???
Well, I said the part about wanting to make them uncomfortable a little tongue in cheek, but I don’t think it’s a bad idea to stigmatize dependency.
Prison loaf, I like it. I guarantee those fat poor people would lose a lot of weight.
Did you ever notice pictures from the 30s, 40s, and 50s? People used to be a lot thinner.
Shorter, too. And, if you ask Starving Artist, they were way more civil in their racism and sexism than today!
[Moderator Hat ON]
Even in the Pit, you can’t tell someone to eat a bullet. “Do not threaten harm or wish death on another poster”, from the rules sticky. So don’t do it THERE, either.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
The big problem that I personally see is that you’d have some MAJOR arguments deciding what what to add. What one person thinks of as “bad for you” another person doesn’t. For example, what about crackers? Now, obviously, saltines aren’t junk food, but what about say, Ritz? Or Triscuit? Can I have peanut butter to put on those crackers?
Is yogurt okay? And what kind? Just the fruit-on-the-bottom, or are you allowed custard style? What about cereal? What kinds are allowed on the list, and what aren’t? Just crappy stuff like Grape-Nuts and Bran-Flakes? Or can I buy Honey-Nut Cheerios, and Raisin Bran? What about say, Kix, or Corn Pops?
And if we’re talking healthy, frozen veggies are MUCH better for you than canned. The canned have a lot of sodium in them, and besides, frozen taste better, since they’re not all soggy and mushy. But oh wait – we’re not supposed to allow good tasting foods!
Or who doesn’t use ginger ale or seven-up when you’re sick with the flu? And unfortunately, I can’t have caffeine anymore, but I used to down a Pepsi or a Coke if I got a migraine – the caffeine did away with it.
Drinks – can I buy Kool-Aid? And above it was mentioned that tap water’s good enough. Now, we buy bottled because our water doesn’t taste that great, but I could probably deal with tap. But then, what about my aunt, who lives in an area where her tap water tastes like sulfer. It’s hard water too, so they have to use a water softener. So they buy bottled.
Oh, and can I have tea? I like to have a cup of tea – especially when it’s really, really cold. Or only certain kinds of tea?
It would be an absolute nightmare trying to organize this. You’re going to have to decide well, this kind of snack is okay, this isn’t, but wait, this isn’t junk food, but no it’s not! Do you really, REALLY want to waste that kind of time and money on such miniscule details? Why not classes or offer lessons on nutrition and such?
And let’s face it, people. Whether people on food stamps are buying nothing but cheetos and Pepsi, or leafy greens and lean chicken breast, you’re still paying the same amount. So what’s it to you, anyways? Like others have said: it’s not about “helping” it’s about “punishment”.
So… you’re planning to teach people to eat healthy by providing them with nutritious but unpleasant mush? Oh, yeah - way to reinforce the “healthy food tastes bad” meme.
And, again, you are ignoring the fact that different people have different nutritional needs. The nutritional needs of my husband, a disabled, sedentary diabetic (who is physically unable to exercise) are quite different than my nutritional needs as a woman in her mid-40’s who engages in manual labor 8-10 hours a day to earn money which are in turn different than the nutritional needs of the still-growing 18 year old young man on my work crew who is likewise engaged in manual labor 8-10 hours per day but still maturing into an adult.
Seems to me that “teaching poor people to eat properly” would best involve making nutritious food tasty and appealing so people will WANT to eat it. Unless, of course, you just want cheap and crappy in order to punish the impoverished. Because, you know, hungry poor people don’t have enough problems…
Yes, but what makes it yours? You earned it? How? And the United States was certainly founded in part upon the idea that certain people were not entitled to their wealth.
