One thought on “Pat Buchanan”

  1. There was a food stamp program as part of the later new deal from 1939 to 1943. It was to alleviate hunger, but it is mainly an agricultural subsidy program to help people buy up surplus agricultural products. And it still is, and it is administered from the department of agriculture, not welfare. This is why you can only buy unprepared food products and not other necessary household items like soap, toothpaste, toilet paper.

    I was a supermarket cashier for a while and checked out thousands and thousands of dollars worth of food bought with food stamps (now on a kind of debit card) . The store’s computer was programed to separate out non-eligible items, so you can’t really cheat. And like most income support programs, if you don’t have kids you can only get a tiny monthly allotment, hardly worth the paperwork it takes to apply and get re-certified every month.

    I very rarely saw anyone buying anything special or expensive, despite all the stories you hear from people who claim they were in the check-out line behind somebody buying steaks and shrimp and layer cakes. The only thing that ever bothered me was the amount of candy and Mountain Dew people bought, but this was true of lots of people who did not have food stamps.

    Some of the other clerks talked nasty about women they knew who had several kids and got a lot of money on food stamps, and they called them bad names because they were not working like the clerks were. But I considered that at least the kids were being fed, even if it was chips and Cheerios and Mac and Cheese from a box, no matter what the character of their parents.

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