Food Stamps, Welfare and Medicaid … Oh, My
August 17th, 2011 by Sonja

Put me in charge . . ..
Put me in charge of food stamps. I’d get rid of Lone Star cards; no cash for Ding Dongs or Ho Ho’s, just money for 50-pound bags of rice and beans, blocks of cheese and all the powdered milk you can haul away. If you want steak and frozen pizza, then get a job.

Put me in charge of Medicaid. The first thing I’d do is to get women Norplant birth control implants or tubal ligations. Then, we’ll test recipients for drugs, alcohol, and nicotine and document all tattoos and piercings. If you want to reproduce or use drugs, alcohol, smoke or get tats and piercings, then get a job.

Put me in charge of government housing. Ever live in a military barracks? You will maintain our property in a clean and good state of repair. Your “home” will be subject to inspections anytime and possessions will be inventoried. If you want a plasma TV or Xbox 360, then get a job and your own place.

In addition, you will either present a check stub from a job each week or you will report to a “government” job. It may be cleaning the roadways of trash, painting and repairing public housing, whatever we find for you. We will sell your 22 inch rims and low profile tires and your blasting stereo and speakers and put that money toward the “common good.”

Before you write that I’ve violated someone’s rights, realize that all of the above is voluntary. If you want our money, accept our rules. Before you say that this would be “demeaning” and ruin their “self esteem,” consider that it wasn’t that long ago that taking someone else’s money for doing absolutely nothing was demeaning and lowered self esteem.

If we are expected to pay for other people’s mistakes we should at least attempt to make them learn from their bad choices. The current system rewards them for continuing to make bad choices.

AND While you are on Gov’t subsistence, you no longer can VOTE! Yes that is correct. For you to vote would be a conflict of interest. You will voluntarily remove yourself from voting while you are receiving a Gov’t welfare check. If you want to vote, then get a job.

Now, if you have the guts – PASS IT ON…

According to an e-mail LightHusband received the above was a letter to the editor in the Waco Herald Tribune in November 2010. It’s rather blunt point is something I bet we’ve all heard and perhaps felt at one time or another in reference to what many see as the profligate waste associated with aid programs for the impoverished in our country. We all think those programs would be really easy to run. So for kicks and giggles I thought I’d respond to this letter myself. Just for fun. Here’s what I would say to this person … paragraph by paragraph. And for arguments sake, I’m going to assume that the author was a man, the writing seems very masculine to me. So I’m going to respond to a man.

Food Stamps – You’re correct, sir. Food assistance should not be allowed to purchase Ding Dongs or Ho Hos or other known unhealthy foods (such as Captain Crunch or other sugary cereal). But I also happen to think that it would be wise to include some healthy fruits and vegetables in your list of approved items for people to purchase. I have never understood why it was acceptable for the WIC (Women with Infants and Children) to have a limited number of items for purchase with their funds, but Food Stamps was a free for all. WIC money is too limited, but Food Stamps are too open. There needs to be a healthy and wise middle ground in which people learn about a healthy diet … and I’m sorry but rice, beans, cheese and milk ain’t it. Steak and frozen pizza probably isn’t it either.

There are a lot of ways to feed a family a healthy diet on a tight budget. This is going to mean educating moms and dads because they did not learn this from their parents. Education costs money, so in the short run this would make the food stamp program more expensive. In the long run (over a period of years) it would become less expensive. But we would have to be prepared to invest our time, effort and money in it to eventually wean people off of it.

Medicaid – Forced birth control, tubal ligations, drug testing etc. I think I understand the reasoning and emotion behind this. However, when the large majority of people receiving Medicaid are people with dark skin it smacks of racism and there is no getting around that. If you are poor, you cannot have children. If you are poor, your options are limited. We have an amendment in the Constitution which addresses this issue – Amendment 14; Article 1 states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. While individual (private) companies can require drug testing for the right to employment and the federal government can require it for security purposes and has done so through the due process of law, there is no reason to require drug testing as a prerequisite for the receipt of public funds. I know that two states are currently attempting to make this law and they are on shaky Constitutional ground. In addition … there are huge costs involved with drug testing. How is this going to be paid for?

Government Housing – I completely understand the desire to tell folks who live in public housing to clean up their act. It is disgraceful the way our country has treated those housing projects. We’ve left them to rot. But have you ever gone to Home Depot and noted the cost of purchasing a basic home repair kit? When you have nothing, it’s pretty expensive. Then you have to learn how to use it. Now I do love LightHusband, but I am here to tell you that of his many talents, home repair is not one of them.  He has 10 thumbs. We hire that out or we do things with friends. But what do you do when you live in an apartment building and you rent? It is common knowledge that a renter relies on the owner or the superintendent of the facility to keep the place in good repair. It is the owner’s responsibility to keep a place looking ship shape and tidy, not the renter’s. Your plan puts the onus in the wrong place. If we want our government housing projects to look like someone cares for them, then perhaps “we, the people” as owners of those public housing projects ought to start caring for them. Perhaps we need to get down off our high horse and take care of our neighbors. Maybe we could teach them some skills and give them some of our excess tools in the process.

