Real reporting at the Washington Post:
FORT PIERCE, Fla. — A good recruiter needs to be liked, so Dillie Nerios filled gift bags with dog toys for the dog people and cat food for the cat people. She packed crates of cookies, croissants, vegetables and fresh fruit. She curled her hair and painted her nails fluorescent pink. “A happy, it’s-all-good look,” she said, checking her reflection in the rearview mirror. Then she drove along the Florida coast to sign people up for food stamps.
Her destination on a recent morning was a 55-and-over community in central Florida, where single-wide trailers surround a parched golf course. On the drive, Nerios, 56, reviewed techniques she had learned for connecting with some of Florida’s most desperate senior citizens during two years on the job. Touch a shoulder. Hold eye contact. Listen for as long as it takes. “Some seniors haven’t had anyone to talk to in some time,” one of the state-issued training manuals reads. “Make each person feel like the only one who matters.”
In fact, it is Nerios’s job to enroll at least 150 seniors for food stamps each month, a quota she usually exceeds. Alleviate hunger, lessen poverty: These are the primary goals of her work. But the job also has a second and more controversial purpose for cash-strapped Florida, where increasing food-stamp enrollment has become a means of economic growth, bringing almost $6 billion each year into the state. The money helps to sustain communities, grocery stores and food producers. It also adds to rising federal entitlement spending and the U.S. debt.
Nerios prefers to think of her job in more simple terms: “Help is available,” she tells hundreds of seniors each week. “You deserve it. So, yes or no?”
In Florida and everywhere else, the answer in 2013 is almost always yes. A record 47 million Americans now rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, available for people with annual incomes below about $15,000. The program grew during the economic collapse because 10 million more Americans dropped into poverty. It has continued to expand four years into the recovery because state governments and their partner organizations have become active promoters, creating official “SNAP outreach plans” and hiring hundreds of recruiters like Nerios.
A decade ago, only about half of eligible Americans chose to sign up for food stamps. Now that number is 75 percent.
Rhode Island hosts SNAP-themed bingo games for the elderly. Alabama hands out fliers that read: “Be a patriot. Bring your food stamp money home.” Three states in the Midwest throw food-stamp parties where new recipients sign up en masse…
Did he deserve it, though? Lonnie Briglia, 60, drove back to his Spanish Lakes mobile home with the recruiter’s pamphlets and thought about that. He wasn’t so sure.
Wasn’t it his fault that he had flushed 40 years of savings into a bad investment, buying a fleet of delivery trucks just as the economy crashed? Wasn’t it his fault that he and his wife, Celeste, had missed mortgage payments on the house where they raised five kids, forcing the bank to foreclose in 2012? Wasn’t it his fault the only place they could afford was an abandoned mobile home in Spanish Lakes, bought for the entirety of their savings, $750 in cash?
“We made horrible mistakes,” he said. “We dug the hole. We should dig ourselves out.”…
max
You didn’t crash the economy. The people who crashed the economy got a bunch of government and continue to get paid oceans of money for doing things that crash the economy.
And you will. But there’s no need to be an idiot about it, particularly if being an idiot about it will prevent you from digging out of the hole.
max
[‘People really need to stop confusing a strong moral code with masochism.’]
c u n d gulag
@max:
AND, they got BONUSES!!!
‘Put my families little house on number 7!”
‘Sorry, you lost.’
“Ok, then give me a condo, so I can bet again.”
‘Coming right up, Sir!’
Misterpuff
Damn it, its your duty as an Alabaman (aMurikan)to be a taker, don’t let those urbans take yer money.
I actually believe you should use any assistance available, but obviously some can’t get their heads around the concept.
c u n d gulag
I’ve been unemployed for almost 4 years.
When my father died last year, my mother and I became eligible for SNAP.
Between the two of us, because she still owns the, now depreciated, home they bought 44 years ago, we get a whopping $16 a month for the two of us!
$16! A MONTH!!!!!
WOW! BRING ON THE HOOKERS AND BLOW!!!
I ain’t bitchin’, ’cause that’s milk and eggs for a month – almost.
But, in reality, sorry Conservatives, no Caddies, no T-bones, no Champagne or Malt Liquor, for us.
Hmm…
Maybe them “Blah” and Hispanic people get a better deal?
