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DENVER (AP) -- Food stamps for a pot brownie? It's an urban myth in Colorado, but state lawmakers want to make sure that doesn't happen. A bill proposed this week by several Republicans would add marijuana dispensaries to liquor stores, gun shops and casinos as places where recipients of public assistance payments and food stamps can't use their electronic benefits cards to access cash. There haven't been any reports of public EBT cards being used at marijuana dispensaries. But lawmakers say pot shops should be added to the law to make clear it's not legal.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," and as the joke goes, "Poverty won." Five decades after a blizzard of programs began descending on the American people, the poverty rate remains essentially unchanged. That's a little unfair. What counts as poverty today would not have seemed so impoverished 50 years ago, when many of the poor lived without electricity and were no strangers to hunger. Today, the biggest health problems of the poor are more likely to stem from obesity than anything approaching starvation. Defenders of the war on poverty -- and the massive bureaucracy...

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee: Change the Word 'Welfare' to 'Transitional Living Fund' January 8, 2014 - 10:49 AM By Susan Jones (CNSNews.com) - In a brief speech on the House floor Wednesday, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) hailed the war on poverty, endorsed government welfare programs, and said the "safety net has to be something for all of us." "Maybe the word welfare should be changed to something of, 'a transitional living fund.' For that is what it is -- for people to be able to live," she said. Jackson Lee hailed the Earned Income Credit, food and nutrition programs,...

President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate are considering sweeping legislation that will provide new benefits for many more Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act is being hailed as a major legislative goal by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition. "Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society," said California Sen. Barbara Boxer. "We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability (POI) to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no...

Abstract: For decades, the U.S. Census Bureau has reported that over 30 million Americans were living in “poverty,” but the bureau’s definition of poverty differs widely from that held by most Americans. In fact, other government surveys show that most of the persons whom the government defines as “in poverty” are not poor in any ordinary sense of the term. The overwhelming majority of the poor have air conditioning, cable TV, and a host of other modern amenities. They are well housed, have an adequate and reasonably steady supply of food, and have met their other basic needs, including medical...

In May 2009, a small experiment involving 13 homeless men took off in London. Some of them had slept in the cold for more than 40 years. The presence of these street veterans was far from cheap. Police, legal services, health care: Each cost taxpayers thousands of pounds every year. That spring, a local charity decided to make the street veterans — sometimes called rough sleepers — the beneficiaries of an innovative social experiment. No more food stamps, food-kitchen dinners or sporadic shelter stays. The 13 would get a drastic bailout, financed by taxpayers. Each would receive 3,000 pounds (about...

A former New Jersey Transit police officer who retired on disability after stapling his own hand is the subject of renewed scrutiny after a video emerged, showing him repeatedly firing a sniper rifle at a gun range. In Christopher Onesti’s 2008 application for a disability pension, doctors said he was “permanently and totally disabled” because he would have trouble operating his service weapon and performing other police duties. His injuries stem from a firearms certification class two years earlier, where Onesti accidentally fired a staple into his non-shooting hand while preparing to attach a paper target to some cardboard. The...

The White House is stepping up efforts to extend jobless benefits to long-term unemployed Americans, arguing that more than a million people will lose the assistance if it isn't renewed by the end of the month, slowing economic growth. In a report released Thursday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Labor Department concluded that if Congress allows benefits, to expire 3.6 million people will lose access to the benefits by the end of 2014. Democrats are pressing for legislation continuing a program in place since 2008 that gives federally paid benefits to jobless people after their 26...

In America, those who work get punished. Those who don't, get a free ride, courtesy of a nationwide policy of spreading the wealth around through confiscation and redistribution. Case in point: A welfare recipient in Austin recently contacted a morning radio show and explained that she gets a lot of money from the program. What she does with it may (or may not) surprise you. Here's how your hard earned money is being used to help the less fortunate: "While workers out there are preaching morality at people like me living on welfare, can you really blame us?"

Attacks on the Affordable Care Act have stepped up over the last week or so. You'd think that the healthcare reform known as Obamacare is leading to the wholesale loss of affordable insurance by huge sectors of the American public, many of whom will be impoverished by being forced into low-quality health plans at exorbitant prices. You'd think the entire reform is on "life support," as the usually judicious National Journal put it today, speculating that Democrats may soon start calling for its repeal. Don't buy the hype. The numbers tell an entirely different story. What they also demonstrate is...

