You’ve seen it before. You go to the store to pick up a few items, or to do your regular shopping. You get to the check-out and in the line you notice the person paying. They pull out this card. It is definitely not an ATM card from any bank you recognize. It’s a welfare card.
It used to be food stamps. Before the welfare department came out with these quick and easy (debit like) cards, welfare recipients were given food stamps. Initially, in 1962, the FSP (Food Stamp Program) developed by the USDA distributed stamps or coupons with dollar denominations that were used to purchase food. This goes back even further when farms had surplus. The concept of the “food stamp” came from using orange or blue color coded stamps that provided certain benefits. When there was farm surplus, it was given out as “welfare”.
The problem is that the program has changed and is no longer used as intended. The welfare recipient you see buying food isn’t making nutritious and economically sound decisions at the grocery store. They’re buying expensive, prepackaged foods like Lunchables, pizza rolls, ice cream sandwiches and candy bars. It’s twenty dollars worth of crap and extravagance, which, by the way, comes the tax money from people who originally got that money the honest way. They earned it.
The current welfare system is built on theft – the theft of money through taxation that pays for welfare, and the theft of self-reliance that is perpetrated against the “beneficiaries” of welfare. The ruin of America will be able-bodied welfare recipients buying pizza rolls and ice cream sandwiches with other people’s money.
Welfare recipients today, on the whole, are frittering away unearned money on foolish and extravagant “food” purchases - steak, lobster, subs, roasted chicken, prepared foods, chips, dip, soda pop, ice cream, sugar drinks, and expensive breakfast cereal - while activists go on TV to say that poor people can’t afford to eat healthily, and are consequently fatter, and need more government-funded health care.
What a bunch of malarkey. They don’t need more, they need less - of everything. If the government is going to feed those who won’t feed themselves, there should be significant and positive restrictions, to deter waste and to foster frugality. Teach people to make the most of what they have, not to blow their allotment on crap.
The fact is that, in America, people can eat very cheaply, but not if they’re buying seven Lunchables for dinner. Instead, they waste the money so generously given them on non-essentials and on expensive convenience or prepared foods. When you are on welfare, there should be no treats – just the basics - which can be tasty, wholesome, nutritious and inexpensive. A 20-pound bag of potatoes doesn’t cost that much. Neither does a 10-pound bag of rice or a variety of store-label canned vegetables. Round steak and ground chuck can be had fairly reasonably, especially if you buy on sales days and in good quantity. If you’re smart, a food dollar will stretch.
Welfare should be an emergency condition of living, from which you would want to escape as quickly as possible. By creating a false living standard and allowing people to live off the dole as though they were self-sustaining only encourages idleness and a lazy society.
The type of foods purchasable with welfare money should be dramatically reduced to nothing more than inexpensive meat, potatoes and rice, vegetables, bread and dairy. No extravagance, no treats, no rip-off foods.
Either do it by programming those cards to only pay for certain types of items, or by creating welfare sections in supermarkets, where appropriate generic products are available and can be purchased with welfare cards. Either suggestion would substantially increase the buying power of welfare recipients, or open the door to reducing the cost to taxpayers.
Even if a fraction of the money now wasted on welfare food could be recovered, the benefit to recipients and taxpayers would be huge.
We should abandon the ridiculous notion that the “dignity” or “rights” of welfare recipients would be hurt by restricting what they can buy with the taxpayer’s dollar. If they want ice cream and pepperoni rolls, let them get a job. It’s not that hard a concept.
It may also pay to look at going back to giving those on the dole commodities, instead of money. We know how to distribute rice and powdered milk to foreigners; maybe we should try the same thing with our own people. And we may also want to explore the idea of having them work for what they get. Welfare recipients can perform services such as picking up litter on the roads, sweeping the floors at city hall, stapling papers in the courthouse - anything to return the dignity of work to the culture of welfare, anything to help them bear the burden of their own support. The way we do it now is a shame.
It is an immoral disservice to both groups – those who have it taken from them and those who have it given to them. It promotes waste and fraud. It destroys dignity and builds mutual resentment. It squanders the wages of the producers to satisfy the rich and unrealistic tastes of the idlers.
What mystifies me is why the people who run our government can’t seem to figure this out.
