So precisely what bureaucratic or political misfire will result in cutting off food stamps? The article is too long, too suppositional, too theoretical and too paranoid to bear any semblance to reality.
Slaves do not revolt. They demand the return of their meagre sustenance. The public dole requires subservience as the first step to receiving benefits. The Democrat party has been clear about this since slavery. They continue to act on the same set of premises: maintain poverty among enslaved classes by denying benefits to recipients who seek to be self supporting.
Inner city ghettos exist by design and intent. Government programs sustain and perpetuate poverty ridden ghettos. They are the backbone of the democrat party. As a political tool the racism perpetuated by the democrat party is profoundly successful and profoundly immoral.
There may be flash mobs but only so long as government and the media look the other way. Gang bangers are not freedom fighters. They are criminal punks who do what they can get away with. There is no sense in which ghetto riots are a rising up of an indignant people seeking the dignity of taking care of their families and communities. It they were they would have risen up when welfare started.
This essay is largely bunk, a scare tactic screed from the right based on a superficial understanding of the political realities of poverty.
The ghetto will end overnight when government stops enforcing its existence.
What you don't realize is that there are millions of induhviduals out there who know, to the very marrow of their bones, that because their great-great-great-great grandparents were captured and sold into slavery by the next tribe over the ridge or up the river that they, and their descendendents in perpetuity, are owed free goodies forever.
I agree that the rioters/looters will not be freedom fighters & no one is saying that they will be. What is being said is that certain members of the MSM & political class will try mightily to proclaim them as such.
This is a very strong worst case scenario based on historical experiences from around the world of conflicts based on race/faith/ethnic/political conflicts combined with the fact that entirely to many of our fellow citizens have no clue how to even plant a garden let alone how to do home canning, or how to get by for as little as a week without electricity.
That was a very good post.
Bwahahaha!
That was a very irrelevant post. It presumes food stamps will continue. Matt's essay considered what happens when they don't.
Our federal government is spending twice as much money as it takes in. The debt just hit $16,000,000,000,000 - and is rising fast. At some point the spending WILL stop.
Food stamps continue only because federal "debt dollars" are still accepted by retailers; like doctors pulling out of the Medicare/Medicaid system (which they are fast) because they're only getting paid a fraction of the bill, there will come a point when grocery stores will only get a fraction of bills paid by EBT, and given that they run on tiny margins to start with they will soon stop accepting food stamps.
Worse, and the scenario more like what Matt considers, is the financial system is at grave risk of locking up fast & hard. Near the end of his term, Bush called in top financial leaders and told them "you will accept this VERY large loan RIGHT NOW." The unraveling of the "credit default swap" system was about to tear the entire banking industry apart in a matter of hours. No banks = no non-cash transactions = no food stamps.
The Soviet Union collapsed when it was unable to issue paychecks. Not just "food stamps" (or whatever their version) - paychecks. That government ran out of money, couldn't pay any bureaucrats, and the functioning body of that government simply walked off the job and went home - nobody was there to issue "food stamps". There's a "bureaucratic misfire" for you.
Every few months Congress votes to raise the debt ceiling. If, for whatever reason, they don't - spending stops. The government (at best) won't completely shut down, but with workers furloughed and automated payment systems purring unattended, there will come a point where either the money in fact runs out or the auto-payment systems malfunction and crash, stopping payments and lacking maintainers. There's a "political misfire" for you.
Upshot is that the flow of food stamps is not guaranteed. It's a system which can stop for many reasons. Momentum will keep it going for a while, but lacking money or maintenance it will stop, and when it does it will crash.
Indeed, "The ghetto will end overnight when government stops enforcing its existence." It's enforced in great part by the government handing out sustenance checks: be content and be paid. If there is no payment, there is no purpose for contentment. In our debt-driven economy, it is hard for many to conceive of a credit/debit/EBT card being denied; I assure you it will given enough economic hemorrhaging - which our current government is doing as fast as it can.
Debt-based food stamps work only insofar as someone trusts they will be paid. At sixteen trillion dollars in debt and rising fast, won't be long until creditors say "no more" and the entitlement checks stop flowing and swiped cards return "denied". At that point, nationwide, Matt's scenario comes into play - and a lot of people, for good reason, think it's coming soon.
Doesn't have to be either bureaucratic or political. It can be due to another financial meltdown, or a massive, long power outage, or just plain state bankruptcy.
This essay is largely bunk, a scare tactic screed from the right based on a superficial understanding of the political realities of poverty.
I guess you were on vacation during the post-Katrina looting. They weren't just taking food.
I also guess you don't live near a major NE city. I live within one mile of the Philly city border. And I see this as a very realistic scenario. After all, they form flash mobs up here just for the fun of it - mobs to loot stores or beat up passers-by. What will happen when there is no food to be had in their neighborhood? They will form mobs to go look for it. And the mobs won't just be composed of bored teenagers.
Heck, in Spain, there is already organized looting of food stores. And they aren't even at the full meltdown stage yet. That is what can happen when the participants in the welfare state start to rationalize taking away what others have. They have instilled in them a sense of entitlement to the possessions of others. And that drives them to want to just go and take it. Especially if they are hungry and perceive that a law-and-order breakdown has happened as well.
You really need to back off the racism claims. This is a cold, hard look at what could happen in an UNEXPECTED cutoff of welfare benefits - as opposed to a planned, phased cutoff like you (and all of us) would like to see.
I will call out actual cold racism on FR when I see it. This is no such thing. Just as it isn't racist to point out that higher murder rates in a state generally correspond to the black population percentage in a state, better than any other statistic.