That’s why the Right’s carping about SNAP (and WIC) is so irritating. To listen to Fox News and Congressional Rs, federal nutrition programs are unjustified goodies that go to layabouts (welfare!) and cause dependency. It’s of a piece with their idiotic critiques of the rest of the social safety net.

–alopecia

Having spent some time on food stamps when I was a kid I can tell you that it’s not a glorious way to live. Without going into the details I’d say that were it not for food stamps it would have taken much longer for my parents to dig us out of the hole (which they did quite admirably) we inadvertantly fell in.

So why does small town America continue to vote against their best interest. Meaning voting republican. And howmany are teabaggers.

If my memory is correct, which it is, the President has sent several jobs bill to Congress, all of which have been rejected y the same people small town America voted into office.

Woonsocket used to be a mill town. Most of the workers were surplus dirt farmers from Quebec who came since there was nothing for them in Canada, the world’s most overrated country, but poverty and discrimination. The fact that my father’s family had real job skills meant they were relatively well off and eventually moved out. Not everyone did.

At its height Woonsocket promoted itself as the third largest French speaking city on the continent and attracted overseas investment from France and Belgium. But the investors were quick to relocate when the formerly docile mill workers started unionizing and even cheaper labor was discovered in Dixie.

The mills started closing after World War I and most of the remainder closed after World War II. They were replaced with nothing. All that’s left is a cheap housing stock that attracts people with nowhere else to go. The first to come were Southeast Asians, many dislocated by our imperial misadventures in their homelands. The newest to arrive are some of those Latinos we’ve been hearing about since the last election.

The economy in Woonsocket has been broken for a very long time, long before the rest of our economy broke. And nobody- not those mythical job creators, not Obama, not Reagan, not LBJ or JFK or FDR- has ever offered more than a band-aid. I don’t know how you can ever fix a place as broken as that, but I know it doesn’t involve the “self-made” scion of the same type of family that broke it in the first place taking the band-aid too.

They wouldn’t last a week.

sigh, thanks Halen. I think I had 4-5 posts open at once and got them reversed.

–alopecia