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I'm not sure the value of this as a top level comment, but I'll write it because it struck me as odd. I live in California. I stopped by Grocery Outlet today after work to pick an ingredient up for dinner and some bleach for cleaning. I walk up to the checkout line with my $10 worth of groceries, and in front of me are two groups. The first group currently checking out are a couple, both guant, face sores, interesting clothing/jewelry/tattoo choices, and are buying food and water. I presume they are either living on the street or out of their vehicle and do drugs pretty consistently. They have a whole load of groceries and what caught my attention was the lady who requested the cashier to separate the mushroom mind focus and energy https://lairdsuperfood.com/products/focus-and-memory-mushrooms bags of snacks she was purchasing because if they weren't EBT eligible she would pay for them on her own. Luckily as I was to find out, they were, and she went on to make a separate purchase of those with her handy card.
Next up in the grocery line, we have a black lady, also buying significant amounts of groceries, and frankly she was a good 300 pounds #healthyatanysize. Luckily she had her handy card too.
Now I make decent money, but I sure feel like a shmuck when I'm the only one paying for my food in the grocery store line. Not sure what to add to this, I see the proposals to shrink EBT just to the essentials, only for people to be shocked as that would require people to make their food like me! Maybe this is what I get for living in California, but frankly, I think EBT and systems like it are just as prevalent elsewhere. It just strikes me as odd that I'm a professional, in a good industry, and I would question spending $50 for a couple of tiny packets of specialty mushroom superfood, but two methheads get to have it as they wish. Maybe I'm out of touch with the plights of the poor, but idk, doesn't seem half bad, I've car camped in the past before.
To be fair with the lady with the kid behind me, I did not stick around long enough to see if she too had her handy card with her, but I feel somewhat saddened that I am missing out on this club.
It reminds me in college, I had some hippy friends, they showed me the beauty of the college food kitchen. Just walk in, grab food, no worries. Oh yeah and btw since you're in a full college courseload, and your income is below the poverty threshold, despite being a dependent, you can apply to EBT, unemployment benefits, free health insurance, etc. Idk, I didn't partake, despite having years of less than stellar income and a strict budget. Maybe I should have? Is that just like any other tax loophole? What's the difference between saving money via that, and wash selling bitcoin shares to offset other investment income or other such schemes which I don't necessarily disagree with morally.
The other thing I think of when I roll this over in my head, is the stratification of grocery stores as a class separator. The last few years my closest store has been Ralphs. For those of you who don't know, Ralphs is slightly more high-end than Grocery Outlet which is more bottom of the barrel. Shoppers of Ralphs are probably not going to encounter EBT users at the same rates in areas with many grocery stores. Think Target vs. Walmart. The effect I feel like this has is for those contributing more to the tax pool, they encounter the absurdity of the purchasers less, and therefore the blob of money dedicated to it is further from the mind.
It sounds like watching these people buy their groceries at your indirect expense made you feel like a chump. I read this article years ago and I still think about it a great deal.
Exactly.
It's not about the math. It's about being made to feel like a fool.
Scott had that post recently about crime rates and spent a lot of time talking about shoplifting, and I think one big difference is that shoplifting when I was young seemed like something really risky. And now with self-checkout, it just seems like I'm only paying because I'm a chump.
Aside: City Journal used to be a publication I really liked, then I saw their college rankings where they weighed Jewish Issues higher than any other aspect of college, and essentially rigged it to get goofy ass answers, and since then I've been really confused by them.
Those sound like pretty standard "old GOP" positions to me. Fiscally conservative, fanatically supportive of Israel and Jews.
I'm not debating their CW bona fides, just the goofiness of it. It's embarrassing.
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Yes, that's exactly it (and the article lives rent-free in my head, too). It seems like there is something at least once a week that makes me feel like a chump for getting up, going to work, trying to do a good job, trying to avoid taking any government cheese I don't feel entitled to (which is all of it), and then seeing hordes of grasshoppers scam the system. It's a good thing I don't live in Minnesota because I don't think I could handle the level of chumpitude that I'd feel there.
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Yes, this is precisely the thing. Recently I saw a fact making the rounds that 40% of Stanford students were officially classes as disabled. This is a similar case. Or take for instance, getting pets classified as service animals so you can take them with you on airplanes. The problem is that there will always be a marginal case that feels unfairly excluded.
You ultimately have to draw the line between "eligible for accommodations" and "ineligible" somewhere, and there will always be people just to the left and just to the right of that line, and there will be very little absolute difference separating them. The difference in accommodations will feel arbitrary and cruel and those with excessive empathy will push to expand it to include those previously just on the wrong side of the line, to alleviate the arbitrary cruelty. But now the line has moved and the process repeats with a new group just to the left and just to the right of it.
Very few of these cases have a clear enough Schelling point to hold the line from this sort of gradual expansion and abuse.
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