A basic result in microeconomics is that giving welfare recipients cash is better than giving them vouchers or food stamps. Allowing individuals to choose how to spend the money rather than have a choice imposed on them leads to individual welfare being maximised. But there is a very slight complication – the people who get taxed to pay for the cash benefits are excluded from the analysis. A taxpayer might be happy to pay something to prevent a welfare recipient from starving to death but may not want to pay for their substance abuse. Don Arthur draws our attention to an actual situation like this.
A sixty-five year old store clerk in New Hampshire was fired last month for refusing to sell cigarettes to a twenty year old using an EBT card. The man’s foster mother came in to complain, and eventually the store management fired the clerk.
So far so good. But then the young man wrote an op-ed defending himself:
Is that okay, I wonder, as tears well in my eyes reading commentators describing people like me as social parasites. Ironically, the same people obsessed with individualism and the free market seem to need to tell individuals how to spend their money. Why do people who are sick or unemployed need to justify their spending habits, simply because they are in receipt of support from their community (transferred via the government in the form of cash)?
Ahem. Whose money? Well a member of the New Hampshire legislature responded.
The debate forming here is not focused on whether or not you are a smoker or what you do with “your money”. Rather, it is centered on whether or not the tax payer dollars you receive should be spent on non essential items– which cigarettes certainly are. Indeed, at the heart of the debate is the very question of whether or not those tax payer dollars are truly yours or whether or not the tax payers who provide them are entitled to some say in how they are spent …
Jackie Whiton, age 65, had worked as a cashier at the Big Apple convenience store in Peterborough, N.H., for years. But then a couple of weeks ago she committed a firing offense.
She refused to allow a welfare recipient to use his EBT card to buy a pack of smokes.
How dare a taxpayer say no to a member of the non-working class?
Back to our young smoker.
Is every taxpayer I encounter entitled to a rundown of my medical condition, shelter expenses, etc.?
To be fair – no. He shouldn’t have to justify himself to each and every taxpayer – that would detract from his efforts to find a job – but it isn’t unreasonable that he have to justify himself to somebody. This whole ‘pay me money to live the life I choose because I have a ‘medical condition’ [or insert any other excuse]‘ is starting to wear thin. Now I’m happy to believe that smokers are a persecuted minority; but I’m not happy to accept that the state should levy taxation to provide welfare to an individual with a ‘medical condition’ so that he can buy cigarettes.
Dig a hole, then pay them to fill it up, that’s all ‘work’ is. Shovel ready jobs is like – pay them to dig a hole, then pay them to fill it up, because if theys aint paid, then theys caint spend money and it’s the spending of money that mattuhs, duh?
coz
15 Jul 12 at 9:40 pm
Yep – suck it up, princess!
Or, get off your arse, get a job and lose a reason to spurt those tears, you lobotomised loser.
Buy your stinky ciggies on your own dime, dickhead.
Rabz
15 Jul 12 at 9:42 pm
And the poor old taxpayer gets fired and goes on welfare. How stupid is that?
Gab
15 Jul 12 at 9:47 pm
Well, this is the nub of it.
A more captured voting demographic is difficult to imagine, outside of recently arrived, illiterate, staggeringly stupid, welfare dependent third world peons.
Thanks to decades of non-education, the locally born, non-working class demographic is bloating, big time.
This is where the socialist parties’ votes will come from – unless compulsory voting is outlawed.
Rabz
15 Jul 12 at 9:54 pm
When they invented bureaucracy, they invented a constant srream of faux jobs for cadres. If you can read’n'rite, you too can be a cadre!
coz
15 Jul 12 at 9:58 pm
The employer certainly has the right to sack her. Has the old dear ever heard “the customer is always right”? Young fagger might also have retorted “zip it lady, my fags feed your cat”. OTOH, at age 20, this chap is savable from the horror of cigarette addiction.
Peter Patton
15 Jul 12 at 10:02 pm
Maybe so however it was an overreaction and a costly exercise for the owner who now has to replace the worker and incur additional costs (recruitment, training etc). Meanwhile, another person goes on welfare until the 65 yo can get another job.
