I do not get it, I do not get what we get out of it, I do not understand the impulse to be mean for the sake of being mean, and I will never ever comprehend how anybody else’s fucking purchases of cereal or whatever should bother me at all:
Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) on Wednesday introduced legislation to require food stamp recipients to produce a valid photo ID every time they purchase food with their Electronic Benefits Transfer card. Under the Food Stamp Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act, anyone caught using someone else’s EBT card illegally would be banned from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
“Using a photo ID is standard in many day-to-day transactions, and most of those are not exclusively paid for by the taxpayer dollars,” Vitter said in a press releaseWednesday. “Food stamps have more than doubled in cost since 2008 and continue to grow in an unsustainable way.”
Vitter’s bill comes after an October system glitch that temporarily disabled the spending limit on EBT debit cards, leading some recipients to take advantage by exceeding their normally allotted cap.
“A photo ID would not have stopped people from taking advantage of the system failure that day,”The Times-Picayune reported. “But Vitter said requiring photo IDs would make it harder for someone to use a stolen or fraudulently obtained [EBT card].”
So it won’t solve the problem, which appeared to be that POOR PEOPLE BOUGHT TOO MUCH FOOD. A catastrophe which must be addressed, via this solution which is utterly ineffective.
If we put the amount of time and money into actual productive effort that we put into worrying about what brand of soup some hypothetical welfare mom is choosing, we could cure famine, pestilence and death, and buy Kuwait just for kicks.
The grocery store near my house, which recently closed, catered to a number of poor neighborhoods. I can’t tell you the number of times I’d be in line behind somebody who was behind somebody using an Illinois food assistance card to pay, and the person in front of me would be huffing and rolling his or her eyes like how dare you … what, appear in public and purchase a chicken? To eat? With your human body?
What do we get out of being outraged by that? A miniscule sense of superiority? For ten seconds? Does the satisfaction even get you to your car before it fades?
I’d like to reserve my seething frustration with the human race for those sheltered souls who haven’t been out of their houses in 25 years and have JUST NO CLUE how the card reader thing works, thank you. Or those assholes who wait till they’re next in line and THEN send their kid/spouse/friend to the opposite end of the store for that one thing they forgot. If we’re making a list of bullshit grocery store behavior, buying something with food stamps isn’t at the top of it.
As to the huffing about taxpayer dollars, grow the fuck up. Taxpayer dollars pay for everything communal in this country including (in the case of subsidies to the grocery stores in which people may avail themselves of tomatoes, and payments to the farmers who grow the corn) the damn food itself. Taxpayer dollars also pay for many things I find objectionable personally, like David Vitter’s continued ability to be in Congress and open his cakehole about things like this.
A.