Projects poor? You mean section-8 qualifiers? I was on the waiting list for three years but when my daughter got a job for seven dollars an hour we were bumped. My teen daughter, who uses her seven dollars an hour to buy anime and hair products.
I’ve been city homeless, but my SO has been “living in a shack with no toilet or lights, shooting his dinner for food” poor. Then he was "living in a tin can picking tomatoes"poor. We are in better shape now, but less than two years ago there were four of us living in a one bedroom apartment in a very bad neighborhood. We live in a two bedroom house now in a not-too-dangerous area in Memphis’s little Mexico district. My SO is a laborer. I was a laborer until I became the parent of a child with special needs.
I’m not enjoying this “let’s see who is poorer” game, but I can assure you there are plenty here who have been and may still be “projects poor”. I’m not blaming ANYONE for my problems. I am asking not to be treated like a dog and fed a can of people chow when I’m down on my luck so I don’t get comfortable flashing my EBT card at Aldi.
And for the record, I drive an '88 Ford Econoline when it’s running. The rims are not even the least bit shiny. And I will NEVER buy a lottery ticket because I think they’re scams but my Mig has been known to purchase one on payday every once in a while.
I’m not trying to make us all sound like “underclass heroes”. I just want it made clear that we aren’t all the stereotype and we aren’t welfare queens with five or six kids. I’m pretty sure there’s a cap on how many children you can get stamps for just like there’s a time limit on TANF cash benefits these days.
I’ve never known anyone personally like you’ve described but I have to go to DHS every few months. I have seen some nice cars and nicely dressed people chatting on nice cell phones while they stand in line for benefits. I don’t know if they are there for themselves or helping out their great-grandma. It’s not my business. You never know what someone’s story is just by seeing them on the street. My mother looked healthy almost up until the day she died and people…strangers in parking lots… made cracks about her having a handicap placard. They could not see her as being a very sick woman who couldn’t walk far, they just saw the fat lady using her fat as an excuse to get a handicap card.
She was one of those folks who just never succeeded I guess. She had two kids, my dad disappeared, she was plagued with health problems and depression. She worked 22 years, hard, every day until she qualified for disability, the year before she died. We never had much growing up. She didn’t didn’t use welfare but there was always charity from family and friends. She never went to college, never really had a promotion after 22 years working for Goldsmiths. She never had a decent car and we lived in a dumpy house in a bad neighborhood. I imagine few would consider her successful.
Some of those people standing in line are there waiting for assistance for a family member they are caring for or for foster kids.
As an example, I have a good job. But If I were to end up with my grandson for an extended period, you would see me standing in line at the social services office to get his medical coverage. Because without adopting him, I can’t cover him on my medical. And you can’t just adopt a kid–the parents have rights. And I would need daycare assistance until he starts school. I would take advantage of these things because I pay taxes just for such purposes…to assist people when they need it.
I’ve been on “welfare” and I worked my ass of to be where I am today. Both of my kids have needed assistance of some kind during their adult lives. A good family friend is staying at my house this week because he had to have emergency surgery. He will be off work for 3 weeks. He may lose both of his jobs. He had no insurance. He will need assistance and I’ll be happy to drive him to the welfare office to get it. And if he decides to buy tasty food with his food stamps, that’s just fine with me.
We had this discussion maybe 5 or 6 years ago. It’s funny how some people get on a soap box about “Not on my dime, buster! The poor should suffer!” I raised a hypothetical about someone on EBT who is so good at shopping for groceries, who manages to eat healthy on the VERY cheap, that they save enough each week to indulge in a lobster. The answer was pretty much “Hell no! If they’re that good at saving money, their benefits should be reduced even further! Why should they enjoy life on my dime?”
Interesting how some people only want to see suffering in others. Interesting and sad.
As a poor person AND a food snob, there have been many times when I’ve survived on beans and rice for a week to compensate for some occasional indulgence. Anyone who thinks that’s a choice that should not be available to me is an asshole and not worth my time.
188 dollars for three people is not going to ever be enough for me to buy lobster. I took the whole amount and spent it for basics. Pasta, rice, beans, flour, canned tomatoes and whatever else would be good for a month. If I had a lobster in my basket (which I wouldn’t because yuck, lobster!) I’d pay for it with cash anyway.
How much is it where you live? Or have you never bothered to look?
Declaring a nation-wide moratorium on it is silly, because it’s probably cheaper in coastal areas. Around here it’s usually about $7.99/pound, but I’ve seen it as high as $11.99. At one place I used to shop they’d occasionally drop it to $2.99 when they wanted to clean the tank. And they’d sometimes have specials on culls.
On those $2.99 days, it would make more sense to buy lobster than chicken.
I don’t have any idea honestly. I’ve never bought it, but it seems to come up in these conversations every single time. I expected it to be rather high. Lobster and steak, steak and lobster. And when it was paper stamps the complaint was using the change to buy beer and cigarettes. Because we all know how poor folks love our beer and cigarettes!
This is my big splurge: Real butter instead of margarine.
Not to appear to be siding with Bri1600BV, but so what? Money is money, and if I don’t think you should be buying lobster, beer, or cigarettes, it’s not going to make me happy to see you buying everything else on the food stamps and the ‘contraband’ with cash.
Not to say that that you should be restricted to eating protein mush and dirt, but as somebody who plays a rational person on television, I can see thinking that there’s not a heck of a lot of a point of putting purchasing restrictions on food stamps when there is such an obvious workaround that people are demonstrably using.
Someone I know has a tenant who does just that. It’s his own rant so I won’t go into details but this tenant has caused him serious financial hardship by not paying rent regularly. It’s compounded by the tenant sometimes paying with hundreds of dollars in “food stamps” (they’re a credit card thingy here but the principle is the same). There’s a black market in food stamps that immediately springs up around them that makes attempts to control them fruitless.
(And yes, I’ve pointed out the need to cut this tenant loose and the trouble with food stamp fraud to this person. So it goes, I suppose.)
Lobsters are relatively cheap now. From Robb Walsh of the Houston Press:
Not that I’ve bought any. Alton Brown, trying to make the public less wussy about murdering lobsters, explained that they are about as smart as cockroaches. Yum–we’ve got some really big ones here in Houston! I’ll bet bri1600BV would support a government program to breed roaches as Protein for the Poor!
Enjoy your butter; margarine has weird stuff in it.
Yeah I can see what you’re saying. I said I’d be buying lobster with cash because I was thinking all my food stamps would go to Aldi, where there wouldn’t be lobster.
But if I’m on stamps it wouldn’t matter if I used them or cash, because if I had cash for lobster (Or cigarettes or beer) I wouldn’t need stamps.
Anyone notice these things? Posting to an internet message board from the library? A person on welfare is allowing her teen daughter to spend her seven dollars an hour on junk? A laborer already not really making ends meets has another child? Someone thinks that limiting those that are living off of others (ie the taxpayer) to “only” necessities is causing them to suffer? And you all wonder why there are so many people who are anti-welfare and anti-poor people?
What the HELL is wrong with people going to the fucking library, and using the internet there? Or are they only supposed to check-out boring, dull books?
What about those on disability – we haven’t even discussed those people! :rolleyes:
