Originally Posted by MsTkEyes

You can buy energy drinks if they claim to have vitamins. It is stupid. I try to be mindful and get generic brands to make it stretch.

I have Connor on SNAP (food benefits) and prefer the card over literal food stamps. It's faster and less discriminatory and WIC was the same way. I don't know how people abuse it or get items that aren't food. When I use my card I have to specify "food" vs. "cash" because I only have food benefits. I'm wonderin if you (rvid/mike) are seeing people use it when they have "cash" benefits? I can only get food or items to grow food. No household items, diapers, alcohol, medicine, etc. I think you can do whatever with cash benefits though. :/

i didn't mean to seem like i'm not sympathetic towards people on stampz

i'm glad you agree that it is silly that people can buy basically junk food with it, maybe more so in my state, my older sister works at a liquor store and she says people try to buy liquor with wic all the time

Originally Posted by MsTkEyes

I don't know how you can be republican and be okay with what they're doing and what they focus on.

by being comfortably wrong in your beliefs and worldview, by believing in the televised or congregational narratives, and etc.; by not being able to distance yourself from your (parents') beliefs or an inversion of them, by not caring to seek out information that will really undermine your self-understanding-- same thing goes for most of the democrats

Bootstraps etc

Originally Posted by Nv1ncible

Doesn't seem like the first thing that should be on the list to cut. What's military spending at these days? And I'm really struck by the fact that as a country we've introduced federally mandated healthcare, yet food stamp funding is being cut. I mean, they have to see the relation between malnutrition and health conditions right?

Last I checked (End of 2012), military and defense spending is about 54% of discretionary spending. I was showing a coworker some stats online since he was in the navy for four years. He said there was no way the military spending was that large, but we looked up the actual budget from 2012 from the whitehouse and went through it. It's pretty remarkable.

IIRC it's pretty well demonstrated that straight up cash payments are pretty much the most cost effective form of social welfare.


+yeah, the defense budget is a morbidly obese sacred cow, and I have literally never seen anyone seriously consider trimming it down even insignificantly in any major media outlet, ever.