Food Stamp Use Up 1.44 million in Just One Month

Do you liberals really think that 1.44 million people would have died of starvation last month if the U.S. government didn't hand out food stamps? Were you all born yesterday?

reply to post by sheepslayer247


Yeah, ok then.

Just keep feeding the tiger.

I am so glad that the Govt was there to step in to create such a wonderful dependency in the first place.

This amounts to negotiating with a terrorist or kidnapper.
If they don't get their free stuff, then they will result to more crime.
I say bring it. When enough of them get shot while trying to rob someone, maybe they will get the hint to cut the crap out.
Or they will get arrested and thrown in jail.
How you pitch it, is an excuse to keep feeding people that don't care, so long as they keep getting their free stuff.

reply to post by sheepslayer247


Actually food stamps ran out your saying all the poor people would immediately turn in to criminals?

My such a low opinion of our fellow Americans,

Then of course someone commits a crime they usually go to jail and depending on the severity of said crime would enjoy an all expenses vacation in prison and enjoy free food free clothes,free healthcare, etc.

Which is pretty much that the poor already have.

Winterkill, if you have a problem with welfare recipients, then I ask you to look at this image. This image is a computer generated visualization of 16 trillion dollars piled in man-sized blocks or cubes around the Statue of Liberty. Just one of those blocks is 100 million in American dollars. The entirety of this image is a representation of the national debt as it currently stands.

So 1.44 millions a month for a whole year is about 17 million. In other words, about 17% of just ONE - JUST ONE!! - of those blocks can be blamed on welfare for this year. Not even a whole cube. Now try and count how many cubes you see in the image. Did you do it? And welfare can be accounted for using less than half of one of those cubes. Oh, excuse me...FOOD STAMP recipients. 17% can be blamed on the Bridge Club. Sorry. Still doesn't change the fact that not even a whole cube, a whole 100 million, is needed to cover that kind of cost. And look at all those cubes!

Just wanted to put it into perspective for all the participants in this thread. If you want to jump on the "Blame The Welfare" bandwagon, then maybe you should trace a slightly larger amount of that money back to its wasteful spender. Because from where I'm sitting, it looks like welfare recipients are practically saints compared to the rest of the money being lost to our national debt.



Note: This image is a screencap taken from the video on the "US Debt visualized in physical $100 bills" thread. If you're interested, use the search engine and take a look.

reply to post by Thepump


1st. Im not against my tax dollars being used to help the truly needy among us. But as others have pointed out over the last nearly 13 years government policy has both created the economic conditions that boost welfare rolls and have actively sought to expand welfare even to those who certainly don't need it. They are attempting to use welfare as a method of enslavement and have successfully done so to huge segments of the population. Namely Blacks and Hispanics. Seeing the success of this statists have expanded the slave program to include anyone that fits the socioeconomic model that is most malleable to statist control.

I don't want people to go hungry either. But I also don't want my fellow countrymen and women to become dependent on a system that i so cruelly using them for the votes they need to stay in power.

God forbid America ever wakes up and takes some personal responsibility for the monster we originally created to benefit society.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Welfare is being discussed, because........................................it is a thread about it.

The financial costs are not the sole issue. The way people become dependent and hooked on Govt handouts is the other issue.

reply to post by macman


You are trying to make it seem like all of these people are neanderthals that just want to mooch of the teet. Sadly, you have not addressed the fact that, by the numbers, most of these people work. 8% unemployment in much lower than the number of people that get foodstamps.

Why are you not trying to address the economic policies congress puts in place or the corporate welfare we pay for?

No, you have to attack the hard-working families that are doing their part, but can't get paid more than minimum wage because America has become a Service nation.

Also, why is it that we are not attacking all of the other crazy stuff our tax dollars pay for, but foodstamps is the only program in which the US citizen can 100% benefit from and it's under fire?

I also find it funny that the Right is making this an issue. They should be in favor of foodstamps considering that the Paul Ryan healthcare plan was what.......health stamps. You got a coupon for healthcare. So why would they care of people get a coupon for food?

