Welfare and Cigarettes
This is a blog about some of my neighbors.Like a lot of people who spend considerable time reading newspapers and websites, I sometimes feel I'm more familiar with the lifestyles of the kinds of people who show up in the lifestyle sections of the paper than with the lives of people who are way closer to my income level. This is an attempt to find out more about the working and middle class people around me.I live in Nashua, New Hampshire, which isn't a poor city. The average job in the metropolitan area pays about $28 an hour, according to the state agency that collects that kind of information. Unemployment in the area is under 5 percent. But I'm continually astonished by how hard things are for many people I see every day.I chose people to interview for this blog pretty much at random. I didn't pick them out because I thought their stories would illustrate a particular political or economic idea. They're just people I saw around who were generous enough to talk with me.On Friday, the speaker of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, William O suggested the state should pass a law to stop people on welfare from spending their benefits on tobacco, alcohol or lottery tickets. Sitting next to him at the press conference was a woman who lost her job at a convenience store after Air Max 2014 refusing to sell a pack of cigarettes to a man paying with an electronic benefit transfer card. are not going to let her courage go unanswered. Aside from the slight oddity of a top state official congratulating someone for refusing to do her job, the story isn unusual. Lots of Nike Air Max 90 Infrared states are trying to make this sort of move, and my Facebook news feed frequently brings me forwarded demands to stop food stamp recipients from buying Nike Store Chadstone soda or to drug test anyone getting government benefits.Some of the arguments clearly stem from the bipolar right wing mindset that says the economy is terrible, and anyone who unemployed needs to go out and find a job. Still, they emotionally compelling. Whenever I talking with someone for this blog about how they feeding their kids with food stamps, and then I see them pull out Mens Nike Roshe Run Camo a cigarette, I feel a swell of disapproval. Usually, though, I find my perspective switches quickly, especially if I happen to call to mind the time I wouldn let my husband quit smoking.We were living in California at the time, but we were right about to move back to the East Coast. I told him no way was he quitting until we were moved in back east. Of course I wanted him to stop smoking. I just couldn imagine being caged in for a whole road trip with the edginess and general bad attitude that comes with nicotine withdrawal.Many of the people I talk to for this blog least the ones who get food stamps or housing subsidies or some kind of other assistance facing much bigger stressors than a three day car ride. Take Nicole, who raising three kids with a mentally ill boyfriend on a budget so tight that she has to worry about how to pay for both soap and shampoo. She pays for basic cable because she doesn want to be left out of conversations about what going on in the news. After 20 years driving a truck, he lost his job when the economy tanked, and he got heart problems that keep him out of work. He gets government benefits. And he drinks quite a bit of beer, though his doctor says he shouldn Would it help anything to kick him off welfare?These aren new questions. Back in the 1930s, George Orwell described upper class, health minded experts telling poor people that they ought to eat better in language that remarkably close to what we hear from their modern counterparts. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit Orwell writes about Nike Sb Janoski Max the cheap, satisfying food of the poor and chips and margarine on white bread he couldn have envisioned the farm subsidies that make corn and soy based, ubiquitously advertised, ultraprocessed snacks the cheapest thing you can buy. Reversing backwards policies that affect the entire food stream would, of course, do far more to keep people healthy than micromanaging how poor people can use their benefits.When it comes to things like cigarettes and lottery tickets, it probably a good idea to remember that people who get cash benefits that could buy those things are likely to be under particular stress. Back before Bill Clinton welfare reform, 96 percent of poor families with kids in New Hampshire received cash benefits. In 2009, it was 39 percent. Nationally, the percentage fell from 75 to 28 percent. The money generally comes with work requirements and lifetime Nike Air Max 2014 Australia limits on collecting, and it only available to people who can prove they in intensely difficult straits to start with.Even people just getting food stamps significantly larger group almost by definition, in a state of acute or prolonged crisis. They lost a job and run out of savings, or they working for $10 an hour with two kids at home, or they were diagnosed with cancer and couldn keep doing their job.Most of us have worse excuses than that for our drinking and smoking and junk food habits. Certainly that true of me, and, as it happens, I a welfare recipient too. In at least one recent year, my family made little enough money that we got an earned income tax credit money from the government. After we bought a house two years ago, we also got an $8,000 first time homebuyers credit. That $2,000 more than the average participant in the state cash benefits program gets in a year, and four times as much as the average food stamp recipient gets. But, since the money went straight to our bank account, not into a distinctive card, I don get dirty looks when I pick up a 12 pack of microbrew at the supermarket.Our societal tolerance for people getting government money rises even more when it comes to the upper end of the economy.In the end, whether we empathetic to a smoker who gets food stamps or a profitable corporation that doesn pay taxes is probably not all that important. Government policies are supposed to be about achieving desirable social outcomes, like healthy kids with halfway stable homes. Saying that something we can shoot for only once parents agree to live on oranges and wheat bread the face of the daily stresses caused by an economic system where they can hope to find a decent job make for a particularly effective policy.See, I don't buy scratch lottery tickets. I think they're silly and a waste of money. I've felt my disapproval rising when I see people buying reams of the things and because of the Cheap Air Max 2013 work I do, I know these people are on benefit.I had an insight one day when I realized that I'd spend the same amount of money on some fancy skin care products promising me to keep my wrinkles at bay. We're both buying hope. I'm betting against the odds to keep my youthful good looks (ahem) and they're betting against the odds to be overnight millionaires not likely for either of us.What an insane idea!Would anyone try to tell a person, who got his money from his job, what he can spend it on? Hell no!So what then gives anyone the right to try to tell someone who got his money any other way, how to spend it.Oh. Yes. They got it from your taxes through the government. So do the politicians. So do all those government workers who arrogantly treat you like shit whenever you need to deal with them. Ar e you also going to try to tell Nike Air Max Thea Black them what they can spend "your" tax dollars on?Yeah. Right. They are meant to make sure someone doesn't go hungry (at least theoretically). Nicotine alcohol are both drugs NOT necessary for life, and I don't think that the money meant for food should go to them. This is the 'government's money' and I think that they do have the right to dictate what it can be spent on. If those on food stamps want to spend what cash they have on other things, go for it. You mention the housing credit you got. Were you able to take that $8K and go for a European vacation? That cash wasn't just given to you, it had a specific purpose (home ownership). Same for food stamps.
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