See, I’m in favor of free-market capitalism because I believe it produces the best results. But property rights aren’t natural rights. You have no more natural right to the house you live in than a wolf has a right to the den she dug. You created it, but why can’t I just move in and force you out into the forest? Because you built it? What gave you the right to build it? What gave you the right to the land? What gave you the right to the wood, and concrete, and copper and steel that make up your house? Someone dug the iron ore out of the ground and smelted it into steel and fashioned it into nails and sold the nails to a store which sold them to a contractor who built the house who sold the house to you. What gave the first person “ownership” of that chunk of ore?
The problem is, unless we agree on who owns what house, and who has the right to dig where, and who can sell this or that, nothing can be accomplished. Why would someone go to the effort of building a house when the first thug with a sharpened stick can force him out of that house? Even the thug with the stick has an interest in creating property rights, since without them there would be no incentive for people to create things he can steal.
So, why can’t I just move into your house and tell you to take a hike, and if you protest I beat you up or shoot you? Because if everyone else allowed me to do that to you, our society wouldn’t work. And since we all enjoy living in houses and driving cars rather than living in piles of wet leaves, if I try to take your house the rest of us will label what I did “stealing” and use force to make me leave and let you come back.
Now, none of this is to say that I have a “right” to your property, and if a bunch of us get together and pass the right laws we are justified in taking what you have and giving it to some homeless guy. But neither is it correct to say you created the wealth you enjoy. Even if you literally built your house with your own hands, if you died tomorrow that house would go to your children. Therefore, they would get a share of wealth they didn’t create. And every single one of us has received this sort of wealth from the generations before us. I’m wealthy beyond the dreams of my Irish dirt-farmer ancestors, who worked like dogs to coax a few potatoes out of their miserable soil. But do I deserve my wealth, while those dirt farmers deserved poverty?
I am the recipient of immeasurable unearned wealth. I didn’t earn the education I got when I was a kid. I didn’t earn the house I lived in. I didn’t earn the clothes on my back. I didn’t earn the city I lived in, or the roads I traveled on. I earn a paycheck today and I provide those sorts of things to my kids, but I didn’t earn my American citizenship instead of being born in Somalia, I didn’t earn the fact that I was born in 1966 instead of 1066. I didn’t earn the fact that I’m a white man living in 2009 rather than a black man living in 1850. I didn’t earn the fact that Newton discovered the laws of motion a couple hundred years ago. Every night I read books written by other people by the light of electric bulbs invented by other people.
The reality is that without the fruits of this vast civilization, I’d be scratching my living from the dirt. Heck, even a naked hunter-gatherer doesn’t earn the fact that his parents taught him the ways of the forest and how to make a living from it.
So where is all this going? Just that all the accoutrements of modern life are to a large extent unearned. That doesn’t mean I advocate socialism. Far from it, because one of the reasons I get all this unearned benefit is from the existence of free market capitalism. I’m in favor of property rights, because it turns out that’s the best way yet discovered for our civilization to accumulate the sorts of wealth that allow me to live comfortably rather than being a miserable dirt farmer.
I just realize that when I look at some mentally ill alcoholic stree person, he doesn’t deserve to be miserable any more than my ancestors deserved to be miserable peasants. Taking away my house and giving it to the homeless guy won’t solve his problems, because there’s something wrong with his brain. The point isn’t that I don’t deserve my wealth, but that neither does the homeless guy deserve to be poor. And the difference between me and you is that I can easily imagine being in that guy’s place.
I know a guy. He was a bright kid. Then around 8 years old he had a seizure. He forgot how to read. He couldn’t remember things anymore. Now about 10 years later he’s largely recovered. But he still talks a bit slowly. He’s clumsy. He blanks out every so often. I imagine how this kid’s life would have gone without that incident. His lifetime earning potential was drastically reduced. Due to his mental and physical deficits, he’ll never reach the potential he could have had. He’ll always be a couple of steps behind. Does this kid deserve to not have a top job? In one sense, sure. He’ll never be able to create the amount of wealth from his efforts that he might have. But he didn’t deserve to have that seizure that left him mentally and physically impaired either.
