In addition, many, if not most, of the people receiving food stamps also get a bunch of other taxpayer funded freebies. I imagine their kids get 3 meals a day at school and during the summer, they get subsidized housing and utilities, and “free” medical care. They even get free cell phones!
Boortz was talking about some woman waiting in line to get help with her utilities. While waiting, she was eating a salad with hard boiled eggs and watching the latest movies on her portable DVD player. As Stossel has demonstrated, the poor in the US are rich by the rest of the world’s standards.
About those school meals, they illuminate a deep truth about welfare. I listen to the cooks and other volunteers who help out, and they are the typical bleeding hearts. What they take away from it is here’s suffering. If we didn’t feed them they’d be starving! The fact that they showed up and took free things proves it!
Somehow it never occurs to them that you might accept free things that you don’t really need. That if your breakfast program didn’t exist maybe they wouldn’t be in a fetal position in the corner, holding their gurgling stomachs, crying through the hunger pangs. Maybe they’d eat anyway, only it would cost them or their families instead of you.
Some people just can’t see that charity increases want. Of course there’ll suddenly be more hunger if food is free for hungry people. Duh. That’s basically their job. If you raised wages for garbage men, for instance, there’d be more competition for garbage jobs. This is all the more attractive, for it results in immediate food instead of working with garbage.