I think you've got things a little bit wrong where foodstamps and other things are concerned. To apply for food stamps you have to show the last 2 years pay stubs. If you made too much money 18 months ago, they deny you. Government agencies don't care if you are broke now, they still expect you to have the paycheck you earned 24 months ago to feed you. I know people it's happened to.
The news lately is all about the food banks being hit hard while receiving decreased donations.
And I think you missed my point about poor hungry children. There is a laundry list of programs aimed specifically at children. 51% of food stamp recipients are under 18. We spent $28.6 billion for food stamps in FY 2005.
Furthermore, if what you say is true (and I have no reason to doubt you), then that simply proves my point that social welfare programs are not designed to be a hand up. They simply encourage people to stay poor. Poor people vote Democrat.
Not all rich people worked their asses off to get what they have either. Most of them have had their life handed to them by wealthy parents. If bet if you traced that wealth back through time you will find some lying and deception at the root of it.
You seem to be under the impression that the average successful person is Thurston Howell III. If there is a leisure class at the top end of the American economic spectrum (and I will concede that there is), then there is a
much larger leisure class at the other end as well.
Dismissing achievers as trust-fund babies is dishonest and plays into the class warfare strategy of the left. There are people who benefit from advantages provided by the hard work and sacrifice of their parents. I always thought this was a key component of the American dream. As an example I give you Michael Dell. He was a middle-class kid from Houston whose parents worked hard to ensure he had the tools to succeed. They wanted him to be a Doctor. They were mortified when he dropped out of college half-way through his freshman year to start a computer company in 1984. He worked his ass off to build Dell into the hugely successful business it is today. Now that he's a billionaire he still works his ass off.
There is much confusion regarding the definition of rich. Confusing the super-rich with the rich, confusing the rich with the affluent, and confusing the affluent with the middle class. Now that it appears BO has the election sewn up, he's systematically moving that dividing line down the salary scale to be more in keeping with his
Democratic primary definition of rich. In the last month, that definition has been deflated by $100,000. As I pointed out previously, BO will eventually settle on $75,000 as the dividing line between rich and the middle class.
