Food Stamps, Guns, Illegal Downloads, and the TSA

[seawasp]

filkerdave posted a link to a story of someone whose life was saved by food stamps.

This led me to repost the link on Facebook, with a sort of stream-of-consciousness/flow of ideas preamble that became a discussion linking together all of the concepts above and more. I'm reposting it in its entirety here, but the TL;DR summary is: all of them are the focus of actions that punish the majority for the damage done by a very small number, and result in a large number of people viewing that majority as criminals/lesser citizens... with security and law enforcement being one of the primary professions infected with this view, since all the new laws get dumped on them to enforce.

This is the story of someone who ended up on food stamps, and is alive because of it.

This is the face, or one of the faces, of most people on food stamps. Most of them are people trying to get by, who don't need to be looked down on by someone because, horrors, they decided to use some of that to get some fun food rather than another box of rice and beans.

I know a lot of people who are, or have been, on food stamps.

Sure. There's some people out there who game the system and get stuff they don't deserve. It's a very small fraction, probably no more than 1-2%. And you know what? I don't care, any more than I care about the fact that a small percentage of my readers only get pirate copies.

There are *ALWAYS* free riders. There are *ALWAYS* people who will find a way to get stuff out of your system that they don't deserve.

That's *real life*.

We shouldn't punish those who AREN'T gaming the system because some small number DO.

Instead, we should accept that part of the price of being civilized is that (A) we do have some responsibility for each other, that costs all of us a little bit, and (B) that there will always be a few parasites that will get carried, and that those who AREN'T parasites shouldn't be treated as if they are.

The arguments about all the activities that will stop welfare abuse, food stamp abuse, etc., ? They're *exactly the same arguments* that justify the additional NSA scrutiny, those intrusive searches at the airport, and so on.

They are designed on the principle that preventing a small number of assholes from doing something is worth abusing, marginalizing, and reducing to a group of suspects a much larger group of people. The current TSA security behavior ASSUMES all of us are potential terrorists, and treats us that way. The NSA justifies any intrusion on the small chance that any random call MIGHT tip them off to some terrible plot. Drug testing (BOTH for corporations and for welfare, etc.) assumes that anyone coming for a job or assistance might be a druggie, and thus justifies testing everyone (despite the fact that the cost of the TESTING is vastly higher than the cost of just letting the occasional druggie through).

It's basically the same logic that the MPAA/RIAA use for their increasingly draconic DRM and download prosecution schemes; ALL their potential customers are also, probably, criminals, and can't be trusted.

You know what? I don't like being treated as a criminal, as a liar, and a potential fraud at **ANY** level. And ALL of these programs -- ones liked by one side or another -- are actually doing the exact same thing.

It's a determination to try to do away with some perceived problem that allows itself to justify ANY action -- even the oppression, demonization, or outright criminalization of the vast majority -- if it can, possibly, achieve the goal.

It's all really the same thing, and it's as repulsive in the form of "freeloaders taking our hard earned dollars" as it is in the form of "We can't trust you with your music so we encrypt it", "we can't trust you with guns so we'll restrict them or outlaw them", or "we can't trust you not to hurt people on the plane, so you can't carry anything that we don't like".

In the end, it means the lawmakers -- and their enforcers -- see ALL OF US as the dangerous lower class, because the very laws and customs encourage them to see us that way.

And worst of all? They encourage *US* to see *EACH OTHER* that way.

Comments

[mariness.livejournal.com]

It's particularly bad with food stamps because so many people who receive food stamps are working, and calling them moochers is a bit much.

Your bit about security reminded me about some Delta person or other who assured the New York Times that people were "faking" being disabled so they could use the courtesy wheelchairs and cut through lines. Ignoring the fact that this doesn't happen -- wheelchair users still have to go through security and in most airports they use the same line as everyone else (Orlando is an exception, but Orlando handles a LOT of disabled/elderly passengers so moves them over to another line so that OTHER passengers aren't held up), if you use a courtesy chair and/or you are in a wheelchair without a companion, you have to go with an airport attendant, which means waiting for the attendant. And why do you have to go with an attendant? It's actually not for your comfort and ease. It's because otherwise your stuff might end up waiting on the damn belt for several minutes while they check your wheelchair for bomb residue....I got off track. My point is, the Delta person was squawking about fake disabilities, when the actual issue is not whether or not people are faking disabilities for the dubious pleasure of using a courtesy wheelchair, but that airports are forcing everyone to go through a lengthy security procedure whose value has been questioned by many security experts.

I can say that El Al's security was pretty safe back in the 90s -- at least back then, El Al switched terminals all the time and ran passengers, including those flying on courtesy El Al tickets, through an interview process designed to trip up terrorists, but that was the only time I felt any confidence in airline security.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I was on food stamps for a couple of years before I left my husband. One of the happiest days in my life was when I didn't need them any more.

But, there are a lot of people who wouldn't eat without them. And, what people don't realize is that most people who have food stamps still have to eat all the shitty stuff other people don't want because food stamps aren't enough to buy the wholesome, healthy food. Only enough to keep from starving.

[dewline.livejournal.com]

The person who made these points will find themselves declared Unforgivable for making them. They constitute yet another Inconvenient Truth, you see.

