A Nation of Special Interests | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Everyone from farmers to those receiving welfare has advocates and even lobbyists working for more and better payments with less regulation. Is it any wonder the nation is in bad shape? We are where our founding fathers predicted we would be if we failed to padlock the treasury. Dividing someone else's wealth is easy and it becomes very easy for elected officials who have the law on their side.

    After using the excuse that we are only doing good, we now fail to ask if there are benefits from these many programs. We allow welfare families to draw from the treasury for generations and assist them in doing so.
Beaufort County Commissioner Hood Richardson, July, 2004     photo by Stan Deatherage
    Most of these un-needed programs are easily controlled and stopped. Take food stamps for example. The lobbyists for food manufactures have got laws passed approving their clients products to be acceptable for purchase. Because of this, steak is now served instead of hamburger. The list of approved highly processed foods has become long.

Providing the basic protein, and carbohydrate foods required for a healthy diet should consist of dried beans, potatoes, rice, eggs, flour, bacon and oil. This could be distributed on the present food stamp card. The present practice of providing packaged and processed foods with fresh meat provides no incentive to get off he system. The up scale items including salt, sugar, baked bread, and canned goods could be had in the old fashioned way -by working. There would not be much of a black market in dried beans and

rice. There sure is one in food stamps.

    It is debatable who would start yelling the loudest if few went back to basics in food stamps and WIC vouchers. The grocers who retail high mark up items, the food manufacturers who do not get to sell their processed foods, or the welfare person who now has to cook. We started these programs to help people survive until they get on their feet.

    Maybe the biggest complainers would be the welfare employees who no longer go to conventions on nutrition, or meetings on how to give away food stamps, and learn all of those complex rules about who qualifies. Under this proposal it would be easy to qualify. A big complainer could be the politicians who no longer buy votes with food stamps.

One thing is for sure, there would be a lot fewer people living high on the hog wasting our hard earned dollars. Why should part of us work while some of us enjoy the benefits of our work?