Sacking the employee was not the only choice available to the owner.
Gab
15 Jul 12 at 10:09 pm
I would never have sacked her in a pink fit. Though we don’t know if this was just the excuse the employer was waiting for for long-term poor performance. I would have just taken her aside, and advised that in future, refer to me any problematic exchanges she felt she was about to engage in. So long as they don’t spit at her, or urinate in the lemon cordial bottles, I encourage them to spent every last dime of their welfare money in my store!
Peter Patton
15 Jul 12 at 10:14 pm
Another good reason to abolish the minimum wage and subsidise employers to take on low productivity workers. You have to work to get ‘welfare’, it feels like you ‘earnt’ the money, you actually have to make some contribution and you will be far more likely to make the transition to high productivity.
And I reckon it would speed up the redeployment of labour resources from dismantled malinvestments while contributing to social calm.
Forester
15 Jul 12 at 10:15 pm
Yep agree. If government money comes with strings etc. and you don’t like it. Get a job.
JC
15 Jul 12 at 10:33 pm
Find these parasites a war to die in.
perturbed
15 Jul 12 at 10:45 pm
Perhaps the ‘Boss’ who fired Jackie Wilton could offer her job to the young man.
Think he’d take it?
Anne
15 Jul 12 at 10:45 pm
Uncle Milt with William F Buckley Jr in 1968 describes his proposal to replace all forms of welfare with a negative income tax.
sdog
15 Jul 12 at 11:33 pm
When we get someone at our church door asking for a handout to get his prescription filled at the chemist, we do just that – take $5 from the poor box, and go with him/her to the chemist to get their prescription filled.
Responses:
a) chemist said “Jack this is not your week for your script, I’m not filling it.”
b) ‘Jack’ calls me and my church all sorts of names, denigrates our supposed charity, and then disappears around the corner as I return the money to the poor box for next time.
Our operating principle: when the persons says “I need help with [a particular nominated expense]“, we take them at their word, but we make sure the money is spent on what the person said. If they don’t say, we ask.
Second example: father and daughter come asking for $20 for food shopping for next meal.
Off we go to Woolies, and father leaves daughter and me at the checkout, scoots around the store like he knows where everything is, comes back and I can see staples only in the basket. Total price $19.50; we all go through the checkout, I hand over the cash, pray for them outside, wish them well and walk back to the church, satisfied that it was a genuine case.
John A
15 Jul 12 at 11:53 pm
John A, that is where private charity is just so much more efficient than government bureaucracies. Private charities shine at doing stuff like that on a very personal level – governments just can’t.
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 12:09 am
Big Government “administration” of welfare just doesn’t work in reality, no matter how much “sense” it makes to us or how useful it seems “in theory.” The people who are dead-set on abusing the system have more time and motivation to work out ways to abuse the system than public servants have to catch and control them. The money we are “wasting” on this guy’s smokes is dwarfed by the amount we’re “wasting” on public servants to administer and police welfare recipients’ spending on a micro level.
I remember back in the day of the physical food stamp, the black market that went on with people selling them for less than half their face value, taking the money and going and buying cigarettes, booze or other drugs with it. You are never going to stop chit like that no matter how many bureaucrats, spies and specialist police squads you have unless you lock them all in poor houses.
Just treat them like adults and give them the money, via a scheme like Milt’s which doesn’t disincentivize them from rejoining the job market and which doesn’t pour millions into the vast bureaucratic welfare-industrial complex.
If one must have a government-run taxpayer-funded social safety net, make its administrative footprint as small as possible. The one thing I’d crack down on though is the ever-widening definition of what constitutes a “disability” severe enough to justify government-awarded taxpayer-funded support for a citizen for the rest of their life. The number of people I’ve met in real life who actually appear to be 100% too disabled to contribute to society in any way, ever, is really pretty small.
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 12:13 am
“The money we are “wasting” on this guy’s smokes is dwarfed by the amount we’re “wasting” on public servants to administer and police welfare recipients’ spending on a micro level.”
A not-unreasonable point.
