TO SAY that most American political discourse takes place at the intellectual level of baboons would be an insult to baboons. Baboons are capable of handling two-factor reasoning problems: if I eat all the bananas now, I'll have none left for later; better eat enough to quell my hunger now, but leave some for later. In contrast, political discourse generally takes place at the one-factor level that could be handled by, say, flatworms: Banana yummy! Hunger bad! Or, as today's headline on Politico has it: "Republicans to slash food stamps"! (Exclamation point added.) Nothing against Politico; such is the nature of headlines, which is the level at which politics generally is conducted. To get to the higher-reasoning version of the argument, the one that might be interesting to any baboons who may be reading this, you have to continue down into the body of the article. There, you find that those Republicans have a rational explanation for wanting to cut food stamps: otherwise, they'd have to cut the defence budget. Welcome to the world of the budget choices you need to make, when you refuse under any circumstances to raise taxes. The list of GOP budget cut proposals this year is fairly routine, but what's new is "the real shift of resources from the domestic side of the ledger to military spending."

Caught in the middle are not just Obama's ideas but the working poor and long-term unemployed forced for the first time to rely on programs like food stamps in the current recession. At one level, the pro-Pentagon, anti-tax stance fits traditional Republican doctrine. And the whole goal is to come up with enough savings to forestall automatic spending cuts that will fall most heavily on the Defense Department in January. ...An average family of four would face an 11 percent cut in monthly benefits after Sept. 1 and, even more important, tighter enforcement of rules would require that households exhaust most of their liquid assets before qualifying for help. This hits hardest among the long-term unemployed, who would be forced off the rolls until they have spent down their savings to less than $2,000 in many cases.

The article is actually very good. It's all too rare to see policy proposals treated in light of their opportunity costs. The article says the cuts to food stamps, officially known as SNAP, would save $33.2 billion over ten years. What might those cuts be getting us, over in the defence budget?

Well, a couple of weeks ago, the Defence Department announced that the F-35 programme's procurement costs had increased by $17 billion. This is partly because the developer has been unable to finalise the jet on time, leading to expensive slowdowns. The actual production cost per plane of the cheapest version, according to Defence talking points, is $83.4m. So if the programme had a fixed budget and the higher costs led to lower purchases, that might mean buying about 210 fewer F-35s, ie 2,233 rather than 2,443. But fortunately, by slashing food stamps for millions of poor Americans during the most stressful economic hardship since the 1930s, we can avoid such painful decisions.

Obviously actual budgeting is much more complicated than this. (Though some of the complications actually trend in the other direction; when you cut planes, you can also cut maintenance personnel, parts and operating costs over the years after they would have been procured, so you might be able to save that $17 billion by cutting fewer than 210 F-35s.) But the point is that our cost-benefit calculations here are obviously ridiculously out of whack. We are talking about forcing large numbers of actual Americans into poverty to qualify for food stamps, in order to guard against an imperceptible increase in the risk that at some point America's overwhelming dominance in air superiority in every corner of the globe might marginally degrade, leading to...what? What is the risk? What is the threat? How much actual food are we willing to take out of the mouths of poor Americans right now, to ensure that we have a couple of hundred more American fighter jets that are even more dominant over Chinese or Russian fighter jets decades from now in a hypothetical war of a variety that is almost certainly never, ever going to happen again? How many poor families' dinners do you have to take away to pay for our 2,443rd F-35? In a non-monetary sense, how many poor families' dinners is our 2,443rd F-35 worth? Because I have trouble seeing how it's even worth one.

(Photo credit: AFP)