The Top 40

I'm mainly offended by the Mountain Dew. At than price, one could buy decent Cab. Then again, one would be required to use one's own funds.

Great news! We saved $8.00!

Freedom includes the right to make an ass of yourself. That right I shall support here. The purchaser is being an ass, and that is his right. Or would you rather we set a great nanny state bureaucracy in place to keep people from buying items they feel like buying.

Better people buy what they wish than we put another drug war into place.

Just did a bit of figuring and came up with the following figures; our subject spent about $1.44 per Mountain Dew. Which means he bought 2 liter bottles.

What clued me in was the $2.40 he paid in deposit for the MD, or about 10 cents each. CA charges 10 cents a two liter bottle, so I assume that MI does the same.

Now look at the list again, it looks to me like our wastrel is buying for a party. Doesn't change what I said in my earlier comment, but it does make the thoughtless waste even more apparent.

How about we stop letting people buy for a party with food stamps?

CBDenver at May 28, 2011 12:16pm: Or would you rather we set a great nanny state bureaucracy in place to keep people from buying items they feel like buying

No, I'd rather live in a world where the sort of person who would use food stamps to buy lobster was forced to STARVE IN A FUCKING DITCH.

B Lewis at 10:05pm -- actually, my comment was above the one by Allan Kellog at 6:23 that you critiqued. I get that buying luxury products with my money (aka food stamps paid for by my dollars) is not good. Have a nice day.

Yeah, really Allan, freedom ends when you sign up for government food assistance. You shouldn't eat surf and turf on somebody else's nickel.When you get your government debit card for the grocery store, you're sold out lock stock and barrel to the nanny state.
They gave the food stamp program the acronym SNAP for Supplementary Nutritional Assistance Program. Snaps in the hood are things like yo' mamma jokes. The next time some 300 lb baby mama shows up at the cashier with a cart full of ding dongs and 40's of malt liquor, the clerk should
say to her kids something like; "Yo mama's so fat she lives in two zip codes"

@CBDenver at May 28, 2011 10:18 PM: My sincere apologies for the mistake.

Alan Kellogg at May 28, 2011 6:23 PM, my post was meant for you.

Gents,

How a man spends his money, regardless of how he obtains it, is entirely up to him and is his responsibility. So long as it is used to purchase food items that need to be prepared at home—and that includes steak and lobster—then food stamps are legal tender for those items.

We can't make food stamp recipients do the right thing. For one thing it's the right of every adult American to make dumb decisions. For another, we don't have the resources we'd need for policing the food stamp receiving population. We've always had the wasteful, and we always will.

I say let every adult order his own affairs, for to do anything else is nanny statism.

Alan, a little cognitive dissonance there pal. Someone collecting food stamps is not "ordering his own affairs" He is a ward of the state to one degree or another.

There should be two thing one can purchase with a Food [stamp] card...Gruel and diet gruel.

Re the Mountain Dew comment above -- at least when I was working as a cashier (during the Reagan administration) you couldn't by booze with food stamps. What people usually would do is buy all their food with food stamps, and then they'd use cash to pay for their beer. (When I was a cashier the sort of people who were on food stamps in my town weren't wine drinkers.)

I'm thinking that the person who made the above purchases was a college student or at least someone young. This might have been his first ever food stamp issue -- he might have looked at the book of stamps -- or no, they issue a card now, don't they? Anyway, he might have looked at the amount, and seen more money than he was used to having to spend on food, decided instead of buying ramen and hot dogs, to spend this "free money" on stuff he usually couldn't afford. He's going to get really sick of lobster.

Actually, with computerized food checkout it is very easy to designate which foods are eligible for payment via food stamps and which are not.