How about a drink for the guy in the chair?
Margaritaville
*********
Its actually more like Touristaville. Key West is a tourist trap that literally brings them in by the boatload.
Know it first hand. My nephew and his mother have no food by the 3rd week of the month because that's what they do. After they drink her disability payment. Which she gets for never having worked a day in her life, unless you count prostitution as employment.
A (stupid IMO) relative pays their rent and utilities every month. All they have to buy with food stamps and disability income is food and booze. And they run out of food 15-20 days into the month. A niece that goes over there now and then says they are blotto at 9 am in the morning.
“I trade my food stamps for cash to buy beer, vodka and cigarettes”
What, no lotto tickets? This guy’s a piker.
I was talking with a libinlaw about Sowell’s assertion that liberals don’t care how much fraud and waste are in government programs as long as they can feel confident that everyone that needs it gets it.
She vehemently responded “we do TOO care about fraud and waste - that’s a terrible accusation!”
[pause]
“But it’s far more important that everyone be covered that needs help.”
[me] Isn’t that exactly what Sowell’s assertion stated?
[lil] Uhm... uh... let me think about it....[pause]
“It just sounded so mean the way you said it”
In the town where I live we have children who normally would only have food at school, same reason. My church packs food for them on Fridays and tells them to hide it from their parents...
What you don’t hear about is the successful Seattle experiment with chronic street alcoholics. For once, they had the brilliant notion of tending to street drunks with *zero* emphasis on reforming them; instead, the *sole* reason for doing this was to save a LOT of taxpayer money.
Street drunks are stupidly expensive, consuming huge amounts of police time, emergency room services, and other drains on the public purse, because living on the street is hard and destructive. Many cities give up and just try to deport them, but this seldom works.
So Seattle had the brilliant idea to just buy an old hotel, refurbish it a little, and put the street drunks in there for free, just to keep them off the streets. The building has a manager and a nurse to tend to their lesser health problems.
The money savings were close to a million dollars in the first year. And because by the time they are street drunks there is almost zero chance for them to “reform”, nobody was really harmed.
There were some reasonable suggestions that the city could even provide them nutritional food, and maybe free grain ethanol and mixers, so they didn’t need to beg at all.
Ironically, it was unexpectedly discovered that with just having a place to stay, the tendency was for them to drink less on their own.
But in the final analysis, there are just too many people out there who insist on trying to force street drunks to reform. They refuse in most places to permit such experiments because they object to it on moral grounds, even though it would save a lot of money.
The Dude abides. /s
The abuse of food stamps could be easily curbed by limiting their use to only healthy foods just like the WIC program. Fewer people would abuse the system if they could not buy soda, junk foods, steaks, crab legs etc. If Michelle Obama is so concerned about obesity and healthy eating, limiting food stamps to only healthy food choices would be a good start.