This must have been one of those backroom deals we heard so much about… Stuffed inside the Obamacare law passed by Democrats (with no Republican votes) is a provision that will reimburse insurance companies up to 80% of their losses due to Obamacare. Melissa Francis reported on FOX News: “Marco Rubio has been out highlighting the fact that there is this ‘risk corridor’ where written into this law that nobody read is this idea that is insurance companies have 3% higher costs than they estimated as a result of who’s in these pools, they can recoup 50% of that money...

High levels of benefits for the unemployed do not lead to a lack of motivation to find work, a Europe-wide study has found. University of Edinburgh researchers found benefit levels had “no effect” on the wellbeing of those without a job. Researchers found some countries with the most generous benefits also had some of the most despondent unemployed citizens, and vice versa. Their paper covered 28 countries across Europe. It compared how unemployment affected people’s life satisfaction levels. …

Emonie "Star" Beasley-Brown lived just three weeks before she was suffocated. Her grandmother was accused of placing her hands over the infant's mouth to hush her crying as the 14-year-old mother stood by. Clayton Condiff, four months old, died after being dropped, shaken and suffocated. And three days later — during a year of record child deaths from abuse and neglect in Illinois — two-month-old Julia Duda drowned in a bathtub. Police said the mother left her baby alone while she made coffee, records show. The three infants as well as a fourth battered child died in Chicago during one...

If Octo-Mom annoyed you, then you haven't seen welfare mom Angel Adams, a 39 year old Black single mother of 15 young children, 12 of which were in her care.

One less bowl of cereal a week for his boy, one less sandwich a week for himself. That's what Friday's cut to national food stamp allotments means to Lionel Hill, but the math equation for lost meals is bound to get worse in the coming months. Hill, 57, and others who need the government aid to eat have no hope of getting their lost benefits back, considering the only debate in Congress over the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program - food stamps - is how much further to slash it. That makes the situation both personal and worrisome in his household....

CARACAS, Venezuela — Venezuela has quietly seized control of two oil rigs owned by a unit of Houston-based Superior Energy Services after the company shut them down because the state oil monopoly was months behind on payments. The seizure took place Thursday after a judge in the state of Anzoategui, accompanied by four members of the local police and national guard, entered a Superior depot and ordered it to hand over control of two specialized rigs to an affiliate of PDVSA, the state-owned oil producer. PDVSA justified the equipment’s expropriation, calling it essential to the South American nation’s development and...

U.S. food stamp cuts taking effect Friday are one of two stimulus safety-net programs ending, an economist said. The other is extended unemployment benefits. ... It was a temporary increase in the maximum amount of food stamp benefits people could get monthly as part of Washington's response to the Great Recession. ... Friday's change in the food stamp program, officially known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, cuts monthly benefits 13.6 percent -- or, more precisely, ends a 13.6 percent increase in SNAP benefits from the stimulus act. Benefits to a family of four receiving the maximum amount...

Greenland’s parliament voted on Thursday (24 October) to end a decades-long prohibition on mining for radioactive materials like uranium, further opening up the country to investors from Australia and China eager to tap its vast mineral resources. The move will not only allow the mining of uranium deposits, but also of rare earths, minerals used in 21st century products from wind turbines to hybrid cars and smart phones and that are currently mostly extracted by China. With sea ice thawing and new Arctic shipping routes opening, the former Cold War ally of the West has emerged from isolation and gained...

Trick or treat!! The word, according to Neil Cavuto, is that the gazillions of food stamp recipients across the land are to have their “benefits” reduced as of November 1st, and that the Department of Homeland Security is gearing up for widespread riots. Such wonders abound in our neo-socialist dystopia of “hope & change.” For the past several years, the Obama administration has aggressively sought to solidify and expand the democrat party’s grip on power by encouraging as many people as they possibly can to sign up for food stamps and other government programs, to make dependency on government a...

The establishment GOP has accepted progressivism’s central premise.Charles Krauthammer has come to my rescue. You see, I’ve been on the receiving end of some spirited reaction since asserting in last weekend’s column that what we commonly call the Republican establishment — i.e., not all individual Republicans but GOP leadership — “is more sympathetic to Obama’s case for the welfare state than to the Tea Party’s case for limited government and individual liberty.” The statement may have been provocative in the sense of expressing a truth that people on the political Right prefer not to talk about. But it was not...