Jarrah
16 Jul 12 at 12:26 am
I’m with Spot, except to point out that, at least in Oz, a disability pension isn’t for life.
wreckage
16 Jul 12 at 12:49 am
Would he have been refused a Coca-Cola or a Mars Bar?
I know what you’re driving at but I’m calling bullshit. He was refused service only and exclusively because the clerk was a self-appointed anti-smoking marshal.
Following the Reason link, I see that the legislator named is Nickolas Levasseur.
I’m not sure he’s a poster-boy for sagacious use of public monies.
Bot look, yeah – what JC said is generally true.
C.L.
16 Jul 12 at 12:49 am
Isn’t it? I have to say I am not intimately knowledgeable about any of the government benefits systems. If you’re granted “disability” for, say, depression or a ‘bad back’ or chronic alcohol abuse, ow often do you have to re-qualify, and how tough is it to get the nod?
Because really, given how I see the Australian “disability” rolls grow, year after year after year, I’d be interested in knowing what percentage of people who are granted disability pensions ever come off them. What percentage of people, once declared so “disabled” that they are unable to do any job of any kind anywhere under any circumstances, “come back” from that and re-enter the work force?
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 1:06 am
Dawg, it’s five years. I am on a partial pension thanks to a fucking horrible illness that got diagnosed as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis back when it used to still be called “Chronic Fatigue”.
I have partly recovered and am trying to entrepreneur my way off the pension – it gets cut as my business income goes up. At five years on the pension I’ll have to be re-tested, and I suspect by then, given a very slow but continual improvement, I won’t be eligible. Hopefully my income will render it a moot point this year.
wreckage
16 Jul 12 at 1:16 am
sdog, wreckage, the disability pension is open-ended, not 5 years. My youngest brother obtained that pension while he was a heroin addict, and has never had to be re-referred, even though he is no longer addicted. He has six children and a wife who is a taxation consultant who earns her own living in Europe, but he and the kids from his previous relationship get all the benefits that you and I pay from our taxes.
That’s absolute truth.
They’re not Scientologists, they’re Hare Krisnas.
mareeS
16 Jul 12 at 1:57 am
It depends on what your condition is.
As for the anti-smoking crusader, cigarettes were deemed so necessary that they were provided in rations to allied troops in WWII. People who don’t smoke nowadays don’t realise how much they mean to an addict. And in the US they are only $3 a packet anyway, about the same as a loaf of bread.
Yobbo
16 Jul 12 at 3:09 am
Some mentally-ill people may be legitimately self-medicating through smoking cigarettes.
The only addicting drug I choose to ingest is caffeine, but it’s definitely a drug of addiction and since coffee and tea are really of no “essential” benefit to humans, if I were on welfare would any of you support embiggening the government to make sure I didn’t “waste” any of my dole payment on such things?
Where do you stop?
Yes, the immediate knee-jerk reaction when you are standing in line at the local Quickie-Mart and see someone using food stamps to buy crap is to want to demand that the government Do Something™ about it. But because the costs of administering America’s ever-more-complex welfare systems are basically hidden to the average Joe, you just don’t stop to think about the hit to your wallet – let alone to your freedom – it’s going to take to embiggen the system even more.
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 3:51 am
N.B. Just as cigarettes were considered essential to the American troops during WWII, so too were instant coffee and chocolate bars. Maybe instead of food stamps we should issue each welfare recipient with a WWII-era rations pack? ;-P
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 3:58 am
sdog, I can’t see why people are so anti smoking. I don’t smoke tobacco, never have, will not allow it in our house, (did my share of pot, though), but I don’t have a problem with friends smoking outside in the yard.
Do you know that there’s a $25,000 fine for every tobacco plant you grow in your backyard, because cultivation of tobacco is subject to customs and excise, but you can have 4 marijuana plants for personal use?
I learned that from our son when he was growing his pot among my tomatoes.
mareeS
16 Jul 12 at 5:22 am
Sdog,
“… we should issue each welfare recipient with a WWII-era rations pack?”
You are hilarious Mate. That made my day this Monday morn.
How about some basic boot camp training as an added bonus. Except for the LSD squad – Lame, Sick and Dysfunctional. They’ll be placed on light duties, admin shit, pushing paper.
