Saturday, October 19, 2013

Food Stamp Recipients Loot Wal Mart Shelves

Last weekend, the food stamp card system crashed in 17 states. One of those states was Louisiana and the recipient class looted the shelves at a couple of Wal Mart stores while the system was down:

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.
The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.
Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirms they were called in to help the employees at Walmart because there were so many people clearing off the shelves. He says Walmart was so packed, “It was worse than any black Friday” that he’s ever seen.
Lynd explained the cards weren’t showing limits and they called corporate Walmart, whose spokesman  said to let the people use the cards anyway. From 7 to 9 p.m., people were loading up their carts, but when the cards began showing limits again around 9, one woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700.00 and only had .49 on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn’t press charges if she left the food.


This is just one example of the need to end welfare as we know it -- not just modify it or reduce it: End it. There's probably no other story that illustrates better the entitlement mentality inherent in welfare programs at the 50-year point in the Great Society.  These people are of the mentality that they are owed food paid for by the rest of us and they are going to take as much of the taxpayer largess as they can take. Never once does it occur to them that they are responsible for providing food for themselves.

Try this sometime: Go to a Wal Mart Supercenter  or some other major grocery store. Find the youngest-looking mother you can with the largest number of kids hanging around. Note the fact that this young woman's cart is filled to brim with every type of name-brand processed food product imaginable if she has been in the store for more than 15 minutes. Then follow her to the checkout. More than likely you will find that she is using your money -- our money -- to buy hundreds of dollar of name-brand food items. Cost isn't a consideration if you are not paying for your food.

This isn't a new phenomenon. How many of us who had small kids 20 years ago remember sidling up to the meat counter to pick up our three or four one-pound packages of hamburger and standing next to someone picking out a nice juicy T-bone or Porterhouse or two. When you got to the front of the store, you found out that you were paying for those nice juicy steaks while you were buying hamburger for your family. Twenty years ago, this transaction was a little more obvious since the folks who were benefiting from your tax dollars and mine had to use actual food stamps back then. Now they can do it on the sly with the swipe of an "EBT card" -- Electronic Benefits Transfer - transferring your wealth to those who didn't earn it for two decades now.

Most of us can recall how tough it was to raise young kids on the meager incomes we made when we were just starting out in life. But while we were pinching every penny, the folks who were sitting in the wagon we were pulling weren't concerned about how much we were paying for their food in the least. The old adage that you appreciate things more when you actually have to pay for them is true.

Barack the Terrible likes to say that the people who are pulling the wagon don't have any "skin in the game". The exact opposite is true: The ones who don't have any "skin in the game" are the ones who are eating steak while the young families who are paying for it are eating hamburger. They are the people who loot grocery stores with their EBT cards if they think they can get by with it. Not only that but they actually think they are entitled to eat high on the hog with other people's money. It's time they had some "skin in the game". There's nothing like hunger to encourage the unmotivated to get off their asses and earn their keep.

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