How about a drink for the guy in the chair?
Posted on 12/10/2013 6:16:57 AM PST by JesseWatters
There are innumerable beach towns in the United States. Many are home to iconic sites that make them notable: the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, Jersey Shore Boardwalk, Coney Island 'Cyclone' and Santa Monica Pier just to name a few. But way down at the southern tip of the continental United States, at the famous "Mile 0" of Route 1 lies the very notable beach town of Key West, Florida. The inspiration for many symbols of American culture such as Jimmy Buffett's hit Margaritaville, Key West is home to artists, tourists, beach bums and numerous others. This week, O'Reilly Factor correspondent Jesse Watters traveled down there to catch up with a number of those folks to find out more about the legendary community:
(Excerpt) Read more at nation.foxnews.com ...
Margaritaville
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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.
PS: they are NOT blood related, thank God.
“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.
Actually it’s not an experiment. Around here, in the old days it was called the County Farm or poor house. Operated basicly the same way, Run by the County Commission.
Then they decided it was mean to feed and house them.
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.
It wasn't long before a couple of posters accused me of lying, racism, etc. with statements like "Do you know how hard it is to get on food stamps?" or "How do you know the guy didn't just lose his job and is making payments on that car?"
I know what I see and the vast majority of people I talk to about it (including the store clerks) have similar observations.
My mom worked for DHS. She's a conservative, and a hardass to boot, so she got a disproportionate amount of the "Tough Cases", but I digress.
She used to figure that somewhere between 3 out of 4 or 5 of her clients were gaming the system in one way or another. The ones who were "double dipping", or working AND getting gov't checks, she could do something about. The rest were just lazy. Nothing illegal, they just knew the system and how to work it.
So your observation probably isn't too far off the mark.
exactly..
before I married my second wife, I was part of the working poor.. man, I was broke. I paid my child support and rent, heat, electric and car payment. That left me with little else. I often saw people at that time using their food stamps (that’s what they were in those days) and buying filet mignon or porterhouse steaks, etc... my diet was chicken for 16 years ! Even broke, I still had 3 meals a day, I was never hungry.
at times, doing the right thing and paying your own way in life, does make you feel like a chump..
Who says this isn’t a free country? :-)
We used to be the Land of the Free. Now we’re just the land of the freebie.
“I made the simple observation that roughly two thirds of the EBT card users who I stand behind in the supermarket checkout line buy food that I can’t afford”
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Over the weekend I went to a local seafood store that mostly sells high quality items from good sources. A little on the expensive side but a nice luxury from time to time. I just happened to notice ‘EBT’ was prominently displayed among to the accepted credit card logos in this high end store.
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