[kengr]

Food stamps is pretty insane. I remember back when they gave you a fixed amount of the scrip each month depending on household size and you had to come up with cash to pay them the difference between that and your actual benefit amount. No, really.

If your benefit was $60, and the then standard amount for your family size was $100, you had to come up with $40 cash to get your $100 worth of food stamps.

That was around 1975. A few years later they removed *that* bit of insanity.

Oh yeah, something that as far as I know is *still* part of the regulation is something I saw when looking thru the old booklet on how your benefits were calculated. The wording was pretty convoluted, but what it amounted to was that your food stamp income was calculated by taking your actual income, subtracting a few "special" items like medical expenses.

Then they multiplied that by some figure (I think it was 30%) to get your "adjusted" food stamp income. Then they subtracted rent and allowed utilities (there were maximums on things like phone bill, so if your bill was bigger, they'd only credit you with the allowed amount). That gave the income your benefits were calculated on.

And if you work that thru, you discover that the only way to get the *full* benefit amount was to be *losing* money. Apparently there *was* an out of some sort for zero income or the like, but still. That is a seriously *broken* set of calculations.

Welfare (which I became all too familiar with while waiting for my disability claim to get processed) has even more broken aspects. Things like not being allowed to have more than $50 above your rent & utilities (and medical?). Yes, you were technically in violation between the time you got your check and when you paid the rent and utilities.

And if you had an income, the rules really punished you. They deducted the gross pay, not the "after taxes". And if your pay varied from pay period to pay period (as it almost always does with the sort of part time work anybody qualifying for welfare is apt to get) then you had to supply them with your pay stubs for April before they'd issue the May check. Since weekly or worse bi-weekly pay periods don't line up with the months very well, it'd be a week or two into May before you could get the pay stub that covered the last days of April. So your May check would be weeks after the first. Which means late charges for stuff like rent.

All because we can't have people "cheating".

So in reality your are *punished* for working.

And lets mot go into the attitudes of far too many caseworkers. Some care. Most are just going thru the motions. And others *like* being able to make you jump thru hoops.

There have been a number of studies that came to the conclusion that it'd actually be *cheaper* to drop almost all the measures intended to "catch cheats" and just live with the cheats. Yeah, it costs more to jump thru the hoops and do all the extra paperwork.

Most of the folks worried about cheats haven't a clue how the system *actually* works. Worse, most of them also don't understand how the job market works. They actually *believe* that being unemployed means you are lazy, that you "aren't trying" to find work.

Gee, the fact that there are fewer jobs than people to work them, and most of the job opening either require skills most unemployed don't have or don't pay a living wage just doesn't exist in their world.

Back in the 80s, the CETA program *worked* it took long term unemployed folks and got them training. And jobs. I got a job that way. And worked at that company for 14 years. But it was scrapped as a waste of taxpayer money.

As I said, it's *all* based beliefs of people who've never been there that people are lazy and cheating.

[kengr]

Oh yeah, I'd *dearly* love to see it required that all Senators and Congressmen spend a few months having to live on foodstamps or welfare. Escrow their pay, give them an apartment within bus range of the Capitol, and let them deal.

You'd see some major attitude changes.

I'd also like to see all those folks who think the unemployed are lazy trying to get a job *without* the help of the people they know or their degrees/money.

[kengr]

Yeah, another comment. This is after reading the story at the link.

I never got *that* bad. But There was a month where the food stamps got messed up somehow, so I didn't get any. I got thru that month by buying a bag of potatoes with the last of my money and eating those along with the plums growing on the tree outside my apartment window.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

After my cousin had his stroke, and his wife lost her job, the only thing that kept them going was that they got Food Stamps. Things were quite grim until he got his Social Security Disability, but that wasnt easy either.

[bunny-m.livejournal.com]

I thoroughly agree with all of these points*.

But then, I'm both an Australian, and more than a bit of a left-wing ratbag by Aussie standards.

Which, apparently, makes me somewhere around Trotsky by US standards.

As for the MPAA/RIAA/international versions of, for the most part, they have managed to kill themselves off with this DRM/"Everyone Is A Pirate!!!!1!" crap, they just haven't quite realised it yet.

As for the sort of folks that seem to be fond of such 'treat everyone as a criminal to limit the actions of a minuscule minority' tactics, they all seem to hold to the "I'm all right Jack, to Hell with you!" mentality as well, so I shall continue to thinking of the lot of them as Jack Bastards**.


(*) Except the part about firearms. I have radically different opinions there, but I'm not going to derail the post with my own opinion of the US and firearms.

(**) A meme I was quite thoroughly infected with during my Army Reserve days. "Jack Bastard" is quite literally a deadly insult. It can get you killed in wartime to have earned such a reputation.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

I got a better one: stop paying them salaries. Period. Go back to the way things used to be, where being an elected official was a part-time, volunteer effort, not a full-time career with salary and benefits and pension.

[kengr]

alas, it's just plain not *possible* to do it that way at even the state level. There's too much to do, including a lot of travel and other stuff. And it'd just make them pay even *more* attention to lobbyists.

The pay they get is pretty much a minor consideration even in "local" politics in larger cities. The attraction is the contacts and deals.