I took my car in for service yesterday. Had an interesting (brief) conversation...
This is just an indication of how people don't think things through.
After consulting with the service personnel we determined that I needed to leave my car overnight so the parts could be ordered and the repairs done today.
I took a seat in the waiting area until someone at the facility was free to run me home. There was some political stuff on the TV....I wasn't paying attention. I started reading a book I had with me.
So the man next to me started ranting about "welfare" and how he knew a woman (a single mother) who had 6 children, some of them, at least, having different fathers. He said this family group was getting $1000. per month in food stamps and he thought that was an exhorbitant sum.
Well, first of all, who your father is shouldn't make any difference as to whether you're allowed to eat. But that's rather beside the point. I took a scrap of paper out of my bag and was going to do a 'back of the envelope' calculation on this.
Just then, one of the mechanics showed up and said he was available to take me home. I couldn't very well ask him to wait, because he was on the clock. So I left. When I got home I did a calculation:
$1000 divided by 7 (mom and 6 kids) = $142.00 and change/person/month. Divide 142.00 by 30 days and you get approximately $4.73 per day. For 3 meals. How easy is it to eat on $4.73 per day?
I wish I'd had time to explain this to the man sitting next to me. But you see how the propagandists succeed in turning us against one another while the banksters steal our taxes, pension funds etc.
It's an ongoing struggle.
= new reply since forum marked as read
i would have never thought to do that. i'm going to try to remember it though! 
This is an Idaho EBT card...
This is a Washington EBT card...
This is a North Carolina EBT card...
This is a Massachusetts EBT card...
(I tried to find a picture of a Kansas EBT card, but no dice. Sorry.)
The problem is, the states either intentionally (in the case of Idaho, it probably WAS intentional, as a way of shaming the people who hold these cards) or inadvertently made their EBT cards look like no other card out there. And you can spot one from a long ways away... you're standing there just minding your own business, the cashier is having a hell of a time getting the card to work (for some reason, EBT cards seem to require more swipes than non-EBT cards to get them to work; I dunno, maybe the cashiers aren't pushing the magic button the first time?) and you see the card out the corner of your eye.
that damned welfare queen
Meanwhile RMoney and his ilk get away with paying so little
food stamps, and free healthcare from Obama.
Helluva deal. Makes me wonder why they even bother to mow lawns and flip burgers in the back kitchen. 
You cannot reason with them. My mother turned right wing as she got older. I'm sure if she were around today she would be a proud teabagger. Remember when the media (except Fox) finally admitted Iraq had no WMD? CNN was reporting on it as we were talking & she refused to believe it. Even when Fox finally reported it, she knew the Iraqi's, "or someone," had just managed to hide them. 
In her last year she finally admitted to climate change, but not that human activity had anything to do with it. It is "just one of Earth's cycles."
... who tricked him into having six kids.
You think he should be sending his hard earned money to them?
I mean, damn that's harsh. What kind of communist are you?
Getting his girlfriend's car fixed ain't gonna be cheap.
To avoid the frustration in the future, why not cut this out (or something similar) and carry it in your wallet.
Ronald Reagan did very well because he was able to create pictures with words.
Using the logic of the reTHUGLiKKKlans, that makes the vice nominee (I like the sound of that - heh) a Welfare Queen of the first order.
I know way too many people who have to apply for assistance...this kind of attitude toward them puts me in a killing mood. The attitude is also extremely anti-Christian - and that's the second club with which I prefer to beat those idiots.
I've a lot more to say, but there aren't that many %&$#@!!@@ symbols in the ASCII table. 
You know.....more or less. 
First, define "Welfare" - WIC and Medicaid are not welfare; unemployment, disability, and survivor's supplimentals are not welfare, Section 8, Head Start, School Lunch programs are not welfare, most of the social safety net programs are not welfare; in fact, "Welfare", even with all the above subsidy additions may pay enough to survive, but still pays barely enough to thrive.
When people complain about "generational" welfare - which is only 5 - 10% of those who take government subsidies to survive on, they ignore the other factors that contribute to generational welfare - which is a serious lack of jobs that pay at least a living wage and a high cost of safe and reliable sustenance in the area that family is living in.
