If you’re an Ocean State Job Lot shopper who donates to food banks at the checkout line, you are part of one for the record books. Today Connecticut Food Bank’s East Haven warehouse received 40,000 pounds of food from Ocean State Job Lot - the first of several full tractor trailer loads it will receive as part of the stores’ Three Square Meals program, which is the largest single food donation of its kind by a private company in New England.
How was this done? Job Lot customers are invited to donate $1 at the register through December 31, to help buy food for food banks to distribute in their local community. Job Lot then matches the first $100,000 of shopper donations and purchases food from its manufacturers and other sources valued at up to three times Job Lot’s purchase price, and then donates the food to food banks. This year’s customer donations and matching amount totaled more than $1.2 million – the equivalent of 60 tractor trailer loads that will be delivered throughout 2013 to 10 food banks and pantries across six New England states and New York.
Thanks to all who donate at the checkout line. You are helping to feed your hungry neighbors who are struggling to put food on the table.
"We got a picture of a gorge, with farm surpluses on one cliff and under-nourished city folks with outstretched hands on the other. We set out to find a practical way to build a bridge across that chasm." In other words, the farms had more food than they could sell and the food stamps all went to the cities. Maria, you make even the goofiest peddlers of revisionist feminist history seem credible.
So go hungry for a few days. Educate your imagination.
Collective punishment is cruel and unjust. And that is exactly what publishing the names of welfare recipients is--collective punishment.
Let me guess, you were "educated" in the public schools.
It would cost billions to audit every welfare recipient. But read the Pepperdine Law Review article, about the extreme cases of people who were almost wealthy who collected welfare. I'd wager most of them would have been quickly ratted out had their names been published.
I find that many of the claims made by those with poverty-stricken imaginations are simply hot air and that researching their claims often turns up nothing. Most of the time it is a complete waste of my time, but I did do a little research this afternoon. Please see the comments below.
government-supported welfare system. The poor and infirm survived on the generosity of relatives and local charities. The lack of government support for welfare systems can be attributed to Puritan mores of the 18th and 19th centuries (Katz 1989). Contemporary welfare reformers are inspired by this model of social welfare. Therefore, it is worth examining the philosophical underpinnings of a welfare system devoid of government involvement. In 1859, Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of the Species that postulated a theory of evolution based on competition between species for scarce resources. Herbert Spencer, a 19th century British sociologist, borrowed the idea of natural selection and applied it to human society. Known as Social Darwinism, this view held that competition between humans resulted in a natural allocation of resources within capitalist society. Spencer popularized the term “survival of the fittest” to imply that it was natural for some people to become destitute (Merrett 1997). It would, therefore, be against the laws of nature to provide government assistance to the poor. This view dominated social welfare debates up to the 1930s. However, the intractable nature of poverty and economic stagnation during the Depression convinced some political leaders that change was necessary."
eliminated in the postwar era. Further growth of the social safety net was stymied by anti-Communists who warned that welfare programs would open the door to Communism. Resentment towards public assistance was so great that newspapers printed the names of welfare recipients in an attempt to “shame them off the [welfare] rolls” (Karger and Stoesz 1994, 65). Contempt for the poor worsened the chronic problem of poverty in the United States. By 1959, almost one-quarter of Americans still lived below the poverty line." [The postwar era the author is writing about is the era after World War II.]
"No one knows how much fraud there is in the welfare system. Those who say they know are not credible." Then Maria says: So what about the other 80 or 90 percent? Should we impose collective punishment? So Maria has no credibility, right? I referred to the few extreme cases mentioned in a law review article; there are far more. Semantic games won't work.
Every town, city and county in America used to have an almshouse or poor farm funded with taxpayer money. Relatively few people used them because of the stigma. Once we hid who was on the dole the number of people using it exploded. One of many things your unionized public school teachers didn't teach you, Maria, is that if you want more of something you subsidize it and if you want less of something you tax it. Subsidize poverty and unwillingness to work and guess what happens.