Does it make sense to give this kid the salary he might have had if he had grown up to be a skilled doctor, or a brilliant scientist, or a visionary businessman? No, because he doesn’t create the value that those people create. But he still didn’t deserve that seizure. I don’t deserve to be an American, just like some Chinese peasant doesn’t deserve to be born a Chinese peasant. The question is, what are we going to do about it?
To quote William Muny, “Deserve’s got nothin to do with it.” Don’t get too wrapped up in what you deserve, what you earn, because tomorrow everything could be different. A brain tumor, a heart attack, a slip and fall, a car accident, a viral infection, and blammo, your life as you knew it is over. Every work of man is transitory.
Have we gotten around to deciding which government bureaucracy should move into the retail grocery business, or is this one of those ‘no bid contract’ pork for the politically loyal private distribution schemes?
Yes, it would be nutritious protein mush created by Halliburton. Or Acorn.
I am all for “good tasting” mush, but much food that is good for you (brocolli, asparagus, etc.) isn’t really good tasting.
As for the “can I have ginger ale, I get sick sometimes”…yes this is a problem with selectively eliminating various foods. One reason why I wanted the poor restricted to their tasty mush. But no, I’m not for poor people having ginger ale, tea, cable TV, cell phones, or any other such thing if they are on the dole. Get rid of those and pay for their own food is what they should do.
And it should be stigmatizing to be on the dole. You don’t want people to get too comfortable there…the idea is for them to get a job and get off or be dependent on their relatives if they are disabled.
For all the hard luck stories there are probably 10 of 400 pound women buying 10 liters of coke at a time.
And for the “you don’t deserve your money”…if someone who busts their tail working, studying, learning doesn’t deserve their money…then who does? Some homeless bum? Some parasite? And speak for yourself when you talk about the money you’ve inherited, I didn’t inherit anything.
It’s too bad aboutu your friend with a stroke, but you can’t compare the cruel vagaries of nature to a deliberate gov’t policy to strip people of their belongings in order to teach them how random life can be. Who would work knowing that the fruits of their labor belong to loafers? The richest 5% pay what? 90% of all the taxes in this country? And that isn’t enough?
Okay, I have to call bullshit on this. You are proving yourself more and more dishonest by the day. I defy you to find one single post out of my more than 7,000 posts in which I said anything even approaching that.
You are yet another one of those unthinking [deleted] who automatically equates any reference to anything having been better in pre-1968 American society with racism and sexism.
Which of course is not only wrong but stupid.
But my peasant ancestors busted their tails a lot harder than I do, and all they got was the potato famine. I sit around in an office all day and debate whether I really should have a second cup of coffee while I noodle around with various computer-y things. My life is much easier than my ancestors life, or the life of some guy from Guatemala. I’m producing things of value to my employer, otherwise he wouldn’t sign my paycheck. The value one subsistence farmer can create in a year (a couple bushels of corn and some beans) is pretty low, worth only a few dollars on the global market. The value I can produce is a lot more, I guess–I know that when I go to the grocery store one of my paychecks could easily buy enough masa and frijoles to feed a family for a year.
So does the Guatemalan dirt farmer deserve to be a dirt farmer?
You didn’t inherit anything? Really? You weren’t fed as a child? You weren’t educated? You taught yourself to read? You wrote your own books with charcoal on the back of a shovel, like Abe Lincoln? You wove your own clothes out of bark?
Even your ability to support yourself in adulthood is dependent on thousands of other people. Some farmer is out there growing corn so efficiently that he can produce in a day what would take you a lifetime to produce by hand. Some engineer designed the car you drive to work. A dentist studied for years so that one time you had a toothache he could fix the problem in an hour or so, instead of condemning you to years of pain. And so on and so on. And you put in your part, you earn your pay by serving your fellow man just like everyone else.