As for the plasma televisions and gaming devices, first of all there is no way to inspect for those. Secondly, what do you do if someone receives those sorts of luxury items as a gift? Take it away? That is ludicrous to begin to monitor gifts and decide which are worthy and which are not. We will become a police state if we do that.

Job Corps – Here is something I can give marginal support to. With one large question. How sir, do you propose to care for the minor children that moms may have in their care? I can see a number of solutions to this problem, but you do not seem to have accounted for children or their wellbeing in your scheme. I wonder how you will do that? My other large problem is that what you have outlined looks more like a chain gang than a public works program. While I agree with the notion that having people work in some manner for the public assistance they receive, I also believe that the work they do should train them in some way for eventually getting off public assistance. It should be a road that leads them in a positive direction, rather than a dead end alley of endless work for endless public assistance. This just feeds the cycle that we desire to break.

Voting – Once again, I would like to refer you to the Constitution and Amendment 24 in which it states “1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote in any primary or other election for President or Vice President, for electors for President or Vice President, or for Senator or Representative in Congress, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” This means that no one can ask or require that voting rights or privileges be restricted for any reason, whether “voluntary” or otherwise.

Last, I’m going to call you out, sir. You are being disingenuous when you make the claim that when you are in charge all of your changes are “voluntary.” That people have the choice to knuckle under to your demands or they can reject public assistance. In other words, it’s your way or the highway (in popular vernacular). When the alternative is starvation, homelessness and perhaps death, especially for one’s children, there’s not really much of a choice, now, is there? And I’d like to ask you, if you were that person, or those people, just how free would you think this country is?

Part 2

Part 3


5 Responses  
  • brad/futuristguy writes:
    August 17th, 20113:08 pmat

    Yup – – what she said to what he said.

    A lot of good points you’ve made here Sonja, and I appreciate your focus on moving in the long term toward prevention and sustainability. Many short-term solutions may be viscerally satisfying to their creators, but go against the ground rules that were set up for the common good by our founders. They also can wreak havoc on the future for all of us with their unintended, unconsidered long-term consequences.

    Diagnose problems, yes, but let’s also build up people’s assets so they can become contributing and self-sustaining participants!

    Oh wait, are we talking about church or state? Or church and state!

    Wise strategies will apply to both/and …

  • Ally C writes:
    August 17th, 201111:59 pmat

    If people feel the need to police what people eat, then please have the decency to ensure that food stamp benefits are enough to cover the expense of “healthy” food. People buy “junk food” with food stamps often because that’s still all they can afford– ramen noodles are cheaper and go further than a bag of carrots. Other than that, good response to what amounts to an asinine letter.

  • Sean writes:
    August 19th, 20118:47 amat

    Interestingly enough this entire range of topics was addressed when I still lived in Toronto, Ontario. The provincial government despairing of breaking the cycle of generations of families on welfare decided on a aggressive and controversial change in the rules.
    – need social assistance (welfare, housing, food stamps) sign up over here.
    – government job training is mandatory in some skill. child care services can be provided depending on circumstances.
    – family planning is available
    – drug testing is mandatory if there is a history of problems.
    – housing is heavily subsidized until you begin working then a rental scale applies based on the ability to pay.
    – food stamps – accepted by all, will only purchase essentials (rice, beans, hamburger, veggies, milk, eggs etc..)Abuses cost the merchant (fines) more than the user.

    Finally after all this the family has one to two years to get off the “dole” so to speak. Not a perfect solution and I believe that austerity programs have severely curtailed the effectiveness but in the early years it really did work.

  • Kimber writes:
    August 19th, 20119:39 amat

    Sonja,

    Bravo!

    I would only add to the part about government housing… Many times this is not government owned housing but is housing subsidized by the government… such as Section 8. The government guarantees the property owner a certain amount of money per month. And the decline in the property is due to the property owner not doing regular maintenance… ie slumlords. And these property owners can go years, collecting a payment from the government while doing little on up keep, with little or no interference from the government.

  • Sonja writes:
    August 19th, 20119:44 amat

    Nice point, Kimber! Perhaps the answer would be to cut off the supply to the slumlords in that case, rather than making the tenants responsible for the owner’s greed.


»  Substance:WordPress   »  Style:Ahren Ahimsa