Written by Lorian Eades   

I just heard another wild statement about freeloading welfare recipients and it started me thinking...

A waitress who claimed to be a Tea Party member said, "I can't afford to eat lobster, filet mignon and crab legs like these freeloaders" (referring to SNAP recipients).

Well, SNAP (food stamp) recipients can indeed legally spend their benefits on lobster, filet mignon and crab legs.

Here in NC, SNAP pays $124.59 a month per person. The national average is $133.85.

Our freeloading NC gourmand could buy equal amounts of lobster, filet mignon and crab legs.

Item......................... Price/lb (on sale)...... Calories/lb
Lobster.....................$12.99.....................540
Filet Mignon............. $15.99.....................624
King Crab Legs.........$18.99.....................300

Our societal slug could consume a total of 2130 calories per month with NC SNAP support or 2288 calories per month with the US average SNAP support. That is only 71 and 76 calories a day, respectively.

A human being needs 1000-1200 calories to remain healthy. More to actually do work.

Of course we know that a human being can survive for a short time ( a few months) on 300 calories a day. Some anorexics consume food at that level.

Toward the end of WWII, inmates in Nazi concentration camps were fed around 500 calories a day. In better times The Third Reich was feeding them 1000-1700 calories a day.

I find it difficult to believe that people receiving SNAP assistance would voluntarily live on less than 15% of death camp calories to enjoy luxury food, but then I'm not a member of the Tea Party.

Here in NC, we had 1,653,501 people receiving SNAP assistance as of March 2012 - about 17% of the state's citizens. For the US, 46,405,204 people were on SNAP - only 14% of the nation's citizens but the majority are children.

With those numbers in mind, I do hope the Tea Party will reconsider their stance on this problem. Rather than complain about SNAP recipients, perhaps a perspective derived from George W Bush's compassionate conservative approach should be implemented:

It appears to me that we could put quite a dent in our obesity problem by simply limiting SNAP purchases to lobster, filet mignon and crab legs. Moreover, that level of starvation would certainly help motivate the adult freeloaders to show a little self-respect and backbone and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The really lazy slugs could just line our street intersections begging for handouts and holding up cardboard signs. "Will vote for food." would be a good one.