Growls

With a HT to Mark Levin (podcast, December 16, 2011, just after the 56-minute mark), we learn of a brave young student at Providence College who wrote of her two summers cashiering at Walmart. At the College Conservative blog, she wrote:

“During the 2010 and 2011 summers, I was a cashier at Wal-Mart #1788 in Scarborough, Maine. I spent hours upon hours toiling away at a register, scanning, bagging, and dealing with questionable clientele. These were all expected parts of the job, and I was okay with it. What I didn’t expect to be part of my job at Wal-Mart was to witness massive amounts of welfare fraud and abuse. (emphasis added)

“I understand that sometimes, people are destitute. They need help, and they accept help from the state in order to feed their families. This is fine. It happens. I’m not against temporary aid helping those who truly need it. What I saw at Wal-Mart, however, was not temporary aid. I witnessed generations of families all relying on the state to buy food and other items.  I literally witnessed small children asking their mothers if they could borrow their EBT cards. I once had a man show me his welfare card for an ID to buy alcohol. The man was from Massachusetts. Governor Michael Dukakis’ signature was on his welfare card. Dukakis’ last gubernatorial term ended in January of 1991. I was born in June of 1991. The man had been on welfare my entire life. That’s not how welfare was intended, but sadly, it is what it has become.”

One of the other examples she wrote about involved “(a) man who ran a hotdog stand on the pier in Portland, Maine.” She said he liked to “discuss his hotdog stand” -- even encouraging her to visit the hotdog stand. But, she wrote:

“What would he buy? Hotdogs, buns, mustard, ketchup, etc. How would he pay for it? Food stamps. Either that man really likes hotdogs, or the state is paying for his business. Not okay.”

She closes with an analysis that is much more clear and cogent than anything coming out of the mouths of so many politicians. She says:

“Maine has a problem with welfare spending. Maine has some of the highest rates in the nation for food stamp enrollment, Medicaid, and TANF. Nearly 30% of the state is on some form of welfare. Maine is the only state in the nation to rank in the top two for all three categories. This is peculiar, as Maine’s poverty rate isn’t even close to being the highest in the nation. The system in Maine is far easier to get into than in other states, and it encourages dependency. When a person makes over the limit for benefits, they lose all benefits completely. There is no time limit and no motivation to actually get back to work. Furthermore, spending on welfare has increased dramatically, but there has been no reduction of the poverty rate. Something is going terribly wrong, and the things I saw at work were indicators of a much larger problem. Something must change before the state runs out of money funding welfare programs.”

What a brave and civically-engaged young woman! Hopefully she is opening the eyes of some politicians who want to reform welfare.

You can watch her being interviewed at the Bangor Daily News. Her story has also been   picked-up in the blogosphere, including one at the Chicago Tribune, Right Turn Forever, Enemy of the Statist, and Anchor Rising.