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
The question for me would be: is the rumbling in my stomach louder than the humiliation from the strangers who would inevitably stick their noses into my shopping cart and demand to know why I’m spending “their” money on food that isn’t sufficiently humble for my station?
Seriously, I once saw a letter to Dear Abby from some idiot complaining about seeing a mom on food stamps buy a birthday cake for her child. The child presumably only gets ONE birthday a year, perhaps they could limit the poverty-shaming to the other 364 days?
Linkmeister
Giving aid is good. States taking advantage of federal help is good unless they’re giving business and the upper class tax cuts at the same time, which I’d bet at least Florida has done. That’s abuse of the rest of us to the states’ benefit.
Tim in SF
Lonnie Briglia’s problems are all of his own making. He’s in the hole he dug for himself.
So fucking what? Yeah, shit happens to everybody, but for the most part, all of us are where we are because of choices we made in life.
Lonnie should get help while he needs it. When he needs it no longer, he’ll be paying for those who still do.
In the meantime, his food stamps will spur demand for more products and services the local economy.
Win-win.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
How much soul searching do you suppose Mitt Romney did about whether he “deserved” that $40,000 a year in tax cuts for his dancing horse?
Wait, did I just put “Mitt Romney” and “soul” in the same sentence?
Dee Loralei
I don’t get this, “In Alabama, they hand out fliers saying ‘Be a Patriot, bring your food stamp money home’.” I get that the Feds are the ones who pay for SNAP, and that Alabama and Florida gov’s think they should get as much money from the Feds to help grocery retailers, etc. (The fact that it also keeps their poorer citizens from starving to death enters very little into the equation, methinks.) What I don’t get is why they aren’t jumping all over “ObamaCare” . Wouldn’t it be patriotic to bring the money home for local Dr.s, hospitals and pharmacies? The Feds will pay 100% of that for a few years, but the states won’t ever have to pay more than 10%, right?
Hoodie
Stories like this make me want to take a swan dive into a bottle of Evan Williams. The servility that has been programmed into folks is sad and, if you wander through the comments, you get a fine display of the assholism that accompanies it. This guy has worked and paid taxes for 40 years, the “mistakes” he made are the result of the shitty choices created by an economy increasingly based on grifting and hustling, and pale in comparison to mistakes bankers made with other people’s money.
Patrick
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
The funny thing is that these tend to be the same people that had no problem spending our hard-earned money on their idiotic war in Iraq. I am so sick of their self-righteousness and hypocrisy.
Thor Heyerdahl
@Tara the Antisocial Social Worker:
The idiotic asshole probably also kicks his dog regularly.
Violet
@Dee Loralei: I don’t get how spending your Government Handout Money makes you a Patriot but taking the Government Handout Money makes you a moocher. These people are fucked up in the brain.
Kyle
This is a sad story.
What’s sadder is the number of these seniors who then go out and vote for Republicans who will economically screw them even worse.
PeakVT
The stock market is up, so the people in that article can’t possibly exist.
Ayn Randy
I remember back during my conservative days I used to listen to Air America Radio to hear what my enemies were saying. Thom Hartmann had a commercial where he talked about how conservatives wanted to take us back to the Dickensian days. This always made me roll my eyes, but stories like this only reinforce his point.
Less than one hundred years ago if you made bad decisions or had bad luck, it was game fucking over for you. There was no assistance to get you back on your feet. Lost your job? Fuck you. Got sick? Fuck you. Got swindled? Fuck you. Had a sick child? Fuck you.
The conservative response to anything unfortunate that happens to you is “fuck you.” They are incapable of thinking in anything but absolutes, so even if you’re a good person who made bad decisions or a good person who got run over by a car, you probably deserved it, so “fuck you.”
This is what makes their approval in Middle Eastern adventures so damn hilarious.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Thor Heyerdahl:
The Dear Abby letter got a response from the woman who’d bought the cake, saying that 8-year-old daughter had cancer, and this birthday was likely to be here last. Who knows, the second letter may have been a fake from somebody just trying to instill a sense of shame in the first guy, but I doubt it worked. He was probably the one yelling “let ’em die” during the debate over Obamacare.
Suzanne
@Misterpuff:
I have a pretty shit situation going on in my family that I can’t talk about, but let me just say that I agree with you…..oh, how I agree with you.
