Is candy healthy? Is soda? How about beer? All healthy, are they? Are you Russian? Did you live during Soviet times?
Government support should be food, shelter, clothing, basic medical care... NOT MONEY TO SPEND AS THEY WISH AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS!! America neither needs nor benefits from the parasite class. If all of the parasites packed up and moved to Venezuela, Cuba, or N. Korea... America would be better off. If all of the parasites just DROPPED DEAD (along with about 75% of Congress and Odumbo), America would be better off.
Here's the problem, the ship is going down for sure and for certain. You can not simply print currency and hand it out to the masses for long. Given that, the question becomes whether you are going to be someone paying for the calamity via redistributive policies or are you going to be someone who opts out. There are two binary extremes possible. You are either a giver or a taker. There isn't a middle position possible that is revenue neutral. You either pay big into the system or by default the system is paying out to you. The left counts on the idea that someone collecting all this stuff isn't likely going to vote for people who want fiscal responsibility. They are willing to trash the country in order to stay in power. They have short-circuited the democratic process with immigration and welfare policies. They packed the electorate with takers. Somebody is going to pay for it.
We pay for it right now. I can almost see the logic of the woman I mentioned. Essentially she's understanding how screwed up it is, so she's essentially on board with jumping on the wagon to short circuit the hay ride as quickly as possible.
If it were not dishonest, I would jump on it too. Sometimes I feel like a fool for not looting the govt like the cronies at the top and some percentage of those people faking it for handouts. Knowing that this is going on... really makes people lose respect for the government and the country.
That would be the dishonesty mentality, also fostered and promoted by amoral leftists. Unfortunately in some regards she's also probably "right". In that the ship is sinking, fast. It's pretty much a proverbial race to the bottom now. As someone else mentioned. I too sometimes feel like being honest about my taxes and not taking government handouts makes me the foolish one. I mean other than self respect and peace of mind. What's the point in being the last rat to go down with the ship? I'll tell you this. IF and when our society does collapse, as it appears to be heading for. I am going to be absolutely Medieval ruthless in the pursuit of my own survival.
Remember that even Ron Paul takes earmarks for his constituents. He says as long as the system is set up the way it is, he's going to get them for his people, too.
Food stamps became part of American life 50 years ago this Sunday when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Food Stamp Act into law on Aug. 31, 1964. The program has been a whipping boy almost ever since, especially from conservatives who call the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, the contemporary name for food stamps) a costly and demoralizing example of government overreach. But SNAP was not an idea first created by liberal do-gooders of the 1960s. Food stamps emerged three decades earlier with active participation of businessmen, the heroes of the exact group of people who want to see the program dissolved today. The early Great Depression was marked by a “paradox of poverty amidst plenty.” Massive crop surpluses led to low prices for farmers. At first, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration tried paying farmers to plow under surplus crops and kill livestock. In theory, decreasing the supply would raise farm prices incentivizing farmers to get their crops to market. But the plan was met with outrage from hungry citizens who said they could have put the destroyed “surplus” food to good use. After this failed start, Roosevelt tried another plan. Government purchased excess crops at a set price and distributed them at little or no cost to poor Americans. But this system was also met with criticism, this time from the sellers of food goods. Wholesalers and retailers were upset that government distribution bypassed “the regular commercial system,” undercutting their profits. The Roosevelt administration started the first pilot food stamp program in 1939 to integrate businesses in getting food to the hungry. However, there were concerns about the food stamp program’s success. A newsmagazine at the time reported, “there was no difficulty in selling the idea to grocers,” but some feared that the “real beneficiaries” wouldn’t cooperate. Unlike the image conjured up today of the poor clamoring for government aid, in the time of perhaps the greatest need in the past century, businesses were more excited about the federal assistance than the hungry individuals who were to benefit. And it turns out businessmen had good reason for their glee; in the first months of the pilot program, grocery receipts were up 15 percent in the dozen “stamp towns.” Conservatives appreciated people “going through the regular channels of trade” and not relying on “government machinery” to bring food to people. The program proved to be so successful that it expanded to half of the counties in the nation by 1943. But the conditions that led to the program’s creation, high unemployment and large agricultural surpluses, disappeared in the WWII economy and the pilot program was shelved. Twenty years later, the 1960 CBS documentary “Harvest of Shame” demonstrated hunger and poverty remained a reality for far too many Americans. Newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy found it unconscionable that in the wealthiest nation on the planet, close to one-quarter lived in poverty without access to enough nutritious food to lead productive lives. He used his first executive order in office to reinstate the food stamp pilot program. After JFK’s assassination, President Johnson reflected on the continued existence of hunger in America. However, the Texan was adamant that any government help would provide people with “a hand up, not a hand out.” Food stamps provided the perfect way to do this. JFK’s pilot program had proven that food stamps improved low-income families’ diets “while strengthening markets for the farmer and immeasurably improving the volume of retail food sales.” And importantly, the poor purchased more food “using their own dollars.” Based on this assessment, LBJ made the Food Stamp Program a permanent part of the welfare state. Much like grocers in the stamp towns of the late 1930s, grocery chains today continue to bring in increased sales from SNAP receipts during recessions. Remember last winter when stimulus funds expired and Wal-Mart disclosed lower than expected fourth quarter profits? While Wal-Mart refuses to disclose its total revenues from SNAP, it is estimated they took in 18 percent of total SNAP benefits in 2013, or close to $13 billion in sales. They publicly reported lower earnings per share as “the sales impact from the reduction in SNAP benefits that went into effect Nov. 1 is greater than we expected.” SNAP recipients, then, are not the program’s only beneficiaries. Businesses profit handsomely from them, too. How ironic that in today’s concentrated grocery-retail market, the chains most ideologically opposed to welfare spending benefit the most from this welfare program. Even more ironic is the fact that the idea behind SNAP originated with grocery men in the 1930s who saw a way to route welfare spending through their businesses. When will today’s conservatives claim as their own these daring and entrepreneurial businessmen who, in part, made the Food Stamp Program possible? CAITLIN RATHE
There's a lot of truth to this article you posted (for once). Though it's a bit of a leap to peg big business to "conservatives of today". Regardless, it's not important to anyone (except maybe yourself) who began the program or why it is where it is. What is important is that it needs to be changed. The fact that you can use an EBT card at Popeye's chicken or at the 7/11 is a direct result of the lobbying interests of those industries trying to get their share of the free money the government gives out. It's corrupt through and through. Even in CPG (the industry I work for) we see programs designed to maximize the amount of SNAP dollars each manufacturer can grab through shopper insights programs targeting the EBT program (promotions run on dates individuals get their money - the so-called "first of the month) including the mining of shopper data to determine what SNAP buyers purchase, and when, in the attempt to get them to purchase more of it with their resources. At the end of the day, try concerning yourself less with who started it and why it is the way it is and correcting it.