Friday, March 19, 2010
Chicagoland / Food Chain / Politics / Food & Drink The Hipster Food Stamp Panic of 2010
Posted by Whet Moser on Fri, Mar 19, 2010 at 1:22 PM
Mak, 31, grew up in Westchester, graduated from the University of Chicago and toiled in publishing in New York during his 20s before moving to Baltimore last year with a meager part-time blogging job and prospects for little else. About half of his friends in Baltimore have been getting food stamps since the economy toppled, so he decided to give it a try; to his delight, he qualified for $200 a month.
This Salon piece about well-educated 20- and 30-somethings buying organic and artisan food from their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program allotment has been making the rounds; One Story Up's Megan Cottrell has more over at change.org. It's been causing consternation in the usual circles, and while it's raised some compelling questions about why the cheap, shitty food that the poor are apparently supposed to confine themselves to is actually cheap (here's a hint), I'd been looking for something brief and resonant to squeeze the matter into a ball, as it were. And fortunately, Reason came through.
One of the very angry commenters on their aggro-libertarian blog mentions how when his daddy was the same age as the U of C grad above ("this pathetic fuck is 31 years old"), he was working the land like a good solid American midwesterner. 640 acres, which is a lot. I was curious where it came from.
Turns out, according to the commenter, the farm was built up over the generations, going back to the 1870s, when... wait for it... it came from one of the federal government's biggest welfare-to-work programs in history, the Homestead Act.
My book larnin' isn't worth much on the free market, but it does sometimes provide a rich sense of historical irony.
Comments (3)
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If I could strike the phrase "my tax dollars" from the English language, I would. People get so pissed about their tax dollars paying for subsidized housing too, except that they don't realize that we spend way way less on public housing than we subsidize home ownership through mortgage tax credits.
Also, I wish there was enough land somewhere to have another Homestead act (actual empty land, not land with an indigenous people whom I have to annihilate). I would really like to be a pioneer. Just a secret obsession of mine.
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The hipster generation is lazy. A Westchester kid with a degree from the University of Chicago needs to go on Food Stamps? If you have the education, skills, and training to work, why don't these bums work in an office? Work is boring. Life is boring. This is all true, but hey Kafka and Einstein had crappy jobs while working on the big idea. Perhaps these suburban college graduates on $1000 bikes and eating $20 cheese with foodstamps have no big ideas?
But if I had to pay $15,000 in taxes last year, I am happy to see that money go to support factory workers who are downsized by decisions made by Westchester, NY or Lake Forest, IL investment bankers who send kids to the University of Chicago, but not the brats of the upper middle class who don't want to work for daddy or mommy. I went to a vocational HS, a urban college campus, then Northwestern. No one gave me a damn thing. Life is a state of nature, and these kids can go ask mom and dad for money - hey those Westchester and Lake Forest folks have made out like bandits with the Clinton-Bush tax cuts which I don't get!
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