Abraham
16 Jul 12 at 6:26 am
It is if you know Dr. Howlong.
nilk
16 Jul 12 at 6:46 am
Theodore Dalrymple often notes that welfare recipients usually referred to their ‘pay day’ – which kind of sums up the entitlement mentality. I guess we pay them to exist.
Once upon a time families took care of their own.
Ellen of Tasmania
16 Jul 12 at 6:50 am
Ellen, there are a lot of people here who also think of it as ‘their’ money. Any public housing is ‘theirs’ also.
Apparently we owe them just for breathing.
For something a little bit different, next time you’re on youtube, do a search for ‘my ebt’ and enjoy the vids.
nilk
16 Jul 12 at 6:57 am
In my opinion the Government is similar to a corporation. I, as the tax payer, am an investor in this corporation. My investment – tax – are then used by the corporation – State – to generate a return on my investment – health care, education etc. Thus I lay claim to the right as an investor and shareholder to have a say in how my investment is spent.
Example, I work at Sydney International Airport. The number of individuals – and some families – travelling overseas whilst on Centerlink benefits are astonishing. So, if you can afford overseas travel while on Centerlink benefits, then I as a taxpayer say I’m giving you too much. Overseas travel is a luxury most working people can’t afford. But Welfare recipients? Unacceptable. You want to travel overseas, get a job and pay for it yourself.
Abraham
16 Jul 12 at 7:19 am
CL you said:
You may not be aware but the charities offer shopping vouchers for the big supermarkets to people on benefits with the clear condition that they cannot be used for ciggies. The vouchers are printed by the chains and clearly state same.
So the welfare sector and its “regulars” already know the rules. You are accusing this person of being a self-appointed marshal, but I suggest they may have been aware of this standard rule of engagement, and applied it to the person in front of them.
Maybe it’s time for you to get with the new program
– the tide has turned on smoking. I doubt that any ration pack would include fags these days.
John A
16 Jul 12 at 7:45 am
Thanks Jarrah, this sounds like a ringing endorsement on allowing private citizens to police the spending of welfare recipients. After all this prevents the waste of public resources on an activity where only marginal benefits can be obtained.
It is much more efficient when a community of people with good values combine to help those who are less fortunate than others.
Token
16 Jul 12 at 8:21 am
John A, from the article, “It is perfectly legal, after all, to buy cigarettes with government assistance.” There don’t seem to be any restrictions on buying cigarettes with EBT money. It wasn’t the checkout lady’s place to refuse service to this guy.
Dangph
16 Jul 12 at 8:27 am
Smaller private charities may be able to police things like that on a small scale, but even so, as with the food stamp black market in the States (back when they were actually food stamps – coupons – and could not be used for non-essential items), what’s to stop a recipient who is hell-bent on having a smoke from selling your $20 Coles voucher to someone for $10, then taking that $10 cash and going off and buying smokes with it?
Poor people are poor. This does not necessarily mean they’re stupid. As Friedman pointed out in the video I linked above, with some people you could refuse to give them money at all and simply deliver groceries to their door, and they’d still find a way to turn that shredded wheat into pot. In a country the size of the US, with more than 45 million people on food stamps, to what extent are you willing to embiggen the government in order to ensure that welfare recipients only spend their welfare dollars on “Good Things”?
I agree that the entitlement mentality is a problem. I don’t believe the answer is “More Government”.
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 8:31 am
There’s a BasicsCard that the government provides and cannot be used for alcohol and cigarettes, etc.
Maybe you could give welfare recipients a choice between cash or a BasicsCard, with the BasicsCard giving you more income, as an incentive to limit the scope of your spending.
XYZ
16 Jul 12 at 8:43 am
It just seems that way. The average duration on DSP is steadily increasing and sits at around 627 weeks or 12 years.
62% of exits from DSP were to the age pension.
Rabz
16 Jul 12 at 8:55 am
Because they are fascists. That’s fucking why.
.