As a libertarian I want to see a smaller government, MUCH smaller. This includes cutting social programs. But as a humanitarian, I don't want to see my fellow man suffer and starve. So I believe that the social programs while needing to be cut, should be the last things to go after other drastic decreases in spending have been made (like military). Hold the correct people responsible for the mess we are in. Start raising tariffs so we can start to bring manufacturing back to America. Legalize drugs and start to tax them therefore we stop funding an over grown privatized prison system. And as we are doing this, start to decrease social program spending. As our society starts to spring back, we can start to increase the fiscal cutbacks from social programs.

This is just a preliminary solution I thought up off the top of my head, that recognizes that cutting back on the size of the government will cause a recession and the reason we wait to outright cut social program spending is so that people don't go hungry while they wait for the economy to rebound (which it will with more vigor than ever before). By slowly cutting the social programs at first before picking up steam, the public will know that they cannot become reliant on them and have to start working to cover themselves.

reply to post by neo96

Actually food stamps ran out your saying all the poor people would immediately turn in to criminals?

No, not all by a long shot. What I am saying is that people have to eat. If they can't eat they will steal to do so. You would....I would.

Which is pretty much that the poor already have.

Neo, can you see past the end of your nose? I'd be willing to bet that you have no clue what it means to be poor in 2012 America and it really shows that some people's view is arrogantly obscured.

If government allowed businesses to function without over-regulation, impositions like ObamaCare, and higher taxes then businesses would do what they are supposed to do.

Build, grow, and make money.

Businesses would hire people. People would be working again. They wouldn't need programmes like welfare and foostamps.

But (as a poster already stated) a populace that is fed by the government is a docile populace. An obedient populace.

What better example of social engineering is this? Government can manipulate, adjust social behaviour just due to the fact that they are the ones controling the food.

This is beyond Machiavellian. This is Orwellian in proportion!

reply to post by sheepslayer247


Have every idea of what it means to be poor, and I am talking about the real poor, 10 year old car, a job that paid $3.25 an hour working 80 hours to make ends meet no cell phones,xbox's and ever other "civil right deemed a person should have in 2012, and never once in my life have i ever taken food stamps, nor unemployment.

So please as if.been there done that and I got myself out of that crap sandwich government didn't.

reply to post by sheepslayer247


I didn't provide, nor pitch, the report showing that due to a decline of welfare, people would resort to crime.
That be all you..........
I am not for the Govt providing Stamps or vouchers for any of these things.
For those that can't care for themselves is a different issue.

And, the issue of of other expenditures, is for a different topic.

reply to post by neo96


These people who talking about being poor. I have spare change to my name and medical bills that remain unpaid. And yet, despite not being well off, I have learned more about life than many who attend an Ivy League college. Ask them about accounting and they'll talk your ear off, but ask their opinion on the meaning of life, what it means to live, and the conversation is over.

I don't regret it one bit, either. There are some things I would have done differently, but I've made up with my parents, which was the one thing I absolutely wanted to do. I treated them like crap despite their every attempt to make me grow up, and I've finally gotten back to them. Other than that, I'm cool. I'm just waiting for my exit cue.

Yeah, I'm more poor than a lot of these immigrants you see on the streets. In fact, they aren't even citizens and they have more than I do. Houses, jobs, the works. I'm hoping to get an apartment within the next couple of weeks, but you get my point. You want to talk about unfair?

Half the people here don't have a clue. Anyway, good thread.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Yeah finally someone who knows what the score is one thing I left out is selling plasma for gas money.

They really do not have a clue of what real poor is.

reply to post by neo96


It's funny though. See, I barely have money for a gallon of gas, yet I don't need it. To be perfectly honest, I despise money. Money is an addiction - you get some, you decide to have fun with it, you run out. Oh, you liked having fun so much that you need more! So you end up catering to ungrateful [insert laundry list of expletives here] so you can get more money and spend it on more things you really don't need. But you have to have it, because the media uses psychological tricks to make you THINK you do because the government pays off the corporations to tell the media moguls what to do so you're driven to keep greasing the wheels of the Machine so you can buy more stuff. Then the corporations pay off the media moguls and the government gets its little drones. And then the corporates go home with more money in one week than you make in a month for doing less.

