Posted on 04/03/2015 11:04:07 AM PDT by Responsibility2nd
In 2013, Fox News proudly broadcast an interview with a young food stamp recipient who claimed to be using the government benefit to purchase lobster and sushi.
"This is the way I want to live and I don’t really see anything changing," Greenslate explained to Fox. “It’s free food; it’s awesome."
That story fit a longtime conservative suspicion that poor people use food stamps to purchase luxury items. Now, a Republican state lawmaker in Missouri is pushing for legislation that would stop people like Greenslate and severely limit what food stamp recipients can buy. The bill being proposed would ban the purchase with food stamps of "cookies, chips, energy drinks, soft drinks, seafood or steak."
"The intention of the bill is to get the food stamp program back to it's original intent, which is nutrition assistance," said Rick Brattin, the representative who is sponsoring the proposed legislation.
Curbing food stamp purchases of cookies, chips, energy drinks, and soft drinks at least falls in line with the food stamp program's mission to provide nutrition. Nutrition experts are already discussing whether to remove unhealthy items from the list of foods participants can buy.
But seafood and steak? Seafood has been shown, time and again, to be a healthy part of any diet. And steak is such a broad category that it's essentially banning people from buying any flat cuts of beef, from porterhouse to flank.
"It just seems really repressive," said Mark Rank, a professor at...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I saw one food stamp gal buy a 100.00 log of filet mignon a few years ago.
Same applies to voter fraud -
if there’s no democRat voting fraud,
then laws enacted to prevent it won’t have any effect,
so there’s no reason to oppose them.
I wonder if anyone on this thread would refuse stamps and welfare if they were facing life on the street.
Well, I certainly wouldn’t be buying steak and lobster and soft drinks. Id stretch every dollar and be grateful.
There is a Food Town in my neighborhood, a low end, no frills kind of grocery store. It attracts the area welfare folks because it is cheap. I am always amazed by what I see them buy, right around the 1st of every month. I usually go to h-e-b, which is about 1 mile away, which doesn’t have the same element. I’ve seen people but things like 10 bags of Cheetos. One scam at this store is that paki-sack store owners will buy things here on a EBT card an resell them in their stores.100% profit.
An associate and his wife hired a single teen mom to help take care of his mother. She would buy prime steaks and other luxury items to take when her friends threw parties.
There was a surfer-bum on a news program who bought lobsters and had no shame in gaming the system.
I think some of you on here would fit in nicely with the tyranny crowd.
Most of us think that if we’re paying for your food you ought to shut the hell up and eat what we tell you to eat.
Funny how this works both ways!
I have nothing against food stamp recipients buying hamburger (beef) and tuna (seafood) with their stamps.
I'd say if you are on public assistance you forfeit your voting rights until the next cycle.
What Rank doesn't understand, or doesn't want to, is that these people are already being controlled by the dimocrat party.
I use to work at a grocery store and I saw the abuse of the system as well. One momma would send in the youngest child, and there were eight, with a $1 food stamp. They would buy the cheapest thing they could and receive real money back.
One kid at time would do this until enough change had been collected for momma to waddle her fat but in and buy her cigs.
Happened monthly on a clockwork basis.
But there were the cases of people in real need.
I remember one woman who came in on WIC. Her hair had not been washed and was uncombed. She had two little ones. She was trying to buy something WIC did not cover. The look on her face said she was embarrassed to be using WIC.
Those are the people who really need help. The first case....no way.
Like I said, you would fit in nicely with the tyranny crowd. Isn’t this the exact mind set of Moochelle Obama and her school lunch program? Yes, it is - hypocrite.
Don’t forget; the welfare queens don’t have to pay for any food for their kids. We buy their breakfasts and lunches served at school, too. Many of those schools serve year round and provide an after school snack that serves as their dinner, too. So mom can have her steaks and the cash goes for crack.
If there’s man in the house, he’s not in the house at all, but sitting on the front porch steps with a bottle of “red” in a brown bag between his knees that he bought with his SSI disability money.
I favor having gov. trucks go around the ghetto and distribute the food to these people. “Here’s your hamburger (or cheaper meat), beans, flour, and vegetables” the feds would say as they hand the recipients their boxes of food. Nothing else.
Why do some on here always assume that because a person receives food stamps that they are boozers or druggies? I know several people who get them and do NOT fit into this category. I think some of you on here would fit in nicely with the tyranny crowd.
If they are on long term assistance i assume they are some sort of loser or user. I have know A LOT of people who were capable of work who lived most of their lives on assistance. As for boozers and druggies the odds are greater they would be on some kind of assistance since they have all the time and the world and get cash medical and housing for doing nothing. Perfect environment for a boozer or a druggy.
If it doesn’t apply to some than it doesn’t apply.
The fact that some of us might not or would not refuse food stamps or welfare if we were facing life on the street really has nothing to do with fact that the welfare programs have been tweaked to a point that makes it laughable. For MANY millions of people, it would not even occur to them to WORK for anything, as long as it is so easy to get the government benefits.
I do believe that there should be restrictions on what the EBT stamps can be used for, and that there should be no “cash back” option. I also think that the EBT amounts need to be reduced for families whose children are getting 2-3 meals at school, every day, which are also paid for by taxpayers.
For the situation you cited, people being down on their luck, it would not hurt them one iota if the EBT programs were much more restricted as to how the funds can be used.
Thank you Michelle Obama.
And that's another thing. The Arrogance of these takers! Makes me ill.
I was in line behind a welfare queen at the market not so long ago. After the EBT purchase, the cashier asked the welfare queen if she wanted the receipt. Of course the welfare queen blew her off.
Well before she got out of ear shot, I stepped up and said “I'LL TAKE THE RECEIPT, IT WAS MY TAX DOLLARS THAT PAID FOR IT!
LOL! You should have seen the look on the cashiers face...priceless!
I wonder if anyone on this thread would refuse stamps and welfare if they were facing life on the street.
It seems most of us are from families that refused to go on welfare and food stamps.
My mother qualified for food stamps and other government programs. Instead she worked in a factory and curbed her spending. There were many times when dinner was tomato soup and (sometimes) shell macaroni.
Your moral outrage isn’t working.
We also had powdered/dry milk as children. I always envied the kids who had bologna sandwiches, because ours were either PBJ or one slice of cheese with a little mustard on it. But it wasn’t until I was much older that I realized how hard she worked at it, and what a great job my mother had done, in feeding us on the little money she had.
On the flip side of that is the black market. A lot of steaks and seafood find their way to other people who can’t get the EBT cards, and can’t afford to pay market prices for better food. They buy from the entrepreneurial street vendors.
And we subsidize this with our tax dollars. Yippee.
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