Food Stamps and the $41 Cake

[saveliberty]

Wall Street Journal:

 

• Updated May 17, 2012, 7:29 p.m. ET
  

Food Stamps and the $41 Cake

 

How did this great nation travel from the common sense of our grandparents to where we are today?

 

By WARREN KOZAK

 

Beware of little expenses.

A small leak will sink a great ship.

 

—Benjamin Franklin

 

 

There is a large chain grocery store in my neighborhood that I rarely frequent because the prices are too high. Instead, I will travel an extra 30 blocks to another store where the costs per item are 20%-30% lower.

 

I arrange my travel around this activity. It takes a little extra effort, but within a year the savings are substantial. As it turns out, I am not alone. The average income of Costco discount shoppers, it was reported recently, is $96,000—so perhaps they're not the millionaires and billionaires the president talks about, yet not the folks one might immediately expect to be watching their pennies either.

 

But every so often I will need one item late at night—a quart of milk, a missing part of a school lunch—and I run over to the high-price store nearby. There, I've noticed something happening with increased regularity: The person ahead of me in line or at the next checkout counter is using a benefits card. Since we are now in the third year of our national recession and unemployment remains depressingly high, I understand this.

 

Recently I had to run into that store and, sizing up the three lines, chose to stand behind a woman with one item in her cart. It was one of those large ice-cream cakes. When the checkout person said "Forty-one dollars," I wasn't the only one who blanched. The shopper's son, around 12, repeated it as a question: "Forty-one dollars?"

 

I quickly calculated that the woman's cake was eight times more expensive than the kind I make at home to celebrate birthdays. The mother ignored her son's question.

[saveliberty]

Howie Carr was talking about this article in his afternoon show yesterday.

 

This morning, we realized that the last of the milk had gone sour. I cooked it and was ready to make cream of wheat, but there wasn't enough, so I mixed the wheat and rice together. It wasn't what I'd order, but it's also not wasting food. Or money.

 

A $41 ice cream cake!

 

I guess she felt the need to show that she had money, rather than to have a nice party with a cake baked at home.

[nickydog]

I just read this article this morning. (I am always behind.) OR, to be less charitable than you, @savelilberty, maybe she didn't want to bother making a cake at home.

 

I am still trying to process something I read on Yahoo! news online yesterday about a guy who has fathered 30 (THIRTY!) children with 11 women. He wants the court to cut him some slack because his minimum wage job doesn't leave anything over after he has paid child support, which his job doesn't begin to cover anyway. At least he has a job..... The court can't order him to stop making babies because he isn't breaking the law. And the $41 dollar cake lady and this guy are the ones Obama wants to spread the wealth around to, I suppose.

[cudjo]

from what I read the guy that fathered the 30 children is only 33 himself, no telling how many more he'll father.

 

 

I really don't care if someone wants to spend $41 for a cake as long as they earn their own money and not living off taxpayers

[RandyM]

If you're looking for a silver lining to this story....... at least the cake is edible.

 

An Atlanta TV station is currently airing investigative reports about EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card abuse in Georgia. They are debit cards issued to "poor" people and are supposed to be used to buy food. However, they're often being used at ATM machines in all sorts of places, including liquor stores and strip clubs, to get cash. Also other instances of direct payment of improper items and improper places. The card recipients, when the cards are issued, are only "cautioned" that they should use them to buy food. No accounting, no policing, no follow-up.

[nickydog]

If you're looking for a silver lining to this story....... at least the cake is edible.

 

An Atlanta TV station is currently airing investigative reports about EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card abuse in Georgia. They are debit cards issued to "poor" people and are supposed to be used to buy food. However, they're often being used at ATM machines in all sorts of places, including liquor stores and strip clubs, to get cash. Also other instances of direct payment of improper items and improper places. The card recipients, when the cards are issued, are only "cautioned" that they should use them to buy food. No accounting, no policing, no follow-up.

 

Our tax dollars at work, spreading the wealth around.