Let’s say the maximum amount of assistance available is $500/month. That’s, what? $16 and change per day? How many people in the family? One? Six? You don’t know. In any case, I don’t think $16/day is enough to ‘gorge’. And if the amount is less than that? No, no ‘gorging’.
The thing is that you don’t know the person in front of you in line. That person may very well be dead by midnight. Probably not, but you never know. Personally, I’d rather my last meal be steak and lobster than a bagk of Cheetos and a Ho-Ho.
But the person problably doesn’t just have hours to live. I agree that they should not be buying expensive food. As I said, even when I was employed I didn’t buy lobster. (I mean, you throw out a lot of the weight of a lobster.) But what’s the deal? They get a certain amount to spend on food each month. If they’ve ‘been good’ and have money left over, why shouldn’t they get something nice? Would you have their benefits reduced? It may be that they are able to splurge but once a year, and you happened to have seen them on that single day out of 365. Reduce their benefits over a single incident, and they may not have enough to feed their families the rest other 11 months.
I don’t see anyone in this thread advocating taking away food stamps, I can only speak for myself but I advocate better uses for them. Maybe it is nutrition classes, or shopping classes. Maybe that would cut on the waste I have seen first hand. But since its mostly electronically done anymore using the UPC symbols would be a great way to limit the actual purchase of garbage while still allowing the user to splurge on special occasions.
Yeah, because birth control and abortion are free!!! (Well, Planned Parenthood DOES provide birth control for the poor. But again, you have to have access to PP, and be educated about it.)
LookingAround, perhaps you misunderstood the slogan when you signed up: this is a board for fighting ignorance, not celebrating it.
This is an excellent point. LookingAround, if you want there to be limits on what can be purchased with food stamps, who would decide what counts as junk food? It’s all well and good to complain about people buying “junk”, but it’s less simple to actually be the food nanny and specifically identify each and every item that falls into the junk category.
Personally, I think the food stamp program does a huge amount of good, and the abuses of the program are such a miniscule drop in the bucket compared to other shit our tax money gets wasted on, including corporate welfare and pork projects that it’s pretty low priority on the list of things to get worked up about. Why try to save e.g. a million dollars from food stamp abuses, which might severely limit the help it gives to thousands of people, when you can go after tens of millions spent on subsidies to bow and arrow manufacturers or South Dakota awareness museums or other completely bullshit projects? Or the billions of dollars spent on corporate tax breaks and giveaways?
Isn’t that more or less what Johnny L.A. said as the first line of his post?
For me, his otherwise great post is marred by this statement that poor people are on welfare, WIC, and foodstamps because they’re too stupid to run their own lives, and not necessarily because the only employment they manage to find just isn’t enough.
Back when I was on food stamps, I would have loved to have bought multi-vitamins for myself and my son-- but that’s not allowed. The most “luxurious” item I ever bought was (store brand) spiral sliced ham. Out of the half ham I could make a ham dinner, quite a few sandwiches, cube the unsliced part to put in omlettes and such, and then use the bone for lentil soup. I bought plenty of store brands, fresh and frozen vegetables and stuff that wasn’t junk food. I was going to college full-time and working a work-study job. I also had to go to a mandatory nutrition class for people on food stamps. The only thing they told me in that class that I didn’t already know was that Sunny Delight has a ton of soybean oil in it. However, the OP would never have noticed me, because then he couldn’t have gotten on his high horse about how he was so much better than the Ding Dong munching welfare queen.
Yeah. I have time for “how to shop class”. I’ll just tuck it in between my two jobs, the class at the community college I’m hoping will get me a real job so 80% of my paycheck isn’t going to rent, and picking the kids up from daycare.
Back when I first went on public assistance, they offered classes like that, actually. Some of them were really neat; I would have gone if I hadn’t been trying to work three jobs and raise children. They were cut. For budget reasons.
True. I should have said some people. As I posted later, I know someone who used public assistance to completely turn her life around.
I did not mean to imply what these people are stupid. Rather, as I (thought I) implied in the next paragraph, it’s more of an issue of education. Lack of education does not equal stupidity.
I think its time you got off your high horse read my post and restate your last paragraph. I never said I was better I never implied I was better, I never said all welfare cases where like that. I did however say, that ding dong munching welfare queens (Not in those exact words of course) where WRONG and something should be done to stop those cases where people splurge on junk food and expensive foods on the publics dime.
Yes because god forbid we raise the ire of the offenderati by admitting that some people are poor because they’re: 1)stupid 2)uneducated 3)unskilled or 4)some combination of all three. Let’s just throw more money at them, that’ll fix the problems.
Yeah, actually, that is how it works. If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve always gotten. Stagnating on welfare is not getting anywhere with a life. Welfare is supposed to be a safety net when you need it due to circumstances; it’s not supposed to be a way of life.
As for the nutritious food debate, I submit that junk food is empty calories that gives virtually no nutrition, and should possibly not even be called “food.” People who eat only junk are subsisting, and their health is chronically suffering in a myriad of ways. A body and mind need nutritious food.
As for people on food stamps having complete freedom, it’s a trade-off. If you want something for nothing, there are always conditions.
Look dude. You’re a sanctimonious prick. No matter how many times you try to define it in your head, and justify why you’re not one, you are. YOUR high-horse is appalling. As I said before, you don’t understand poverty and in fact, I doubt you ever really experienced it. I’m convinced if it, actually. Your opinions on why or how people ought to run their life is apalling.
How do you know that these welfare moms weren’t married and happy until the dad was killed making their 5 children almost impossible to care for when mom had to go back to work without ANY job experience? THere are millions of different scenarios I could run you through, but you’ll never see the light.