Davis X. Machina
It’s America.
It’s not enough that I win.
It’s not enough that I be seen to win.
I have to be seen to deserve to win.
But that’s not all…
No, you have to lose, too.
And be seen to lose.
And be seen to deserve to lose.
And believe you deserve to lose.
Because only then, finally, do I win.
These people will bitch because they don’t get taken out by their own, separate, slightly better meteor than the ordinary one that takes the rest of out.
Tara the Antisocial Social Worker
@Davis X. Machina:
That is awesome. I need to embroider it on a pillow or something.
Mr Stagger Lee
I remember reading, the difference in the attitudes about poverty between Europeans and Americans, the former believes that there are things that cause it is usually beyond the poor person’s control, while the latter(thanks to good old myth of the Puritan Work ethic) feel it is a character flaw of the poor person.
Mnemosyne
@Mr Stagger Lee:
That’s because the so-called “Puritan Work Ethic” idea is actually Calvinism in its purest form — poverty is proof that God hates you and you are going to Hell, while wealth is proof that you’re one of the elect and totally going to Heaven.
I don’t think there are any other major countries that bought into Calvinism as strongly as the US did. Maybe Switzerland.
Mnemosyne
Also, since some jackass (ahem) mentioned the fact that bicycles are never presented as a viable form of transportation for the poor when things like food stamps come up, I though this was an interesting story from San Diego:
Bicycles and recidivism reduction
Short version: a lot of parolees and people on probation can’t afford a car, but depending on public transportation or rides from friends can lead them back into the cycle of petty crime, so a parole officer in San Diego is organizing a program to supply bicycles to those who want them. It sounds like it will be a great program if they can get it off the ground.
Chris
@Linkmeister:
That’s how the entire South does it. Keep wages as low as possible, give tax breaks out the wazoo, and count on Washington’s generosity with Yankee money to make up for the lack of tax revenue and underfunded social programs that results.
The region’s been on the federal dole since the New Deal, and not by accident.
Patrick
@Mnemosyne:
I don’t think Switzerland is as extreme as the US. For example, Switzerland prohibited health insurance discrimination based on pre-existing conditions back in 1994. It will take us at least 20 years to get to that level.
Chris
@Davis X. Machina:
The fascinating thing is that they then project all that shit onto us. All that shit about “envy” and how “you want to lift up the poor by tearing down the rich.”
If they scream their heads off about how union workers have it too good and the unions should be broken, how minimum wage nonunionized workers have it too good and the minimum wage should be broken, how government workers have it too good because the government hasn’t spent the last ten years destroying benefits for its employees the private sector has… somehow, that’s not “envy.”
But if I suggest that in an era of record deficits and calls for “belt-tightening,” maybe the rich should have their taxes go up from their lowest rate in eighty years to their previous lowest rate in eighty years, that’s “envy” and I just want to watch them fail. Clearly.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
My mother grew up there and is living there now. According to her, if I understand it right, you can’t enter a hospital until you’ve shown proof that you can pay, and I believe that’s true even in emergency situations. I don’t know if that’s just for her because she’s not Swiss or if it’s a general thing, but it’s pretty sick either way.
gene108
@Mr Stagger Lee:
Heard a slightly different take on it, which I think makes more sense.
In Europe they look at a poor
personcountryman and think, “But there for the grace of God go I”.In the U.S. they look at a poor
personcountryman and think, “The nigger, spic, mic, etc. needs to get off their lazy ass and work hard like us”.Look at the backlash to the Great Society programs. Sticking to others worse than you get stuck seems to be a fabric of our society.
Yutsano
@Chris: Switzerland also has a health insurance mandate, but there are rather strict price controls and generous assistance if you can’t afford it. I think the assistance is only available for actual citizens however.
Mike in NC
@Chris: Not the New Deal, since Reconstruction.
gene108
@Chris:
I think the South’s been doing it longer than the New Deal. Pretty much from the inception of a slave-based economy the wealthy plantation owners used racial hatred to make the poor whites happy to be poor, because they were white and superior to the black slaves.
There’s a certain dynamic to Southern politics pre and post-Civil War that seems to rotate around keeping petty oligarchs in power.
The rest of the actions – anti-union, low wages, lack of investment in education, low taxes, etc. – just flow from a long tradition of ensuring the places are ruled by petty oligarchs.
