While Obama agrees to another 13 months of unemployment checks for people who, as far as I have seen so far, just use the money to take trips around the world and enjoy the beach, food stamps leap up 16.2% across the nation. I don’t know how much longer I can keep paying for all that free food and globe-trotting.
From the Wall Street Journal:
“42.9 million people collected food stamps last month, up 1.2% from the prior month and 16.2% higher than the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Nationwide 14% of the population relied on food stamps as of September but in some states the percentage was much higher. In Washington, D.C., Mississippi and Tennessee – the states with the largest share of citizens receiving benefits – more than a fifth of the population in each was collecting food stamps.”
If you are in my home state of California, take a look around next time you are out in public. One in ten of the people you’re looking at is on food stamps. If you live in Mississippi or Tennessee, it’s 1 in 5.
If you’d like to see how many people in your state are making you pay for their food, click on the Wall Street Journal link above.
SNAP stands for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Reader Tim Wallace over on Mish’s Blog provided the charts below.
Click on image to enlarge
Categories: Welfare State
Angrywoodchuck's Blog 
It is called compromise. Yes, unemployment was extended but tax cuts for the wealthy were also renewed.
Give credit where credit is due.
This takes a lot of explanation but I’ll try to keep it short. The short answer is, jobs are created because the wealthy are greedy and it’s their greed that creates jobs…until the government tries to increase their taxes.
Let’s assume I am wealthy and I have $100,000 in a shoebox. In a shoebox it doesn’t make me any money…it just sits there. But I am wealthy and greedy. So I decide to put it in a bank to earn interest. The best interest rate I saw in a savings account at Bank of America was 0.60%. I put my $100,000 in that account. A week later, I earned $11.50 for my investment. That is a horrible return on my investment because interest rates are atrociously low. But I am greedy. I want more than $11.50 so what do I do? I decide to invest my $100,000 in the free market. I buy some stocks in some promising companies and I loan some of the money directly to some start-up companies. I ask these companies that they pay me 10% interest in exchange for borrowing my money…much higher than 0.60%, right? These companies take my money and start expanding, using the money to create new products and increase production on existing products. Expansion means new jobs. New jobs mean lower unemployment. This is how an economy creates new jobs. THIS is how.
NOW I am making some REAL money and my greed is being fulfilled. I am a happy, greedy investor as the companies I invest in expand and they make more and more money and keep sending me big fat interest payment checks at 10% interest.
Then the government comes along and decides it wants more of my $100,000 when I earn it (through a higher income tax), and then when the companies I invest in make a nice big 10% interest payment to me, the government takes a nice big chunk of that away from me too (capital gains tax increase). So I decide I am tired of giving the government more and more and more money and I decide to never invest in the stock market or companies in the U.S. again. I take my $100,000 and I find a nice safe place for it overseas, or invest in overseas companies (creating jobs in OTHER countries) or in banks with better interest rates where I can keep more of my profits. Or I put it back in my shoebox.
And even if I do continue to loan my money to U.S. companies, every dollar the government takes from me, is $1 less that I can loan to a private company to expand…which means less expansion, less jobs, higher unemployment. And then the government takes all that money it took from me in higher taxes and capital gains and gives it away to nonproductive citizens on unemployment, or uses it for a bank bailout or some other inefficient stimulus idea. Who knows better where money should be spent…the private sector that needs money to expand to meet higher consumer demand or a city government that wants to spend the money to repave a perfectly good road, like Irvine, as an example of the waste of the stimulus money.
Trillions of dollars later, all of that taxpayer money taken from the “wealthy” and spent on stimulus, and the unemployment rate went up ANYWAY. Because taking money away from an efficient private sector, that knows where the demand is, and where to invest the money is 1000% more efficient than a slow, bureaucratic government that knows nothing of business…handing out checks to citizens that don’t work or to governments for bike trail beautification projects. Think about it? Who is more likely to successfully run Apple? The government or Steve Jobs? Well…there is a reason for that. That is why money made BY the private sector (i.e. the wealthy) is best left IN the private sector.
So what was the compromise? Taxes on the wealthy would only have increased unemployment as they withdrew their investment capital and moved it outside of the country to avoid the excess taxation, so the compromise, as I see it, was to agree to not increase unemployment in exchange for spending $56 billion on unemployment benefits. All the Democrats did was threaten to increase unemployment in exchange for buying more votes by handing out $56 billion in employed taxpayer money to unemployed 2012 voters.
What a sucky compromise.