Modern "War on Poverty" welfare as we know it only came about in the 1960's - when it was recognized that there were too many widows/widowers or divorcees with dead-beat former spouses left taking care of what was once a happy family with a socially acceptable "lot of kids" that were falling through the cracks. Even into the early 1960's, when a spouse died, families were often broken up and the children sent off to relatives or given up to orphanages for adoption because there was no way for the remaining parent to take care of them. Welfare allowed that parent to keep the family together and attempt to create a stable household.
I've met far more under-graduate students, wait-staff, lower-level (including military families) and "part-time" workers who were on some form of welfare or subsidized service for the few years it took them to get their kids past the daycare stage and themselves into decent wage status than I have a "welfare queen". Most of the time, the few non-working caretakers of children on welfare I have met are the grandparents on social security who have already retired from an average job that didn't pay enough to save on, not some Reaganesque stereotype of a drug-abuser who sits on her ass with her six kids from different fathers who are all in jail or on probation. (I've only met two drug-abuser welfare types in the 45 years I've been aware of "welfare", and they were not custodial parents and on welfare for very long...)
The so-called "generational welfare" of the projects probably only consists of perhaps two actual welfare-dependent generations, and that, again, is due to the families that are trapped by living in areas where there is not enough opportunity for the people who live there to advance out of poverty/welfare and not enough resources to move out.
Before WWII, the families of the extremely or chronically poor used to just live in the shadows and alleys, often sterilized for "their own good", and have their children taken from them to be raised by charity and sent off to labor in farms and rural work camps (again, "for their own good"
or in most cases, thrown out on the street when they got too old to stay at the orphanage where they had gotten a very minimal training on how to survive without turning to begging or crime. Now, these poor were warehoused into projects, still with no way to make a living beyond the walls of the apartment they were given to live in.
Oddly enough, in the 1990's, the focus was on the increasing amount of working middle class (often formerly union) families with severely disabled children divorcing because the health care benefits that used to be taken for granted were being eroded (along with the pensions and other benefits) in the name of corporate profits; getting divorced and going on welfare while whichever parent had the job paid minimal child support guaranteed that your child would be treated and you could all still live at home - while not doing so guaranteed that you were faced with a grim choice, your family would go bankrupt and lose the house, or your disabled child will either die or have to be turned over to the state.
So if they're trying to get on their feet, there's a lot of good reasons for a single parent to go on some sort of welfare or subsidy. In fact, over the past fifty years or so, a good 90% of applicants are still only on "welfare" for an average of six years while they get on their feet, get a little ahead and start paying taxes again.
So let's just use that bright neon paint reflecting the very few who, for whatever reason, can't get their act together at all, to brush over all of the people who need assistance - those who would rather be dealing with the cost of living via the living-wage jobs and benefits that Corporate America is not otherwised prepared to bring to their community. Companies aren't charities, and have no reason to actually spend profits they made off their workforce to invest in the communities they operate in, right?
After all, other righteous, hard-working Americans who haven't fallen down(yet) need some excuse to hold up when talking about how all those "lazy poor people" shouldn't be coddled for all the mistakes they must have made to get them into that situation.
Tough love, baby, that's what they all need - tough love. Just like during the Gilded Age...
Haele
Poor folk everywhere would be better served by free birth control and access to Health Care. Being trapped in a cycle of Poverty is more difficult than you can imagine, especially when Republicans consistently make it harder for these women to access Family Planning services, and de-fund all their other options. Of course restricting access to abortions goes along with that. Why not torture these women with images of their "unborn children" and counsel them towards Christian alternatives as well?
You're simplistic statement proves you have little desire to understand the depths of these societal issues, and might i add, would not be uttered by either the Green Lantern or Superman...
'just sayin'
sometimes unplanned things happen. Ever stop to think people can be forced into poverty AFTER they have children? Or after a major accident/health care crisis. I think maybe you have been affected by the Reagan/Clinton "welfare mom" stereotype. Do you know anyone on welfare personally? Ever been a social worker or someone who works with the poor and under-served?
Let's get back to this:
"People who can't afford to be responsible parents shouldn't keep having kids."
I doubt very much Planned Parenthood would phrase it this way as it sounds like you are saying poor people shouldn't be allowed to have children.....
