Kudos to the Tea Party and other Republicans in the House for their heroic efforts to limit food stamps.
They are a waste of money, and really don’t help anybody. The poor are poor before they receive food stamps, and they are still poor afterwards, though they might be a bit less hungry.
Besides, a lot of them squander the aid on unhealthy food like milk and bread.
We can learn a lot from India which has a lot of poor people. They don’t provide a lot of assistance, relying instead on the magic of the free market to solve the problem. (Chris Hedges)
For example, in Mumbai, a whole new hierarchy of entrepreneurial enterprisers has sprung up.
It starts at dawn with the garbage gleaners leaving their luxurious shanties at dawn to travel to the middle class slums where the pickings are better.
There, they separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, and bring the good stuff to the next higher level where more specialized entrepreneurs pay them for their discoveries.
(They’re the guys who live up on that hill).
These businessmen are more sophisticated. For example, one specializes in toothpaste tubes, another in tin cans, another in tampon applicators, etc.
Some of them do quite well for themselves. The “Tin Can Czar” (who wishes to remain nameless) actually earned so much last year, that he was able to paint his shack! (It’s the blue one).
And the government doesn’t have to spend money on garbage collection.
Meanwhile, back in the good old USA, Kansas Rep. Tim Huelskamp is leading the charge.
His message is simple: Food stamps create dependency, and they cost too much.
Huelskamp IS able to see a need for some federal aid however.
His brother’s farm received $1.6 million in federal subsidies from 1995 to 2011.
His parents’ farm has also received subsidies. The farm took in $1.1 million in federal farms subsidies from 1995 to 2009.
In 2002, Huelskamp himself picked up $258,000 in disaster subsidies.
(The congressman has made very little income from farming, according to his financial disclosure forms. In 2011, he made $4,000 on farming, along with additional money he made renting out farmland. The previous year, his farming earned him close to $6,000.)
Last August, Huelskamp voted in favor of $383 million in agriculture disaster aid. The congressman defended his vote: “I thought it was fiscally responsible,” he said. (Huffington Post)
Besides that, they’re “Job Creators”.
Snark
I hope to heaven that this is funny over there in Vermont. In New Hampshire, there are many people that I see all the time that absolutely believe your beginning. I can just visualize them reading the first several paragraphs and saying, “right on, this guy really knows his stuff.” Then they would click on to something else. This is why I have stopped this kind of sarcasm in my own writing.