Excellent post, DrCube.
There are always people who take advantage of everything. Always. There was a lottery winner in Michigan who continued to take welfare/WIC payments. How many other people should suffer because she was a jerk?
I tossed a stick of dynamite into the sewer main. Should we discontinue the sewer service to the whole street because I’m a jerk?
You just have to realize that there will always be abusers of the system and work to exclude them as time goes on, not make everyone suffer because of it.
We can talk about the poor and their poor choices all day long. But most poor people didn’t make any choice because they’re children. Should we punish them for the choices made by someone else?
How does persistence hunger help them rise above their parents’ choices? Doesn’t this just make the situation worse?
Doesn’t allowing the existence of hungry kids today ensure that we will always and forever be talking about hungry kids?
I work with my local NAMI, and I find that actually, the truth is even more disturbing: a lot of poor people get some access to “mental health care”…and what they get, is often of very poor quality. As in, it damaged/is damaging them even more than if they didn’t get access at all.
My wife went through nursing assistant training awhile ago. The hospice she had to work for two weeks at to complete the training horrified her.
I really wish they had passed single payer health care instead of the horrible Obamacare monstrosity. Something that properly funds mental hospitals and similar.
It doesn’t matter if some of them made poor choices. They are where they are. We should help them.
Taking swipes at other posters by posting caricatures of their positions is not appropriate and does nothing to promote discussion. Doing so when not even engaged with the poster is liable to garner a Warning for personal attacks.
Knock it off.
[ /Moderating ]
This is so much complete nonsense. We just bought sliced turkey - it was $4 for half a pound. I’m guessing you got about a quarter pound of turkey, or about 4 ounces.
A slice of turkey is about .75 ounces. So, you’re looking at about 5.33 slices of turkey. So, I can eat 10 sandwiches, each with a half a slice of turkey.
That kind of fits with your $0.25 buns. At my grocery store, this week anyway, I can get 12 mini slider buns for $3.00. So, you’re suggesting that I can survive on two mini slider sized 1/2 half slice turkey sandwiches a day?
I don’t know about that. I can get cheap turkey for 3.99 a pound. And the baked-at-the-store bread rolls are about 50cents each.
I think that’s more regional/you need to buy the cheapest, dirtiest stuff to get it really cheap.
Clearly, two anecdotes don’t nullify your anecdote, but you can find cheap things that are normally expensive.
Being able to budget two whole slices of turkey per day, rather than two half-slices, doesn’t really make Werekoala’s sandwich/starvation diet more practical.
If you’re trying to say I missed the point of your post…I’d say you’re correct. To save face, I must bluster:
IT MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE. You just can’t comprehend, man.
Well, here’s a guy that documents a 2000 calorie a day healthy diet at $90/month.
Bravo for you. Did you have to plan meals for a diabetic and someone with food allergies severe enough to make for a trip to the ER if they ate the wrong thing? I did. It wasn’t fun. White rice and potatoes are cheap as hell, but it’s a recipe for disaster for a lot of diabetics.
Also, were you doing manual labor, construction work, roofing, and the like? Because I was, which greatly increased my caloric needs above the baseline.
Yeah. If you have an equipped kitchen, cooking and nutrition knowledge, and access to a good grocery, you can get by on a minimal budget. It sure ain’t as easy as slapping sandwiches together.
Maybe food stamp programs should include vouchers for cooking classes?
I will admit the items I bought were from a Tom Thumb grand opening, so probably less than they’d normally be, so I’ll back off a bit on that. However, there are still dollar stores where you can get many of the basics (and even some not-so-basics) for … well, around a dollar. Not fresh produce or anything, of course, but every bit helps. We do that, in fact, and have even in better times - no point in spending more than you have to, and I don’t mind it a bit. Some folks would never stoop that low of course, but I’m not one of them.
Not universally. Virgina and Indiana, as just two examples, are NOT expanding Medicaid.
So that’s your answer? Nothing but rice and bean and meat going bad? Wow. Do people really think that’s OK long term?
Not mention that you don’t need meat if you have rice and beans, a better choice would be spending either the bean or the meat money on actual vegetables or fruit.
“Food stamps” (actually, SNAP) are NOT part of TANF. It would really help if you knew what the heck you were talking about.
So the elderly and disabled and poor kids should just starve if they can’t become young, able-bodied, and born to better parents within an arbitrary time period?
That’s an excellent guide, but those prices seem out of date. Even going to the stores that he mentioned when they weren’t local showed those prices don’t work, at least in my region. It looks to be about 20% more overall. ($115) Overall, it’s a good indicator of what kind of diet you’d need, but it’s also $90 per person. Which means with three people in a family, you would quickly outstrip what you could afford on assistance. Remember, a woman with a child who posted up thread received $157 a month in food stamps. Just the two of them are operating at a negative 23 a month just on that.
I also…wonder what he’s doing with that. I mean 1 tablespoon of olive oil? In what? Is he just, like, drinking that tablespoon? If he’s cooking with it, none of that will really make it into his diet. If he boils the beans and broccoli, he’ll lose a lot of nutritional value, also. I hope he thinks about that before he tries that diet out.
I am not a Christian, but do believe in many of the strictures suggested by Christianity and other religions. None suggest only helping the deserving, only helping the needy.
I assume that Christianity is the most obvious religious reference for the Western world. ALl major religions, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism share the same Golden rule derived necessity to treat the lowly well. If I were writing on an Indian Board I would have referenced Hinduism.