16 Jul 12 at 9:12 am
News to me; I’m just telling you what I was told by The Authorities.
wreckage
16 Jul 12 at 9:17 am
Also I have to fill out paperwork quarterly. If Mr Heroin Addict is still on a pension he can’t be on much of one as theoretically his partners income counts against. Either he’s around $100 per fortnight (the highest rate is just above the dole, so about $300 per fortnight) or he is outright cheating the system, submitting false claims, etc.
I can only speak of my own experience.
wreckage
16 Jul 12 at 9:34 am
The illegality of homegrown tobacco dates back to 1911 or something, it’s certainly not a health or social order issue.
wreckage
16 Jul 12 at 9:37 am
Wreckage – the source is the gubberment’s own report on the characteristics of DSP recipients, 2010-11.
It’s about a year old. The new report will be out soon and I can’t envision any improvement in those two figures.
Rabz
16 Jul 12 at 9:42 am
There are no smokes in Australian ration packs from A to E. E is the best.
You order smokes separately in the field.
Winston SMITH
16 Jul 12 at 10:02 am
maree s
Oh boy, would I have loved to been around when you had THAT conversation. “But mum, the law says it’s OK”. “Sure it does. Now up to your room young man, for a jolly food talking to!”
Peter Patton
16 Jul 12 at 10:25 am
The store clerk wouldn’t have blocked a Mars Bar purchase. So we know she was being an anti-smoking zealot, not an officious eagle for Joe Q. Taxpayer.
C.L.
16 Jul 12 at 10:28 am
Nah, I bet its simply tax revenue issue. There are no legal marijuana sales to tax.
I wonder if things like the basics card change this a bit though by making it a lot more efficient to implement. Though its also important to note that not all a person’s welfare income is put on the basics card and they still have about half in cash if they want it.
Chris
16 Jul 12 at 10:50 am
The Basic Card appears to work through Eftpos pinpads. These pinpads don’t know anything about the individual items in a sale, so they could never restrict the sale of particular items. You could get the point-of-sale software to restrict the sale of items for customers paying with the card, but that would entail a lot of software development by multiple POS software vendors to make them do this. But there are many of these vendors. Some of them may no longer be in business. Basically it would be very, very expensive to implement a software-enforced solution.
Dangph
16 Jul 12 at 11:42 am
Chris, the Australian “Basics Card” only works in a limited number of government-approved outlets. It’s fine (in theory) for small communities where people rarely go more than a little ways from their local area, but out of curiosity I looked up two postcodes near my home in suburban Perth and in one suburb you can only go to one particular BP servo and one particular Woolies, and there are no licensed government-approved outlets at all in the other one.
What would be the cost to the US taxpayer to license (and then police for fraud) every supermarket, superstore, gas station and convenience store each of the 45 million+ food stamp recipients in America might want to use? Because you can be sure that the American people would not tolerate the State dictating that you are only allowed to go to one supermarket and one supermarket only (which may be miles away) – it’s not fair to the welfare recipients, and it leaves the government open to charges of ‘playing favorites’ by only giving Basics Card licenses to their maaaaates’ shops or even taking kickbacks so that in a smallish lower-income community Piggly Wiggly gets all the Basics Card business and Food Lion is left out in the cold. And again, it’s just adding more red tape, more bureaucrats, and generally embiggening a beast I don’t think many of us want to see embiggened.
And then, importantly, what is the benefit you’d reap from that cost? Would the US taxpayer actually be paying out any less in welfare payments? Or is the benefit mainly a psychic one, a sense of “Well good, now those bludgers can’t buy smokes with MY MONEY!”?
Go watch the Milton Friedman video I posted earlier, if you haven’t already. He makes a lot of sense.
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 11:55 am
sdog – the Basics card has only recently started getting rolled out to capital cities so its not surprising that not many shops are on the list yet in Perth. I understand that its being rolled out on a handful of suburbs (eg Adelaide only has one) as a trial.
btw it sounds like the government are not holding back on licences to be able to use the basics card – if anything they are trying to encourage as many shops as possible to accept them. Otherwise they end up with the problem that it gives the big supermarkets a monopoly on welfare spending and they simply don’t stock everything that people want (eg a lot of non western food staples).