Davis X. Machina
@Chris: With mandate-insure-subsidize, they’ve got 99.1% of the population covered, and an emergency-room law much like ours (Son lived for a year in Lausanne recently.) Most EU people just have to show up… there’s reciprocity with the NHS, for example.
Morzer
Incidentally, Anne Laurie deserves a tip of the hat for the felicitous Trollope reference in the title. I would warmly recommend the excellent four part British adaptation of the novel with David Suchet that appeared in 2001.
NotMax
When the boat you’re in is swamped, snubbing the offer of a bail bucket (even a small one) is a bad decision.
Also too, Mr. Briglia, some of your money in both good times and bad went to fund and keep available the program(s).
Chris
@Mike in NC:
@gene108:
Well, yes to the oligarchic thing for sure, but as far as being on the dole from the rest of the country? It’s my understanding that from the Civil War to the New Deal the relationship was pretty exploitative, with big trusts based in the North extracting the wealth and paying just enough that most people didn’t die of hunger… and that the New Deal was the first time that money started coming back to them. (Possible exception for the immediate postwar era, but I thought Reconstruction was pretty chaotic and, depending on time and place, exploitative too).
Not that local oligarchs weren’t happy to go along with the exploitation.
(Also, thanks to all for Switzerland clarification).
Dr. Mantis Toboggan
@Kyle: “What’s sadder is the number of these seniors who then go out and vote for Republicans who will economically screw them even worse. ”
Growth of Income Inequality Is Worse Under Obama than Bush
Mnemosyne
@Dr. Mantis Toboggan:
Why am I not surprised by this message when I click your link:
NotMax
@Chris
As awful as he may have been in some social areas, Henry Ford did insist on paying well above the prevailing wage well before the New Deal, his comments about that being along the line that he wanted to pay his employees enough that they could afford to buy the cars they produced.
Haydnseek
So you’re going to dig yourself out? That’s mighty hard work. I imagine that at some point you’re going to need something to eat.
Haydnseek
@Ayn Randy: Precisely. These catastrophies are always your fault, because you are of low moral character, and are insufficiently subservient to the idea that Jeebus will fill that grocery cart if only you BELIEVE!
Haydnseek
@Davis X. Machina: But first they’ll scream that the government should instantly do whatever it takes to destroy the meteor before it hits, never for a moment realizing that they destroyed the governments ability to do that, because government is always evil, and after plundering the treasury they filled Grover Norquist’s bathtub and destroyed themselves……..
trollhattan
@Haydnseek:
No kidding. Somebody lends you a ladder, you use it to climb out then hand the ladder to the folks in the next hole over.
Was that so hard?
RKC
Re the birthday cake discussion above. The last time my kids had a food drive at school they sent home a list of needed items. On it was a need to make birthday bags, cake mix, frosting and candles for kids in families that come to the food pantry. As a commie liberal it made choke up, we went shopping, and along with the peanut butter and stuff on the list, got lots of stuff for birthday bags. No kid should miss their birthday.
Ruckus
This is pretty much my story as well. Started a retail business 2 years before the recession hit. And it takes 3-4 years to build up the customer base and make any money at all. I didn’t mind not making any money for 3-4 years, that’s the normal cost of starting your own business. But to spend everything and then have the economy shut down by some greedy fuckers, who made out grand by the way, and me on the street living in a friends house because I had no where else to go and no money to get there. Couldn’t get unemployment because I was self-employed and therefore not eligible.
I did exactly what I was supposed to do, start my own business and hopefully be able in a couple of years to hire a couple of employees. But No, can’t have any of that, the MOU needed a few more billions to stash away in their offshore accounts.
I didn’t dig the hole(the MOU didn’t really dig it either, they more like blew it the fuck up with way too much explosive, fuckers), why should I be the one to help fill it back up?
Ruckus
@Dr. Mantis Toboggan:
Of course it’s worse you fucking moron. How many people are out of work, some for years? And the conservatives will do nothing to help anyone but themselves. All the while corporations are having huge profit years and the MOU are cleaning up. Do you even understand how income inequality works? Asshole.
Ruckus
@Patrick:
Actually it will take us about 7 months to get to that level.
