Wednesday, June 08, 2016

EBT Failure Creates Havoc

By Douglas V. Gibbs,
AuthorSpeakerInstructorRadio Host

The following story shows us how badly the liberal left disease of dependency upon the government has gotten.  People can't imagine living without their freebies from the government, and are willing to lash-out violently if their flow of goodies is interrupted.

Obese Woman Starts Trashing Store After EBT Card Gets Refused

Only in America do we experience the interesting phenomenon of the poverty-stricken suffering from obesity.  In the case of a video that has gone viral, an obese woman can be seen trashing a store because her food stamps benefit card was declined.

In the clip the large woman moves through a convenience store sweeping items off the shelves as she repeatedly mumbles, “Call the police, call the police!” among other things.  A shopper asks her what she is doing, and afterward workers eventually manage to haul the woman out of the store.

Imagine what would happen nationwide with all of the people dependent upon the government if for a moment their access to their gifts from the treasury was interrupted.  Remember, back in 2013, several Walmart stores had a system failure that resulted in an EBT card shutoff, and the result in a number of stores was looting and “mini-riots.”  Managers were forced to close a Walmart in Philadelphia, Mississippi because of the resulting violence.  In Springhill and Mansfield, Louisiana Walmart stores shoppers attempted to loot hundreds of dollars worth of groceries after the glitch temporarily allowed them to make unlimited purchases on their EBT cards.

Overall, welfare benefits and/or no taxation for being below a certain income level are provided for nearly half of the population of the United States.  Over the last decade and a half, food stamp participation alone has increased from 17 million users in 2000 to nearly 47 million in 2014.  One small ray of sunshine, however, is revealed when we notice that the complete number of Americans using EBT cards has actually declined by around 1.5 million since 2012 (a small consolation when one considers usage has increased by 30 million during the Bush and Obama years).

I am not arguing that there should be absolutely no safety-net.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt created much of the welfare system, but he even commented that welfare programs should not be a way of life.  From a constitutional point of view, the federal government has no authority to be sponsoring these programs.  If, at a State level, it is seen as necessary to have programs that enables folks to temporarily receive assistance until they can get their feet back on the ground, it is totally understood and legally allowable based on constitutional concepts.  The federal government, however, must have no hand in these programs.  Any federal participation in "entitlement" programs is strictly unconstitutional.  The communities of each State should be more involved in determining the parameters of such programs in their State without federal interference.  Politicians, unfortunately, use the promise of gifts from the treasury as election promises, enabling never-ending growth of the programs.

As Ronald Reagan said, "We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added."

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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