One of the problems with federal government help is that once it starts, people assume that those being helped have no responsibility for a positive outcome. You can see that even in Syria when opponents of doing anything to harm Assad claim we will "own" the outcome if we intervene, as if every other actor is irrelevant once we act.
We can see that outlook playing out domestically with that Panera Bread guy's food stamps stunt.
What a compassionate man:
Panera Bread Chief Executive Ron Shaich can afford to eat just about anywhere. But for one week the millionaire is shelling out no more than $4.50 a day as part of an effort to see how people on food stamps live.
Called the SNAP challenge, the experiment involves buying food using only what a family would receive on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as the Food Stamp program.
He couldn't buy enough food with the allotment. Oh snap. But what a typically liberal man. SNAP, of course is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
"Supplement," if we want to get all pedantic, means "something added to complete a thing, make up for a deficiency, or extend or strengthen the whole."
But the SNAP challenge asks you to only use SNAP assistance to buy your weekly food.
Here we have a government plan designed to supplement the resources of the poor so they can buy enough food, and Mr. Shaich takes it (as the challenge is intended) as a program that takes over 100% of the poor person's food budget. So now, the person using the government program is no longer responsible for their nutrition--supplemented by the government--but the government is responsible for all of the person's nutritional needs.
Look, I have no problem with helping people who can't afford food. Although I'd like to remind you that Michelle Obama's project is childhood obesity, so something is off here when Democrats are screeching that Republicans want to starve children.
But a safety net shouldn't ensnare a person. And a helping hand shouldn't obligate the helper to carry a person being helped forever, when that person is capable of helping themself.
And so we come to the point where a proposal to trim the SNAP program (after massive increases in the last several years, with the cuts the program will still be far higher than it was even a few years ago) is a heartless attempt to starve children.
Let's try a reality challenge and remember what the program is supposed to do.
And we wonder why we've had to raise the debt limit over a hundred times?