You’re right and good, they’re bad and lazy and make poor decisions. It must be cool to live in such a cut and dry world! Enjoy the sand while you can, when you pull your head out of it and get a taste of real life, things change.
Why, yes, there is: " displaying high-mindedness with intent to impress " for example, such as in your attitude that you’re fit to cast judgement on the food purchasing habits of someone you don’t know.
But this pleasant little divergence into sparring over vocabulary still doesn’t answer the underlying issue of *why *you think it’s any of your business what foods someone buys with food stamps.
Little scenario:
I have a job as a tech at a bank. The health insurance is decent, but has a lifetime cap and my husband works there. The bank has a requirement that you must maintain good credit to remain employed. He gets sick though no fault of his own. He has a procedure that should have been covered by the VA, but after the fact, they rescind approval. Suddenly we are hit with a bill we cannot pay. We try to negotiate with the hospital, but they are giving us fits and tagging our credit report etc. The bank gets wind of this and fires the both of us for failing to live up to our employment agreement.
A recent study showed that a great many bankruptcies start with medical bills. This can put all but the very wealthy on the street. It can happen with little warning. There are supposed to be laws that prevent many strong arm tactics by hospitals, but it can be nearly impossible to get them to acknowlege this. Many who did nothing worse than the very best that they could have done end up poor, and it can be damn hard to recover. I don’t think only the very wealthy should have childen.
I am glad there is a safety net. I don’t begrudge those who need it and use it. I don’t care if they get there by their own mistakes, or by no mistake they made. I don’t begrudge them the dignity of choosing their own food and I don’t want the system to either.
Hmmm. I’ve been buying groceries for twentysome years now, and I can truthfully say that I have never, one single time, seen anyone buy lobster, shrimp, or anything too outrageous with food stamps. Junk food, maybe, but lobster? Please.
Although…IF I were someone who would spend my energy pissing and moaning about “my” money supporting someone to whom I felt vastly superior, I might consider that even lobster, if it’s close to its sellby date, might go on sale really really cheap. I’ve bought decent steak in my day for under a buck a pound, why not lobster?
At any rate, here’s something I’ve noticed in my forays to our local food bank, which is a really GREAT place. They do Second Harvest with some of the local restaurants, plus work with some health food stores for really nice healthy stuff, so they have an excellent selection of goodies. Folks like me, who have a home and a freezer and a way to cook, do really well there–bulk soups from Chili’s, rice, canned salmon, decent food that will pretty much feed my family for most of a week.
But you know what? The homeless folks, the ones who really NEED bulk soup and rice and canned salmon and eggs and milk–they get stuck with the loaves of bread and the chips (health-oriented chips, but still) and the canned pudding. Because they’re stuck–nowhere to store this stuff, no freezer, no way to prepare cooked food. I wish they had better circumstances. But I’m certainly not going to wag my finger at them about making better use of their resources.
Or, as has been pointed out: You don’t know the circumstances of those people you’re judging.
If it would make you feel better, maybe you could buy healthy stuff and donate it to a food bank. Then you KNOW those undeserving lazy nonworking folks will HAVE to eat store brand mac & cheese.
Or, hey! How much, exactly, of Your Money is going to support food stamp programs? I’d happily send you a buck or two if it would make you a little nicer to the single mom in front of you at Kroger…
Huh. What an obtuse and ignorant thing to say. If you reread my post, you’ll notice that wasn’t trying to “defend lobster for poor folks as an economical solution.” Whatever stupidity you read in my post is what you brought there yourself.
What I was saying was that if I’m picking out an extravagent main dish for myself, I often find that lobster is the less-expensive choice. If you want to take offense at that, knock yourself out.
WIC, on the other hand, is a fantastic program. You get vouchers, you can only get what is on the vouchers, and it’s all good healthy stuff. Perhaps there is some middle ground by which food stamps (or a portion of the benefit) might be restricted to certain healthy, cheap foods.
Of course, then you have to worry about what constitutes “healthy.” Store brand mac and cheese is no healthier than name brand mac and cheese, and neither of those would be considered healthy to me. Whole grain bread is expensive, but healthy; white bread is cheap but crap. Eggs are good, I guess, unless you eat too many of them. Concerns like these would be never-ending, and I can absolutely guarantee that no matter what resolution were reached, there would still be a large, noisy group of people beating their chests and saying “Why are they getting peanut butter, for God’s sake? Why can’t they just eat DIRT, like we did when we were poor??”
WIC is a great program, but lee nailed it pretty succinctly: the “approved” corporations exploit the hell out of it. The price for sliced cheese approved by WIC (yes, I should’ve milked a cow and made it myself) was MUCH higher than the other brands. Corporations make a lot of money off those sales–imagine their reaction if they were placed on the no-go list.
Something would cost more money than the abuses and open the way for more abuses. Hell the study to find out the something that should be done would likely cost more than the current abuses.
The studies that I would like to see instead is how we can change the safety net to make it easier not harder to get back on your feet and the one that would help people nurture the generousness of sould that it would take not to begrudge others of their unearned pleasures.
I took great pleasure yesterday watching the fog rise from the melting snow in the woods as I drove past. I take great pleasure in the smile of my daughter. There is not anyway that I could possibly earn the right to these perfect pleasures, but I take them and revel in them. There is no way that I can remove the pain of a child lost to parents who did nothing worse than love him. Until I know I can earn my pleasures and ease the pain of those who I believe don’t deserve it, I won’t pass judgement on the ding dong munchers.
I agree with you on the issue of education. And I’m glad for the clarification – I did mean what I said when I called your post “excellent”, it’s just that the opening sentence left a bad taste in my mouth.
Oh, and Weirddave? :rolleyes: Do I know you? What did I do to get lumped into whatever you mean by “Offenderati”?