Forward!-looking Democrats eager to increase dependency class
The next time someone moans about Washington “austerity,” tell them about the Senate’s food stamp votes on Tuesday. Democrats and a few Republicans united to block even modest reform in a welfare program that has exploded in the last decade and is set to spend $770 billion in the next 10 years.
Yes, $770 billion on a single program. And you wonder why the U.S. had its credit-rating downgraded? […]
A record 44.7 million people received food stamps in fiscal 2011, up from 28.2 million as recently as 2008. The cost has more than doubled in that same period, to $78 billion, and is on track to account for 78% of farm bill spending over the next decade. One in seven Americans now qualifies.
Once there was a stigma to going on the dole, and it was seen as a last resort. But now the Agriculture Department runs radio and TV ads prodding people to get the free food, as in a recent campaign that says food stamps will help you lose weight. A federal website boasts about strategies that have “increased program participation” with special emphasis on Hispanics because “our data show that many low-income Latinos simply don’t apply for [food stamps] even though they’re eligible.”
In the 1990s Bill Clinton boasted that welfare reform took Americans off the dole. The Obama Administration boasts about how many it has added. […]
Enter Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, who proposed reforms to limit the worst excesses. […]
That amendment lost 56-43, with every Democrat except Missouri’s Claire McCaskill opposing it. New England Republicans Scott Brown, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe and Nevada’s Dean Heller joined the antireformers.Mr. Sessions also tried to end the preposterous federal policy of paying some $500 million in bonuses to states that sign up more people for food stamps. This is the way government becomes a permanent feedback loop promoting even bigger government. That amendment lost 58-41, with every self-described Democratic “deficit hawk” opposed.
State governments have gone out of their way to remove the shame of food stamps. There are swipe cards that can be mistaken for debit/credit cards and even renaming the programs so they sound like health-clubs — California has now renamed it CalFresh: Better Food for Better Living — rather than an income redistribution scheme that leaves honest earners clipping supermarket coupons and going for the cheaper cuts of meats while the CalFresh member is loading up on processed and junk food, trading their cards for cash and liquor or going to casinos.
The death of shame — The Bigger the Government, the smaller the citizen.
Breaking: Obama invokes Executive Privilege over Fast and Furious docs.
You know what food stamps should get you? Milk (soy milk too, so the lactose intolerant don’t bitch), one whole chicken per family per week, oats, and all the lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, and other vegetables you want. Access should be non-transferable. You want to eat free? Then you’re going to eat a boring diet.
Betcha we’d see people getting paying jobs inside a month.
I wonder if after they ban the plastic bags you’ll be able to use food stamps to pay for the paper ones if you didn’t bring the reusable dirty hippie ones
Rob, beans and gubmint chese. Just like the old days.
There’s nothing I like better than standing behind a woman in the checkout line while she argues with the clerk about whether some box of processed crap qualifies for her food stamp card, while simultaneously talking shit on her state-of-the-art smartphone. Well, there’s one thing I like better, and that’s following her into the parking lot to see her get into a car that’s six years newer and three times as expensive as mine.
Me, I love standing in line at the Pharmacy behind this same woman who is now arguing about how her Medicaid card should pay for over the counter cough syrup or liquid Tylenol for her sick kid and, then she decides not to pay cash for it and leaves.
My favorite thing is the women who fill a grocery cart full of stuff , stands at the check out picking and choosing different items to match the limit on her EBT card, then leaves a half cart full of crap behind for the poor stock boys to have to put back on the shelves.
B Moe, after she’s been schlepping the frozen stuff around the store for a couple of hours they won’t be putting it back…. assuming she didn’t just leave it scattered randomly across the store.