sanctions.
Why are nation-states talking about acquiring bitcoin? First, they see it as a digital asset. Recently Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell referred to bitcoin as “digital gold.” Second, they see it as a hedge against sanctions risk. You never know when a nation or international organization would want to shut down your finances.