And in the end, you feel unsatisfied because everything you bought broke and jobs are running out and your wife left you for a younger man and your kids are doing drugs to forget the nightmare they're living and you never figured out how to have fun without wading waist-deep into Materialism Land. That's not a problem I have. Most people have more than they really need anyway, so I consider it payment for not causing trouble.

reply to post by AfterInfinity


Yep I have long said that far too many people are obsessed with what they don't have never looking at what the do have.

True wealth has never been measured by zeros in a bank account or that shiny new car or the latest iphone, and other "stuff".

reply to post by beezzer


Government regulation and taxes are not the reason business' aren't hiring.

Let me put it this way: If a business has a ton of extra cash...will they hire more people if they are meeting demand with their current staff?

No, of course not. That is silly and the business will sit on the money.

Now if the patrons of that particular business have extra cash, they will spend it. In doing so, they increase demand and create the need for the business to hire more people.

That's how jobs are created. Supply and demand, not trickle-down silliness.

That's one reason why foodstamps are good because the money is guaranteed to be put into the economy and in doing so creates demand for supermarkets.

reply to post by AfterInfinity

It's funny though. See, I barely have money for a gallon of gas, yet I don't need it. To be perfectly honest, I despise money. Money is an addiction - you get some, you decide to have fun with it, you run out. Oh, you liked having fun so much that you need more!

You make a good point here.

What sucks is when you are not spending any of your money on fun and barely making ends meet. That's where I am now. My kids are my priority, and I mean food, shelter and clothing for them. They don't have a lot of money spent for them on anything that isn't a necessity.

It used to be easier to make ends meet. I don't hear a lot said about inflation by the news media, but I am pretty damned sure that it exists.

There isn’t really any need for food stamps.

Economic and political ramifications of these statistics aside, we should consider what they say about our way of life in general. Western society is estranged from its relationship with nature. The continued survival of the population is contingent on the sustained functioning of an obviously flawed economic system (yet I repeat myself) around which mass agriculture and the need for industrialization have grown. When there’s no food in the pantry, the first option most people consider is a trip to the supermarket, not giving much thought to where that food came from and the processes involved in distribution. When there isn’t enough money available to make necessary purchases for survival, people turn to where they can get the money to do so—by stealing usually, either directly or indirectly through state-managed resource confiscation and reallocation.

The idea that, as human beings with a fundamental and inseparable (as much as we’ve tried to deny it) relationship with nature, they should know how to grow and hunt their own food never even occurs to them. They don’t recognize that not being able to survive as an organism on this planet without an artificial system of resource organization called “economics” driving it all is a huge problem. They seek an immediate solution to an immediate problem—an illusory monetary one—without addressing the philosophical implications of that problem at all.

If you have any land at your disposal, I would venture to argue that it is irresponsible for you as a human to not be growing as much of your own food as possible, which would probably be self-sufficient with minor supplementation from outside sources. If you have a lot of land, raising your own meat sources wouldn’t hurt either.

If you have no land of your “own”, it would be relatively easy to set up co-ops within your local communities to make use of what areas are suitable for cultivation, even in urban settings. The question is, are people willing to do it? Or is the detachment from nature too deep and the convenience of one-stop, everything-at-your-fingertips-now culture simply too tempting for most?

We’ll find out one way or the other, as the current system cannot sustain itself. The problems within our systems of social welfare are not nearly as important as what the need for such systems in the first place says about the way we live our lives as human beings. There isn’t any need for food stamps, or any economic remedy. Nature provides for all our needs simply and for free. All it asks in return is the recognition of the fact that we are not separate from it, and should treat it as we would have ourselves treated—with love and respect.

A revolutionary concept, I know...

Ron Paul 2016