A Friend of Mine Once Knew a Guy Who Was a Welfare Queen

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer with AlterNet.

As a good conservative, I understand that programs like food-stamps, which purportedly help the poor, aren’t really about providing nutrition to 1 in 4 American children. Being Americans, these kids obviously don’t lack for nutrition in the first place.

The bleeding-hearts might buy all that mushy stuff about “poor” people “suffering” at the bottom of the economic ladder, but as anyone who's read this influential comic book knows, it’s ultimately about dependency. Hungry children, if such creatures existed in the U.S., would have no incentive to go out and find a job -- to develop themselves and their vocational-skills, as long as the nanny-state just keeps filling up their stomachs for free.

This is basic economics, people.

I know I will be charged with callousness by the PC-crowd for saying as much. And perhaps the accusation would have some merit if a very large share of those receiving food-stamps actually increased their nutritional intake.  

But as anyone who hasn’t been indoctrinated into the liberal media’s poverty narrative knows quite well, if you give a poor person a dollar to buy food, they’re just going to use it to buy fancy sneakers or those gold teeth the inner-city types like to sport.

And because we know this is not only true for a small number of food-stamp recipients, but is in fact very, very common — perhaps bordering on universal — it’s more than enough reason to oppose the program altogether. Heartlessness doesn’t even enter into the equation.

Obviously, whenever one makes a commonsense observation like this, those pointy-headed ivory-tower-liberals start blathering about “evidence.”

But that there is in abundance!

It’s true that the government claims that 1 in 8 American families have experienced some degree of serious food insecurity in the last year. That’s the government line. But as the National Review’s Victor David Hanson noted, that story just didn’t pan out at his local Wal-Mart:

One would think that if real need explained increased [food-stamp] usage, "Black Friday" would have been a bust. But perhaps the opposite occurred, and Thanksgiving holiday sales were good (as I can attest from witnessing a stampede at the Selma Wal-Mart). One then cannot quite believe that one in eight Americans did not go on the annual shopping spree.

He’s right, of course, and his conclusion about what the extra-heavy traffic he saw at the Selma Wal-Mart that day says about all manner of public assistance programs is all but impossible to refute:

... in this day and age, when the government provides an entitlement, at least two things inevitably follow: (1) recipients calculate the subsidy into a budget, and then use the resulting freed-up cash for other discretionary expenditures; (2) government and the media provide the requisite narrative of Joad-like, Depression-era need to justify continuing and then expanding the program.

Hanson’s a good conservative, but he is an academic. His intricate, data-heavy argument is probably hard for some readers to follow. But there’s just tons of anecdotal evidence as well, as one commenter on our Facebook page (of which you should become a fan if you haven’t already) described really well:

Not everybody takes advantage of the system, but I can tell you, I've seen many a people just in my area have no shame using food stamps, HUD housing, and have HUGE flat screens, chrome wheels on their ghetto jetts, and styled hair and nails. thats whats pissing people off. If you're recieving help, have some integrity and live within your means. ... Republicans are not heartless. They want to see people earn their keep. Not cop out.

• 1
• 2
• Next page »

View as a single page