PurpleGirl
@NotMax: He knew that whatever money/profit he lost by paying his workers more would be more than made up when his workers could buy the cars they produced.
ETA: It’s a lesson today’s CEOs are too dumb and greedy to understand.
JR in WV
@Dr. Mantis Toboggan:
President Obama is not solely in charge of the whole US economy, there’s a republican party led by bigots sworn to destroy the country if necessary to make President Obama’s terms in office a failure.
You are obviously part of the near-treasonous clique trying to destroy this country to prevent another progressive black leader from ever being elected president. If I were leader, you would be in a re-education camp in Syria.
I think your linky is broken because you are too stupid to insert a real link to the propaganda you want to expose B-J readers to, also being unaware that B-J readers know that propaganda such as you attempt to quote is un-American tripe created by Republican haters.
FU2! just for grins.
Anonymous At Work
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0745635/trivia?item=qt0381858
President Josiah “Jed” Bartlet: [Toby has just arranged for an honor guard at the funeral of a homeless vet] Toby, If we start pulling strings like this don’t you think every homeless veteran will come out of the woodwork?
Toby Ziegler: I can only hope so, sir.
West Wing gets over-used in political forums but this one always sticks with me. Why shouldn’t every political program have 100% compliance?
Steeplejack
@Dr. Mantis Toboggan:
Broken link is to a piece at Naked Capitalism by Matt Stoller.
Chris
@PurpleGirl:
I think the problem is that our CEOs have been told for so long that they and only they create wealth, that their company is an extension of their genius and all the little people are just parasites along for the ride, and it’s become integral to their self image.
Ford’s outlook was based on the understanding that everyone creates wealth and economic activity, the little people just as much as the tycoons. For our CEO class to acknowledge that would be far too humiliating.
KS in MA
@Mnemosyne: Actually (ahem), that was Max Weber’s caricature of Calvinism. Calvin didn’t think that way; he took for granted that most people were poor, as indeed they were in the 16th century.
Vince
@Linkmeister: Florida hasn’t given any tax breaks to rich people as Florida has no state income tax to cut.
Betsy
@Davis X. Machina: and when white conservatives lose, it says (under their belief system) that they de served it. So to avoid that, they have to have been cheated out of their deserved win by a person of color. Simple … See?
ThresherK
“Help is available,” she tells hundreds of seniors each week. “You deserve it. So, yes or no?”
I’m nowhere near that age or state or income strata, but, “Yes”.
Good for this worker and the folks she signs up. Whenever I hear someone say “I don’t want to go on welfare* or be dependent on the government”, I want to ask them “What does a rich person do? The government has designed a program, the rich person uses it.
Nobody gets apologetic about toting up their charitable donations if it’s enough to matter on their income tax. Nobody worries that if they moved from a house paying X to 3X in property tax as they’ve climbed the ladder they’ve got some moral failing by taking the deduction that’s sitting there. Nobody took that $300 “gift” from Bush a decade ago and worried about the debt clock.
So, yes, sign up. Start behaving like you’re rich. Act like you own it!”
(*So often used in lieu of the accurate name of whatever program they qualify for that I’ve stopped counting.)
Chris
@NotMax: Although, in the interest of full disclosure, anti-Semite, Grand Cross of the German Eagle-winning Henry Ford also paid his workers well enough to successfully poach them from any competitors who might be on the verge of getting uppity and taking away market share.
moron
@max
[‘People really need to stop confusing a strong moral code with masochism.’]
:
It’s not masochism if he has a wife and kids or any family that depends on him — they’re suffering for his idiocy too.
Another Halocene Human
@Vince: lololol, you think capping boat taxes so yachts pay the same as used dinghies doesn’t count? Or cutting corporate taxes? Or cutting regulation so monopolistic players make short term profits, bonuses all around? Raising taxes on the things you need, lowering taxes on the things rich plutocrats want?
Oh, and they got rid of intangible property tax, that was proxy for income tax, during Jeb! years.
liberal
@Patrick:
Yep.
The Sailor
@Vince:
They give owners of companies tax cuts, those are rich people. They also devise ‘kick the poors’ programs (e.g. drug testing) that funnel money to their cronies (and wives). There are many ways to grift, Rick Scott knows them all.
Zap Rowsdower
@Davis X. Machina:
Man, that says it all. Good work.