If there is one thing that you can count on when it comes to a government-funded program, it is the idea that at some point money will be handed out to someone who does not deserve it.
If that isn’t the case, then you will find money being handed out to someone who will waste it. It’s the problem that I have had with food stamp programs all over the United States for years.
You will get someone who gets X amount of taxpayer money to buy food when it is deemed essential that they get assistance. Then you see that person buying some platter of seafood that is fifteen bucks a pound.
My mom knew a lady like that when I was younger. She kept having kids and never marrying the father, so she would get more and more money in food stamps as the years went by.
Her kids would eat the stuff at the grocery store that you would debate feeding a squirrel, yet she would buy all sorts of expensive stuff.
Another issue I have with programs like that is that often times when the government gives somebody money, it’s rarely tracked what the person being given the money is being used on.
It’s kind of like this. A family member asks you for money to pay their electric bill or it is going to be shut off.
Being nice, you give them the money. The next day, you see them buying a fifty-dollar steak at Outback. Think it doesn’t happen when it comes to the government giving folks money?
Well, let me tell you about Canethia Miller.
She’s a mother of three in her late twenties living in government-funded housing in Washington, D.C. She was picked to be one of a hundred or so women in a pilot program that were then given approximately eleven thousand dollars with no strings attached to figure out how extra cash would impact someone’s life.
I can tell you this, when I was in my twenties if someone handed me an extra eleven thousand dollars it would have been a life-changing amount of money.
I would have held onto it as long as I could. Maybe get my car fixed so I didn’t have to keep putting oil in it or something.
Mrs. Miller, on the other hand, immediately got the money and spent six thousand dollars on a vacation to Miami for her and the rest of her family.
I mean, I can understand being given that money and buying a new television or a slightly nicer Blu-Ray player than the one you had; but being given such a windfall free of charge with no strings attached is just an insult to the American taxpayer who were the ones that gave her this money.
I hope that the other women who were involved in this program made more intelligent decisions with the cash they got.
