free internet, free health care!
YES the POOR are so down trodden!
Absolutely NO OTHER country offers these luxuries to the "POOR"!!!
a) Free Cell phone (my cell phone I PAY is about $100/month)
if the poor person receives just one of the below:
Food stamps * Medicaid * Section 8 * Supplemental Security Income * National School Lunch Program
THEY GET A FREE CELL PHONE PAID BY ME FROM TAX ON MY CELL PHONE!
b) 40 million Americans on food stamps get $200/month in free food.
c)FREE RENT...
about 2.1 million households (6 million) use Section 8 the Housing Choice Voucher program, pays a large portion of the rents and utilities of or the Housing Choice Voucher Program up to $1,000 /month in FREE housing...
So these people get
=== $ 5,666 in EIC cash,
=== $12,000 free housing ,
=== $ 2,400 free food,
=== $ 1,200 in free cell phone plus
=== $ 5,000 a year in free health care from Medicaid.
So this is about $26,000 a year in FREE MONEY, free goods and free services...
THE '"POOR"!!!
The free cell phone link you posted was from 2009. Has that program been cut? No one here gets a free cell phone. They get a landline connection with limited minutes and no frills for $20/month here.
They don't get much choice in the housing. They're allowed 1 bedroom for the head of household & spouse, and one bedroom to be shared per gender, meaning up to 3 bedrooms. They aren't given a voucher and told, "You can spend this much." They are given a list of rental properties that are pre-approved. At present here there's a two-year waiting list to get into a section 8 house. The landlords routinely overcharge the system.
$200/month in free food? $50/week? My, how generous. A family of 4 can go hog wild on ramen noodles.
Three people on my street died because their medicaid was underfunded. One was a woman that died in terrible pain from cancer, the docs refused to operate on her because they wouldn't get paid enough. One doc gave her morphine for about a month, then said he could no longer afford it. Another was an older man that should have been in a nursing home. It wasn't the stroke that killed him, it was exposure - he dropped in his unheated garage in 40-degree cold. The third was a 5-year-old boy with a tumor. Again, the docs refused to operate without the cash. But hey, it saved your tax dollars, so that's great news!
The EIC is for the working poor. I guess only the 1% should be subsidized, after all, they need the money so badly. Too much is never enough.