having to do community service for food stamps sounds totally common sense to me. Far too often you have a food stamp / welfare receipient living a great life off someone else while claiming to be poor just to steal from the system.
Force them to work for the food stamp and they’ll drop off asap.
I’d say about 90% of able bodied people without children who collect food stamps or public assistance have mental issues which basically prohibits them from working.
^ They are defined in the article as being “work-capable”. Even if they are not able to maintain employment, 6 hours of community service per week is an option. If someone’s mental issues are so severe that they can’t laddle out soup at a shelter or do something at the local library for 6 hours per week, they should be receiving care, not just collecting food stamps.
I don’t think you’ve met many people on food stamps. Most are just poor but perfectly “fine” mentally.
That 90% figure is seemingly based on… opinion?
My experience could be biased, but having grown up in the country and seen it, it’s not the way you’re picturing. These people are simply fat sleezly slobs that grew up watchinig their parents game the system and just continue the craft. When they have kids, they teach them early on to lie about their age everywhere they go to get the childrens discounts, they scam every chance they can get, drink at really odd times, step outside parent teachers meetings to smoke in front of the building, etc. When we grabbed a candy bar we didn’t pay for as a kid, they our parents made us take it back. Their parents sent them in to buy their beer with a note while they waited in the car and smoked and didn’t say a word to them when they grabbed some candy on the way out. That’s an actual story one of my friends recounted to me later (she made it alright). They’re only mentally ill in the way that living a lifetime of dullness rotting in front of a television with the blinds closed and drinking PBRs while smoking a pack a day will make you mentally ill. Yes, some legitimately need the assistance, but there’s a lot of naivity here.
I dated a nurse anesthetist, a nurse practictioner, and two other RN’s and each of them complained constantly about overweight people constantly coming into the office dragging three kids asking to be on disability. The doctor would say no, they’d complain that their friend’s doctor did it, then cuss out the doctor and go to another doctor until they got their disability claim.
This is where the well educated socially conscious liberal mentality I encounter in Manhattan always smacks up against my personal experience growing up in a rural area. It just doesn’t reflect the reality. I appreciate the open minded benefit of the doubt, but it’s just not real life. Not everyone is the same, not everyone is driven to suceed. As hard as it is for you and me to wrap our heads around, some people simply just do not give a flying fck.
I should clarify, I’m talking about people who have the following charecteristics (1) no children/dependents or are not a dependent i.e. living in a parents basement (2) not additicted to drugs and (3) no physical disabilities.
If you eat a lot and reach say 400 lbs, I think you can claim disability, since obesity hampers your movement. Not kidding.
Apparently, some people would shoot off their toe during the Vietnam war to avoid the draft. I am considering the payout of losing one toe in return for free food for life. Tough decision.
Many of the people I was refering to fit this bill as well. They were on this path before they had kids. Also, a large subset of them used drugs so we’re really narrowing it down to a miniscule portion of the population at this point with your list.
Disability compendium puts the rate of “cognitive disability” at 4.4% of the population or roughly 20% of disability claims before getting into the issues of substance abuse and dependents which I was looking for but just didn’t have the time to look for today.
I see your point, in that it was a self inflicted disability. Although it’s still super messed up. A lot of these people were probably in the 200-300 lb range from what I understood.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=490 Starts slow, but worth listening to the whole thing for sure.
What’s it about?
The disability scam. Here’s the prologue… PROLOGUE Ira Glass talks with Planet Money reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, about Hale County, Alabama — a place where one fourth of working age adults are on disability. That means the government has determined that due to a health issue, 25 percent of the adults in Hale County are unable to work, qualifying them for monthly payments and health care coverage. Chana explains that people in Hale County have a lot of theories as to why their disability numbers are so high: freeloaders, cheaters, hard partiers, obesity. But none of those seem quite right. The rise in disability isn’t just happening in Hale County but in pockets all over the country. 14 million people are now receiving disability payments. And it’s a number that is growing. We devote the whole show today to figuring out why these numbers are ballooning and what it says about our economy. (7 minutes)
+1. I find this to be very true. As long as they have TV, food, and alcohol/cigarettes, they truly don’t care what else goes on around them. And they have found a way to continue to have these things with zero work.
When I worked at a grocery store, I couldn’t count the number of times I would see somebody come in and buy a hundred dollars worth of groceries, pay for it with food stamps, then ask me to help them carry it to a Cadillac Escalade. And what’s worse, (being a small town) I knew that these people lived in a government-subsidized housing project.
Or you could be Ted Nugent and just act crazy and crap your pants for a week to get out of the draft and keep your toe
Wow! Had not listened to this in a couple years. Can any of you wannabe socialists claim the disability program should continue in the current form? Consider what you hear when you vote please. Thank you. http://m.thisamericanlife.org/play_full.php?play=490
I would be for a disability reform, we can reform tons of programs in this country. I am all for a 10% cut of the federal budget across the board.
Give me a legit candidate who will look at programs in a responsible way (which is the hard part, most of the ones who want reform really just want to gut them) and that doesnt talk up all the social conservative BS and I think you would have a lot of people in the center & center left interested in voting for the republican party (myself included). Unfortunately the right bends over and does whatever the religious nut jobs want just like the left bends over for whatever social cause is flavor of the month. We need an electoral system with more than 2 legit parties.
Listen to the program. You might overlook the religious zealotry when you’re done. It’s an npr production I believe. But I found it fairly objective.
Interesting listen, I agree there should be reform to the program. The portion of with the children was incredibly sad, the kids never stand a chance.
Agreed. Thanks for taking a listen. I think the narrator does a good job of not politicizing the issue. And the doctor’s rationalization I find amazing, from a psychological perspective. Helps me understand some supreme court justices. The mind is a powerful thing.