Slate Interview: Its hard living on food stamps

Because 89 percent of its students received free or reduced priced lunches last year, the Dallas school district has thrown in the towel on charging for meals. It is now giving every student free lunch AND free breakfast.

http://educationblog.dallasnews.com/2013/10/all-dallas-isd-students-will-now-get-free-breakfast-and-lunch.html/

 

Not everyone's handicaps are apparent to everyone else. Some people may appear physically fine, but have debilitating ailments, for example.

 

Billions of dollars is funneled by government in sweet corporate tax incentives and money for enormously profitable companies who don't need them but have the political clout to get them. That bothers me a lot more than someone electing to remain on food stamps because they otherwise can't find a job that pays enough to
allow them to afford food and rent, in part because many of those same companies tell us the economy will collapse if people are actually paid a living wage.

 

That wasn't what I said.

I didn't say anyone who APPEARS to be of sound body and mind. I'm not judging people based on some arbitrary appearance. I'm judging someone who ADMITS she will not even bother to look for work . . . because the pay would lower her government assistance. A completely unacceptable excuse 100 percent of the time.

 

At the end of the day if you look at all assistance programs it's just not a big piece of of the pie. Cutting out a portion is not
going to do much in the way of deficit reduction. The way I see it is that most of the money spent is helping people
in need so it's not worth worrying about those gaming the system.

It's become a bigger issue now because those who are actually holding down a job have been vilified and have
been asked to pay more. We are now seeing the blowback.

Anecdotal but I have a close friend who is a cop in The Bronx. He claims that a good portion of the precinct where
he patrols is on some kind of public assistance, yet are able to qualify for luxury car leases due to the fact that all of
their day to day living expenses are covered down to the cell phones. As a result he will only eat at deli's that have a
sign in window reading "no EBT cards accepted". His reasoning is that with so many assistance programs available, one hand does not know what the other is doing.

 

The problem I see with the Slate article is that it doesn't give us enough details on the woman's background. For example, she explains why she gets VA benefits (served as a nurse in the military) but it doesn't appear that the writer asked the woman if she once held a job in nursing... and if she did, what happened that kept her from continuing that job.

Or was it because she was married and her husband worked, but then he was killed in an auto accident and she tried to find a job, but either had no luck, or found out about a condition that classified her as "disabled" and thus prevented her from taking jobs?

And what is her "disability" anyway? I don't ask this to pick on her, but simply so I can understand her situation and what jobs she would be able to take.

That's the real problem with the Slate article. The writer appeared to only ask questions about her current situation but didn't get into the details as to how she ended up in her situation and what routes she may or may not have tried to take before going the government assistance route.

Burton's post earlier in this thread is an example of the information that helps one truly understand how somebody got into that situation.

 

Those questions would not have fit the narrative.

 

There isn't a job for everyone. So what do you do with the miserable people who can't get jobs? Re-enact The Grapes of Wrath? Go back to the early 1900s when we all genuflected at the altar of the tycoon?

 

Man came to my house this week selling "Almighty Dirt Buster" cleaning solution. I admired somebody willing to go door to door and deal with (likely) a low success rate trying to earn a few dollars. I bought a couple of bottles. I don't mind helping people trying to help themselves. I enjoy it, actually.

Tell me that job --- or others like it --- is not available to anyone of sound mind and body.

 

The last couple of weeks the Sunday school class (early/mid-teens) of which I'm a co-teacher was scheduled to talk about poverty. Yours truly was given responsibility over those topics, and the curriculum had the students "advising" a single parent who'd recently been approved for disability. The task was to go find out how this hypothetical individual would avail him-/herself of various programs that are out there and get a sense for just how difficult it is to make that kind of life work. For a couple of practical reasons -- for one thing, I never know which kids are going to be there on a given Sunday, so I can't count on my charges doing any research -- I chucked the curriculum's lesson plan and instead went through putting together a budget for a single-parent with a $10-per-hour job. What I wanted the kids to see was: 1) just how tough it is to do that; and 2) just how vulnerable someone with that income is to very plausible vicissitudes (say, suddenly needing four new tires). In the course of my lesson planning, I came across this pretty good website/simulation (www.playspent.org). Even though it's based on the idea that the player has a job, you get a clear sense of how difficult making it through the month can be.

 

One thing is that people aren't moving to where the jobs are, like they used to:

http://www.ibtimes.com/why-are-americans-moving-less-will-it-hurt-us-job-market-us-economy-1301911

And, if it's going to be a safety net, then there should be provisions included that allow benefits to flow for some period of time, while a person is working, allowing them to take a job, get back on their feet, find housing, etc.

The current system, discourages, rather than encourages work. That's backwards, and needs to change.

And, it shouldn't be generational. When they tore down the last of the Cabrini Green high rises, residents who lived there were interviewed. Many had lived there for decades. Some, were born there, are now adults, and had children and/or grandchildren living there.