Gbaji, decide if you want your words to be taken literal or figuratively when you make your claims(point). I quoted what you said that food stamps aren't effective. You mean that, in your experience, people are not wise about it.
Yes. Which is part of the reason why they aren't effective.
More of the story, omitting other details of course, was I moved from FL earning roughly 2 grand a month. I had a car payment and insurance that followed me totaling about 800 a month. The food stamps made it so I did not die cause of lack of food.
No. The food stamps allowed you to not have to choose between food and a car. The food stamps paid for part of your car and insurance, not the food. If you had not had food stamps, which would you have done: Starved to death? Or sold the car? Assuming you would not have actually starved to death, then the food stamps helped you keep your car.
Which is the point I was making.
I am a diabetic of 27 yrs. When I got on my feet a month before I had to renew my food stamps assistance I did not bother. It achieved its purpose. How big or small of a percentage my attitude falls into is not something you can just pull out of your ass. When you make those claims, you are expected to pull up varifiable sources. That is just decency.
You just provided the best source I could use to convince *you* of what I'm talking about. I'll ask again: Imagine there was no food stamps. What would you have done? Food is an incredibly inelastic product. People will buy enough so that they don't actually starve. This is why we use terms like "food insecurity" btw. Almost no one starves in the US because of poverty, so we focus on whether people have what we've determined to be a sufficient amount of food instead. You *would* have survived without food stamps. You'd just have had to focus more of your own efforts on food instead of other things. This is why I made the claim that food stamps mostly end out paying for things other than food.
In your case, the food stamps helped make your car payments.
Unless you would have chosen to make a car payment and consigned yourself to starvation? That seems incredibly unlikely.
Edited, Jan 9th 2013 5:17pm by gbaji