Posted on 05/14/2010 11:16:49 AM PDT by Tribune7
Congressman Collin Peterson, a moderate Democrat who represents the 7th District of Minnesota, wants to prohibit the 39 million monthly users of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)-- which the federal Food Stamp Program has been called since Oct. 1, 2008 -- from using their electronic benefits transfer card from buying soft drinks with sugar.
The average American who reads that will say "Food Stamp recipients can buy Pepsi with my money?"
And the answer is of course, you silly person. Not only Pepsi and Coke and Gatorade but cocktail mixes, artificial sweetener, warm bread from the bakery, hoagies from the deli and stuffed olives from the salad bar.
Peterson suggestion is motivated more by concern about America's poor being too fat -- what a country as Yakov Smirnoff might say -- than a desire to encourage them to find jobs, but I'll walk this path with him.
(Excerpt) Read more at BillLawrenceOnline.Com ...
How much money do they get a month?
“Food Stamp” Ping!
That’s what I was going to say -
you see a fat person ahead of you in line
with perfect hair & nails & jewelry,
buying steaks and shrimp and convenience foods
with food stamps,
complaining that the booze and cigs aren’t covered,
then going out and getting in a much newer car than you drive.
Liberal “Christians” would call this “social justice”.
Oh, good grief, what a bunch of bull. The only thing your empirical data shows is that the quest for grant money results in junk science.
I hope you're not expecting to be taken seriously. Or did you just forget the sarcasm tag?
I use to see it all the time when I worked as a cashier at a grocery store. I never could figure out how they did it. I remember this one couple who use to come through my line from time to time. They’d buy steaks, shrimp and other items like that. They’d leave the store with a grocery cart full of food. How did they get so much in food stamps??? I struggled with what I received and I was totally on welfare for about a year and a half. It wasn’t like I was a big eater either. At the time I barely weighed 100 lbs. It just never made sense to me.
You know, if we could contain the Socialists’ nanny-impulses to those only on welfare, this could have some positive “unintended consequences.”
Exactly. First, this would be an efficient use of our money (NOT saying we should be using our money for food stamps in the first place, but if we are, let's at least do it efficiently). Secondly, keeping it simple could lead some people to saying they want to work to get more. IOW, being poor shouldn't be so comfortable that there is no incentive to not be poor.
Or the statists can set up government food pantries where the poor go to get their food issued to them. Why not?
If we could channel all the socialist energy into the permanent underclass, and thereby get the Socialists to leave the rest of us alone, I’d think about it.
Wow, that would change things. There are literally people who are 3rd and 4th generation welfare recipients. They don’t know anyone who has ever had a job.
But if we allow Congress to dictate to welfare recipients what they can and cannot eat or drink, then the next logical step would be for them to tell me, the taxpayer, what I can and cannot eat.
Your post reminds me of a story my GF told me the other day while she was at Wal Mart. She went to go buy some lentil beans and brown rice for our dinner later on that day. She overheard some woman complaining about the price of food, so my GF suggested that they just go the beans-rice-greens route for dinner. The mother (No father, just a mother) told my GF that she tried that already and the kids complained about the food and the mother didn’t like the food herself. She had an opportunity to feed her kids lentils, greens and rice for about a cost of about $.19 per serving, depending on how well she shopped... But she opted for the Spaghetti-Os because “They taste better”.
Expect a backlash from those types of parents if the government decides that the food stamp program is inefficient and the government goes back to the whole flour-beans-milk-can of greens system.
This was my suggestion as well. I did not know this was how the government used to do it. I do know this is how many, many private food pantries, in churches, for example, worked. And there there was accountability, and maybe the person offered to do a little work around the building in exchange for food.
Americans are a very generous people. If the feds would stop robbing us of so much of our money, and by outsourcing our human obligations to faceless bureaucracies, we could do a lot privately to help those in need in our own communities. And the resentment would not be there; it would be voluntary.
OTOH, most of them have plenty of time to spend preparing meals. It’s not like they are rushing home from work, picking the kids up from school, then trying to put together a healthy meal before helping with homework, etc.
They’re simply too helpless and naive to know how to make food without a microwave... I’m not kidding you, they’re so helpless that most o f them don’t even know how to make chicken soup from actual chicken meat (Ignore my tagline for a second).
The purpose of foodstamps is not to feed the starving, it's to provide Democrats socially acceptable cover to enviously take away things from others. As a plus they buy the loyalty of 40 million voters with other people's money. The Democrats will never give that up, although they increasing wish the leisure class did not appear so ridiculously overweight.
I can suggest that you do a little more reading on this subject. Just sayin’!
Oh, and did you know you can buy live lobsters and filet mignon?
I rest my case.
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