| | | Carr: EBT card shutdown? Now THAT’S outrage
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Howie Carr
The EBT cards just stopped working — can you imagine a worse catastrophe to befall Obamanation?
But it happened Saturday in 17 states, including Massachusetts, and no, Gov. Patrick, this is not an “anecdote.”
Thank goodness Xerox got the system back up and running before the major cities started burning down. As it is, it’ll take the liquor stores and tattoo parlors weeks to make up their lost weekend business. One store in Chelsea shut down for the day; 75 percent of its business involves EBT cards. Only 75 percent?
A woman named Laura told me yesterday she was at the Market Basket in Salem, N.H. The woman in front of her took one EBT card from her designer purse, tried to run it through and failed. She shrugged and pulled out a second one.
That one didn’t work either, so she took out a third card and tried that. When it didn’t work, she pulled out a wad of cash that would choke a horse, all 50s and 100s, and paid cash.
“I’d been in MacKinnon’s (meat market) earlier, and they’d made the announcement,” Laura said. “I can barely afford to shop there, and I work. So I was wondering, how can somebody who’s poor afford to go to a pretty good butcher’s shop?”
A guy texted me: “I was in the BJ’s in Dedham. It was funny watching them pointing at the sign, but they all kept shopping. I wonder where they get their money.”
Surely a rhetorical question. Unlike Obamacare, where the layabouts can supposedly get instructions on how to pick up their latest handout in 180 different languages, most supermarkets announced the tragedy in English only.
“The illegals would get to the register, and they had no idea that they couldn’t charge it to Uncle Sam,” another listener said.
Many of those who found out they couldn’t pay with somebody else’s money just threw up their hands and walked out. You know, these people didn’t sneak into America with their eight kids to suffer such indignities. This kind of brutal treatment is why the Tsarnaevs turned on us infidels who’d been picking up the tab for their food, housing, medical care, education, clothing and child care.
According to a survey a few months ago, the average welfare “family” in Massachusetts collects the equivalent of a pretax income of $57,000 a year.
How many of the U.S. citizens working in the supermarkets make even half that?
State Rep. Shaunna O’Connell (R-Taunton) has been leading the uphill struggle to reform the welfare system.
“People on government assistance,” she was saying yesterday, “need to take a good hard look at what can happen when you rely on the government to support you.”
On the other hand, look what happens when you don’t rely on the government to support you. You have to work. Given a choice, I think I know the decision most of the EBT card generation will make.
Source URL: bostonherald.com |
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