Woonsocket, RI: Welfare City

Washington Post journalist Elis Saslow wrote an impressive and yet very disturbing report on the influence of food stamps in local cities.

He focused on Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where one out of three people are living on food stamps.

Elis Saslow

Yikes!

Food stamps put Rhode Island town on monthly boom-and-bust cycle

 

One of the first pictures on the web page included a picture of a man and wife hugging each other:

 

  Jourie Ortiz gets a hug from his wife, Rebecka, after he was woozy and hardly able to stand after 48 hours with only about five hours of sleep. He works an overnight shift at a supermarket and then comes home to be with his family, getting less than three hours of sleep on many days. They have two children and a combined monthly income of $1,700. They also rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps.

Even on food stamps, they were still not getting by. They had a job, they worked, they were not welfare queens in the frequently referred sense at all.

And they still can't make it. Let's discuss the fact that government assistance is not.

Some questions worth asking: why does this couple have two kids, if they cannot afford to raise them? Were they making ends meet before the Great Recession? What economic factors in the Ocean State are affecting their ability to make it from month to month?

So many questions emerge in these reports on food stamp use (and abuse?).

WOONSOCKET, R.I. – The economy of Woonsocket was about to stir to life. Delivery trucks were moving down river roads, and stores were extending their hours. The bus company was warning riders to anticipate “heavy traffic.” A community bank, soon to experience a surge in deposits, was rolling a message across its electronic marquee on the night of Feb. 28: “Happy shopping! Enjoy the 1st.”

 

Woonsocket, RI, Historical Downtown District

The whole city swings and cycles based on the government subsidies through SNAP. Oh snap!

In the heart of downtown, Miguel Pichardo, 53, watched three trucks jockey for position at the loading dock of his family-run International Meat Market. For most of the month, his business operated as a humble milk-and-eggs corner store, but now 3,000 pounds of product were scheduled for delivery in the next few hours. He wiped the front counter and smoothed the edges of a sign posted near his register. “Yes! We take Food Stamps, SNAP, EBT!”

 

This brazen advertising of food stamps is criminal. Enabling dependence and redistribution of wealth is just unconscionable. Now fast food restaurants are accepting government subsidies. What was the point of food stamps disbursements? To help people in need so that they could get back on their feet.

 

How is anyone going to get from poor to prosperity spending their money irresponsibly?

This passage in Saslow's report was the most revealing:

At precisely one second after midnight, on March 1, Woonsocket would experience its monthly financial windfall — nearly $2 million from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps. Federal money would be electronically transferred to the broke residents of a nearly bankrupt town, where it would flow first into grocery stores and then on to food companies, employees and banks. . .

SNAP enrollment in Rhode Island had been rising for six years, up from 73,000 people to nearly 180,000, and now three-quarters of purchases at International Meat Market are paid for with Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards.

Even as the economy has improved (however slightly) more people are enrolling into the food stamps program. Since when did individual consumers gather the idea that living off of someone else was acceptable?

An entire city in Rhode Island is turning into a welfare city?

Pichardo catered his store to the unique shopping rhythms of Rhode Island, where so much about the food industry revolved around the 1st. Other states had passed legislation to distribute SNAP benefits more gradually across the month, believing a one-day blitz was taxing for both retailers and customers. Maryland and Washington, D.C., had begun depositing benefits evenly across the first 10 days; Virginia had started doing it over four. But Rhode Island and seven other states had stuck to the old method — a retail flashpoint that sent shoppers scrambling to stores en masse.

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In this part of his report, Saslow focuses on one family. The choices they made, and the consequences, highlight the sources of their poverty.

For the past three years, the Ortizes’ lives had unfolded in a series of exhausting, fractional decisions. Was it better to eat the string cheese now or to save it? To buy milk for $3.80 nearby or for $3.10 across town? Was it better to pay down the $600 they owed the landlord, or the $110 they owed for their cellphones, or the $75 they owed the tattoo parlor, or the $840 they owed the electric company?

They had to start making harder decisions for themselves. How much would they spend, and what would they spend it on. Did their lives before economic tumult reflect this conscious decision-making?

