Posted on 04/08/2015 5:53:55 AM PDT by cotton1706
Rick Brattin, a young Republican state representative in Missouri, has come up with an innovative new way to humiliate the poor in his state. Call it the surf-and-turf law.
Brattin has introduced House Bill 813, making it illegal for food-stamp recipients to use their benefits to purchase cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood, or steak.
I have seen people purchasing filet mignons and crab legs with electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards, the legislator explained, according to The Posts Roberto A. Ferdman. When I cant afford it on my pay, I dont want people on the taxpayers dime to afford those kinds of foods either.
Never mind that few can afford filet mignon on a less-than-$7/day food-stamp allotment; theyre more likely to be buying chuck steak or canned tuna. This is less about public policy than about demeaning public-benefit recipients.
The surf-and-turf bill is one of a flurry of new legislative proposals at the state and local level to dehumanize and even criminalize the poor as the country deals with the high-poverty hangover of the Great Recession.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Then don’t complain when Michelle Obama tells your middle class kids what to eat.
Its the public’s money, its the government’s business.
My mother was a supermarket cashier back in the 1950s and 60s. She used to tell tales of people with food stamps coming through the checkout with carts full of top-of-the-line porterhouse and delmonico steaks. Meanwhile, my dad was working for the railroad, making maybe $10 or so an hour, and we were eating hamburger. And my parents’ tax dollars were paying for those fancy steaks. Does that seem right to you?
I have seen entire families show up with several carts of food, including loaded with meats. Every female in the bunch will have an EBT card and none of them will speak English.
Government strings on other programs set standards. But you want restrictions.
If you want people to conform to certain standards its reasonable, but carving out exceptions here and there to them isn’t.
All based on anecdotal observations of individual behavior that may not be universally true.
I am, lol
Read my post again. Very slowly. I bolded it to help you out:
I guess then that it is actually a gift card, since I see people buying $8.99 6 packs of microbrew with cash and their food with EBT
That is exactly the point that the left will avoid addressing at all costs.
It’s a big loser for them to try to argue that that situation is what “should be”.
Of course, this “shaming” is why they INSIST that the gov’t be involved in charity. A private charity MUST, pretty much by definition, “judge” the recipients as worthy or needy and not wasting the resources of the charity.
Gov’t doesn’t have to worry about waste and fraud.
They just stick their guns in productive people’s faces and demand more.
“I work 12+ hour days most days. Its disheartening to see what I see almost every day.”
I’m with you man. I work every day, and sometimes I stop by the grocery store down the street from my workplace to grab something for lunch.
Invariably, the place is packed with people who obviously have no jobs, buying carts piled with junk and luxury foods, and I have to wait behind them as nearly every one of them pays with EBT cards. It’s been this way for years and I’m damn sick of it.
Show me one poor person you know personally that you’ve been to their home who dines on filet mignon and king crab.
And seafood and steak is hardly the stuff of a price fixe gourmet restaurant.
Obviously by your comment you think you are entitled to steak and lobster on someone else’s dime.
“How someone lives their life isnt for you to decide.”
When we are subsidizing their lifestyle, then yes, it is our business.
EBT has some cash loaded on it as well.
So, they take their EBT to the ATM, get the cash, buy their microbrews.
I think goldstategop is an EBT card holder.
I am just telling you what I see.
I can only assume they can somehow sell or transfer their alotment to others somehow.
So crack head shakela gets high, and hungry shneqwa gets extra money to buy steak.
Well, then, if it doesn’t happen, then this restriction affects no one,
and will do no “harm” if passed.
“People confuse EBT with welfare.”
EBT is a form of welfare, genius.
“a government program for poor or unemployed people that helps pay for their food, housing, medical costs, etc.”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/welfare
Couldn’t agree more. That’s why I was/am PO’d.
There is some cash loaded on the EBT card.
I say make the EBT cards apply only to food, and let the wookie decide what their dietary requirements are.
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