Who would work knowing their work could be taken away at any time? Exactly. No one would, that’s why we don’t take people’s stuff. And sometimes life is unfair and a blood vessel ruptures or a tree falls over or there’s faulty wiring in your house, and then disaster. And it’s not fair, but who said life was fair?
See, you did. You think it’s fair that you’re healthy and bright and productive, while those other people are stupid and ignorant and lazy. But you know well that some random thing could happen, and your life is finished. How did you end up talented and healthy and able to earn a good living? How did you end up an American in 2009 instead of a Guatemalan peasant? So life’s not fair. Some people work hard and get nothing for it, another guy buys a lottery ticket and gets millions for nothing. So now you say that life’s not fair, and it isn’t your job to make it fair. Fair enough. Except if you say that the purpose of government and taxation isn’t to make things fair, then how can you complain about unfairness when poor people vote themselves a share of your money? Life’s not fair after all!
The answer is that life’s not fair, but if we take away everyone’s money and give it all to the poor, it turns out that pretty soon nobody has anything left to take. You don’t deserve to have your money taken away and handed out to the poor, you don’t deserve to have a stroke, you don’t deserve to be born a peasant serf, you don’t deserve to be born Paris Hilton, you don’t deserve to be be alive. Is life fair? Is it the government’s job to try to make it fair?
If life is unfair and it isn’t the government’s job to make it fair, then how can you complain when you get the short end of the stick? If life is unfair and it’s the government’s job to make it fair, then how complain when people who’ve gotten the short end of the stick get some help?
The government gives me a tax deduction for my mortgage payment, which I greatly appreciate. I may or may not have bought my current house depending on whether that was in place, although I would have bought something. Does this give the government the right to tell me what kind of furniture I can buy since my house is directly related to a government benefit?
As a relatively wealthy individual I get benefits from the gov’t that the poor don’t get. Why should only the most poor have their choices dictated to them when we all benefit from government largess?
I’ve been on the receiving end of food handouts. Right after the divorce I needed food for the family and got it from the church. No lines and no forms. But you had to take a pre-packed bag of food. Some things we wouldn’t eat, A can of gravy or cranberry sauce, stuff we pass up on holidays and ignore all the rest of the time. So we’d sit on the church back steps and swap until it worked out.
Cite? Anyone got any stats on this? You keep saying things like this, but you have yet to prove it.
:dubious:
I have another question – since it’s now all done by an EBT card, are things like toilet paper, diapers, and pads and tampons covered? (
Oh, and bri1600bv, I STRONGLY suggest you do NOT say anything about restricting it to only the cheapest tampons/pads there are. Unless you use them, I’d say kindly leave it to those of us familiar with these products)
Show us your data. Exactly, precisely how many people getting assistance at the grocery store are obese. (Unfortunately, plenty of morbidly obese people pay for all their own food.) Exactly, precisely what do these people buy at that store. Surely there have been some studies.
Please–no anecdotes about people selling lobsters out of the trunks of their Cadillacs.
Everyone has probably already seen this before, but it’s the most recent information I could find.
PDF showing the fertility rate in 2006. Relevant information on page 15.
Actually, a better comparison would be to ask whether the gov’t checks to see if your house makes good financial sense or is an “appropriate” choice for you. Really, should people be using their gov’t give away to buy McMansions or get a home theater? Not with my tax dollars.
We should get Purina to develop and sell 25 and 50 pound bags of “poor people chow”. They could take a bunch of good healthy foods ,puree them,cook them in a huge pot, dehydrate them and make them into bite size nuggets. The poor could go to special stores, that are dark and dingy, with no assistants , They would file in and pick one of the bags and go. They would have a little alcove to go into where they would confess their unworthyness and give thanks to all the superior types that made this bounty possible.
Eddie Murphy- “I got an Icecream! wanna lick?, Well you cant have none cause your mamma’s on the welfare”.- Eddie Murphy.
This kind of thinking at a grassroots level will bring us all together in short order.