In the long term in wider society its probably a rather flawed system though – as people have mentioned it’ll just establish a black market. There’ll be people making lots of money out of bartering goods.
Chris
16 Jul 12 at 12:56 pm
wreckage … “I’m with Spot, except to point out that, at least in Oz, a disability pension isn’t for life.”
You’re joking right?
I am sure some genuine cases decide to relinquish the benefit when they are well.
But, when was the last time a doctor declared an bludging recipient fit and pushed them off the benefit?
Bzzzzzt.
Is the answer “Never” Eddie?
Correct!
Leigh Lowe
16 Jul 12 at 1:06 pm
Same for the dole, Leigh, I’m just pointing out that you need to be reassessed at 5 years in most cases. I severely doubt that going out and kicking in doors and performing fresh testing on pension recipients would yield much savings. It’s a moral panic and nothing more… strictly IMO.
So, my point is only that the disability pension is not a rubber stamp for a handout for life. And it isn’t. And if we’re talking about TPI pensions then it would be bloody surprising if a significant number of people ever got off them.
wreckage
16 Jul 12 at 1:22 pm
The majority of Australians who are granted the disability pension stay dependent on the taxpayer for the rest of their lives, only leaving the Disability rolls when they age out and graduate to old age pensions (going by Rabz’ figures above, which he says are from Centrelink itself).
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 1:25 pm
I see the store clerk’s complexion is (ahem) Antique USA.
Dare I ask if the customer’s complexion was perhaps further along the spectrum?
I think I know the answer.
Leigh Lowe
16 Jul 12 at 1:32 pm
I remember years ago I enquired about donating to an Education Fund run by a large charity. It was all going beautifully until I asked what guarantee I had that the money would actually be spent on books, uniforms and edy-kay-shun accoutrements.
The representative of the charity got that “dog-shit-on-my-shoe” expression on her face and told me in a very condescending tone that “placing such restrictions on the victims of poverty serves only to damage their self-esteem and perpetuate the cycle of poverty”. It was also explained that their “client base” comprised lots of “complex family-units” and it “can create tensions when there are externally imposed restrictions”.
This really means the new step-dad will go off his tree if he can’t spend the money on smack/Booze/pokies.
“No worries” I said “I wouldn’t want to cause trouble”
Put cheque book back in bag and departed post-haste.
Leigh Lowe
16 Jul 12 at 1:46 pm
Correct sdog.
I realise there are “reviews” but I am talking about the reality … that is, no-one gets thrown off the disability pension if they don’t want to except where they graduate to the age-pension
Leigh Lowe
16 Jul 12 at 1:49 pm
Antique? What does that mean? Native American?
Just come out and say it if you are going to say something.
Dangph
16 Jul 12 at 1:50 pm
There are plenty of whites who use & abuse the American welfare system as well, Leigh. I’ve seen them myself in the South. Big fat white 30-something tub-O-lards at the servo buying fried pork rinds, moon pies and Mountain Dew on their EBTs. I wouldn’t be so quick with the racial assumptions. The entitlement virus can infect people cross the spectrum.
I don’t know what the answer is, but as I’ve opined above I don’t think it lies in creating whole new government departments to micromanage over 45 million peoples’ buying habits. The government doesn’t do anything very cost-effectively or efficiently – I think that “solution” would be very costly and intrusive and not even save us any welfare dollars in the process.
sdog
16 Jul 12 at 2:00 pm
Ciggie man smokes to his hearts content. Less money spent on real food means he lives a profoundly shorter life through the wonders of Malnutrition.
Dan
16 Jul 12 at 5:31 pm
Dangph
Store clerk is white.
I am betting the customer was black.
The store chain knew they would have Al Sharpton organising torch-bearing mobs to run them out of business, not to mention a Guzzillion Dollar law-suit
Leigh Lowe
16 Jul 12 at 7:40 pm
sdog.
I agree that sloth and indolence is colour-blind.
But banjo-playing white trash don’t have a massive political machine behind them like the NAACP and the whole Civil Rights outrage industry.
That is what usually causes a business like Big Apple to back off at light speed.
Leigh Lowe
16 Jul 12 at 7:44 pm