 

They had been living together since Rebecka became pregnant during their senior year of high school, long enough to experience Woonsocket’s version of recession and recovery. Jourie had lost his job at a pharmacy late in 2010 because of downsizing, and Rebecka had lost hers in fast food for the same reason a few months later.

So, the coupled had children before they graduated high school, got married, and got a job. They put themselves onto a slippery slope toward deeper poverty by their choices. James Q. Wilson had analyzed these correlational factors when tracking poverty and its causes. Can they really blame the economic downturn for their moral then financial failings?

Rhode Island Food Stamp Card

She made $8 an hour, and he earned $9. She worked days in produce, and he worked nights as a stocker. Their combined monthly income of $1,700 was still near the poverty line, and they still qualified for SNAP.

They make money, yet they still can't make it. Something is wrong with this picture. Have they considered moving to a better state with stronger economic growth and better opportunities?

Rebecka had read once that nobody starved to death in America, and she believed that was true. But she had also read that the average monthly SNAP benefit lasted a family 17 days, and she knew from personal experience the anxiety headaches that came at the end of every month, when their SNAP money had run out, their bank account was empty and she was left to ply Woonsocket’s circuit of emergency church food pantries.

Even private charities are struggling. Where is the growing outreach to help private and voluntary charity?

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Grocery store chains had started discount spinoffs. Farmers markets had incentivized SNAP shopping by rewarding customers with $2 extra for every $5 of government money spent. Restaurants, long forbidden from accepting SNAP, had begun a major lobbying campaign in Washington, and now a handful of Subways in Rhode Island were accepting the benefit as part of a pilot program.

For the record, relatively wealthy Torrance, CA has just implemented food stamp usage at its farmer's market. When I read about this item in last month's city council agenda, I did not know how to react. Did the city have to include this payment option in order to comply with state/federal law?

But SNAP recipients at International Meat Market were allowed to spend their money only on uncooked foods — nothing hot or pre-prepared, no paper products, pet food, alcohol or cigarettes. A line formed at Pichardo’s register, and he lifted one heavy cardboard box of meat after the next.
A part-time janitor came through with a meat pack, vegetable oil and canned tomatoes. “That’s $132.20,” Pichardo said.

California Food Stamp Card

Those limits also exist in California. I was serving a customer, who arrogantly complained that it was "stupid" she could not use her EBT card to pay for hot soup. This entitlement mentality is sickening. There should be no discussion about government assistance usage for anything but bare essentials.

California EBT cards have a SNAP Food and SNAP Cash option, so that food stamp uses can spend the cash portions on anything, including alcohol, cigarettes, and other non-food items like paper.

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Nearly 150 cars filled the lot, and stray shopping carts edged into the adjacent road. The sign in front of the store advertised “Impossibly, Incredibly, Inconceivably Low Prices.” A city bus had stopped at the entrance a few minutes earlier to drop off 30 shoppers before turning back to pick up 30 more. The residents of Woonsocket had petitioned for the route in 2011, but now buses suffered from overcrowding on the 1st and drivers enforced a limit of seven grocery bags per person on the way home. A line of opportunistic cab drivers had begun waiting outside Price Rite on the 1st, ready for customers with more than seven bags and with $4.75 for the fare.

The public transportation has fallen into the welfare web as well. Wow!

Final Thoughts

Welfarism has become a way of life for millions of Americans. This is not the American Dream;  these life-style choices are not a living example of the Preamble of the Constitution. No one can secure the blessings of  liberty while depending on bare-necessity government handouts.

Now, entire cities are getting warped into this cycle of government subsidy and servility. Woonsocket is an easy target, as is the entire state of Rhode Island because of its size and reputation for government expansion and corruption. One in three residents of Woonsocket depend on the government to get through the month, and the new normal has turned the first day of the month into "Check Day", with slow decline to follow. Young families should look forward to something better in their lives.

Yet no one should contend that welfarism is only a Woonsocket, or a Rhode Island problem. How bad has this EBT Mentality infected communities in other states?

In California?