Welfare State

Posted on March 31, 2011
Filed Under Congress, Democratic Party | 1217Leave a CommentWelfare+State2011-03-31+11%3A46%3A33MikesView

Today, I woke up early and heard Andrew Wilkow, on XM-Patriot Channel, on in the background. A caller started in on a story that sounded like I was telling it, except less detailed.

The story the caller told was about a person he had seen in line at a grocery store. The person had two carts, the first full of food and the second full of booze, cigarettes and other items. In his description, the person paid for everything in the first cart with a debit card that was issued by the local welfare department, in whichever state this took place in. The person then pulled out a ‘wad’ of cash and paid for the contents of the second cart. The caller said that this was the incident that made him a conservative.

I can understand that, but my experience is a little more detailed and there were a couple of separate incidents that took place in a one week period and took place in the context of my family’s household situation at the time.

At the time, in 1981, I was already moderately conservative, having spent the last four years of the seventies in the U. S. Air Force and had voted for Ronald Reagan for President over that disgrace that had occupied the White House during most of the time I was in the service. My twin boys were only a few months old and we were living in a low cost four-plex apartment a mile east of Disneyland in Anaheim. We were a one income family and I had been on the job, the one I had landed after leaving the service, for about a year.

One day I went to the grocery store, possibly a Market Basket, and planned on getting a weeks worth of food, a six pack of baby formula and a package of diapers. This was the time when many items were sold as ‘generic’ along side the named brands. So I roll up to the cash register line, with a cart half full of food items, many of the ‘generic’ type. This cart basically wiped out all the money we had for that purpose for the week.

In front of me was a quite large woman with two carts, the first literally overflowing with all named brand items and expensive cuts of meat. The second cart had four or five 1.75 liter bottles of booze and several cartons of cigarettes. After the checker punched up all of the items into the cash register, the woman pulled out a large stamp book and started peeling off page after page of food stamps. I was looking at that with eyebrows raised. Then the checker rang up the second cart and the woman pulled out a rolled up ‘wad’ of money about two to three inches in diameter. She took off a rubber band and peeled off eight or nine $20 bills to pay for her booze and cigarettes. That was the moment I turned strongly against the welfare state.

To go beyond the callers experience, another occurrence the same week reinforced my clarified thinking. One evening after work, I decided to walk to the local convenience store, I think it was a Circle K, to get a six pack of beer. After passing by various groups, hanging out in front of houses and apartment buildings, each looking like they would turn and kill you for blinking the wrong way, I get to the store and here are what we would describe then as a ‘punk-rock’ gang of teenagers. Shaking my head, I go inside.

When I get to the counter, there is a kid in front of me and he throws a candy bar on the counter, whips out a $1 food stamp, and the store clerk gives the kid the change, as if he had spent a dollar bill. As I move up to the counter, I noticed that the kid didn’t leave the store, but instead went to the pinball machine inside the store and used the change to start playing. Now I don’t begrudge a kid from wanting to play pinball, but if that went on thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of times everyday, how much waste was that in a program designed for nutritional subsistence? While I didn’t think the candy bar qualified as food, I later found out that the Food Stamp Act of 1977 dropped the purchase requirement and also allowed for the cash change that was given to the kid.

So while the two elements I had observed in that convenience store irked me to no end, the Democratic Party controlled House and Senate had passed the bill and the Democratic Party President had signed that damaging piece of legislation, making mooching off the government, indefinitely, a pleasure.