Walmart, Welfare and WTF!

Full Disclosure- I have never been a fan of Walmart for a variety of reasons.  I try not to shop there.  However, I am fully aware that I have the financial means to make that choice.

Once again, I heard a legislator on a talk show talking about food stamps.  He even ducked a question about why conservatives seem to keep bringing up food stamps and welfare for poor people, yet they are not addressing corporate welfare.  That got me thinking, how many of Walmart's employees are on public assistance versus how much in corporate subsidies do they receive.  I picked Walmart because they are huge and there is a lot of data out there on them.

Ohio seemed to be the easiest state to get the numbers so lets take a look at my neighbor.
In 2012, the Ohio State Department of Job and Family services found that 16,098 Walmart employees and family were on Medicaid and 14,799 were on food stamps. Walmart earned the dubious distinction of being number one (McDonalds came in second) for employers whose employees are on public assistance.  One caveat, these numbers do not differentiate between full time and part time employees.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/1niscE8_qdt3upqA0Aqg8vOS1APuzOvDGh9AV4UOiXwuve9mJW9SQPucu0Gtz/edit

Now lets take a look at corporate subsidies for Walmart in Ohio.
According to data compiled by Good Jobs First:

Good Jobs First has compiled data on Wal-Mart subsidies in the following cities

Cleveland/Steelyard Commons, OH : $4.16 million
Columbus, OH : $2.6 million
Grove City, OH : $19 million
Island Creek Township (Winterville), OH : more than $9.2 million
Lancaster, OH : $1.26 million
Moraine (Dayton), OH : more than $157,000
Ravenna, OH : $1.3 million
Streetsboro, OH : $491,000
Washington Court House, OH : more than $8.3 million
West Chester, OH : $3.4 million


So to be clear, its easier to demonize a worker who is on public assistance than it is to demonize a corporation who is getting millions in corporate subsidies.

                                                                           VS

Just the facts....Jack!

I have been thinking a lot about welfare and US citizen's perceptions of who is on welfare.  I would love to see someone do a study on how much money we think we spend on welfare, who we think is on welfare, who we think is on food stamps, how long we think they are on them versus the reality.  I have a feeling, judging off of posts I'm seeing on social media, that people think there are huge numbers of welfare queens.
Lets take a look at the facts.
4.1% of the US population is on Welfare.  Not including food stamps or unemployment insurance the US government spends 131.9 billion on welfare. Only 19.6% of   of welfare recipients are on welfare for longer than 5 years.  In 2011 14% of the US population was on food stamps. The US government spent 71.8 billion on the food stamp program.  In order to qualify for food stamps you can not make more than $1000/month.  The average monthly benefit was $133.85.  47% of people who were on food stamps in 2010 were under 18 and 8% were the elderly.  Less than 10% of people on food stamps are also on welfare.
Sources
http://www.statisticbrain.com/welfare-statistics/
http://www.statisticbrain.com/food-stamp-statistics/
http://www.fns.usda.gov/ora/MENU/Published/snap/FILES/Participation/2010CharacteristicsSummary.pdf

 Are there welfare queens out there? Of course there are!  Does it piss me off that people have learned to game the system and are sitting around on their asses while I'm working mine off?  Hell yes it does!  But the reality is that the number of people who are on welfare for a long time is low and a lot of those are people who do have a legitimate need.  Are there more reforms we can make to welfare and food stamps?  Of course there are.  But before we get our collective panties in a bunch over a few pieces of shit, lets get realistic about who really is on welfare and food stamps.  Welfare, food stamps and unemployment are meant to be safety nets and not safety trampolines.  The fact is that the majority of people really do use them as nets.

Lets start with the facts - Wealth Inequality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QPKKQnijnsM

I have been seeing a lot of people posting things about Welfare and Food Stamps and it got me thinking about what the facts and numbers are really saying about who really controls the purse strings and who is really receiving government assistance.   I thought I'd start with wealth inequality and go from there.

10 Common sense responses to Newtown

1. Promote gun safety and responsibility. The fact is that background checks would not have prevented Newtown shooter from getting a hold of the guns that he used to commit mass murder. I don’t know what, if any, methods his mother used to secure her guns but they obviously were not enough. If someone owns gun(s), they have a responsibility to make sure they are secure and don’t end up in the hands of someone that should not have them. I would like to think that a national campaign of PSA’s on gun safety would be a starting point.

2. Pass universal background checks. While universal background checks will not prevent every person from having a gun who should not have one, they will make it harder. I can’t drive a motor vehicle without a license there is no reason I should be able to buy a gun without first passing a background check.

3. Make sure those that should not be able to buy a gun (felons, mentally ill, etc.) are identified and placed in a national database that is updated frequently. Establish a process so that those that have gotten the help they need and no longer are a danger to society may have their names removed.

4. Strengthen the ability of the ATF by repealing the Tiahrt amendments and any other restriction that prevents the current laws from being enforced.

5. Encourage states to pass laws the punish those that have illegal guns. I would like to see those laws modeled after Project Exile. I lived in Richmond, VA during the initial enactment of Project Exile and I remember the difference that it made.

6. Encourage states to make the punishment for selling an illegal gun stiffer than owning one. For example, an illegal gun will get you 5 years in VA, selling a known illegal gun should get you 10 years.

7. Encourage the movie and video industries to tighten their ratings in regards to violence and promote better parent education and dialogue on children and violent imagery.

8. While we certainly need to cut our federal spending, please make sure it is not done at the expense of mental health services. Now is the time to increase the services that need to be provided to those that need our help.

9. Establish a maximum limit on magazine clips and outlaw armor piercing ammunition. While I have the right to defend myself, I don’t need 30 rounds to do so and I certainly don’t need armor piercing bullets.

10. I am not a gun enthusiast nor am I a gun expert. However, I do believe that if there is a weapon that is being sold in the U.S. whose sole purpose is a weapon of war, designed to kill on a large scale than it should be outlawed. I do not know if any of the “assault-style” rifles fit that description. I realize the reality of any legislation that outlaws a gun does not have much of a chance of passing; however I believe that weapons of war belong solely in the hands of our warriors.

I think my parents were right (on movie violence)

A couple of days ago, I observed an online conversation between some good friends of mine. A friend stated that she was at Zero Dark Thirty with her ~8 year old son. Another friend made the comment that she allowed her kids to see violent movies but not ones with sex. The thought then crossed my mind that this is exactly what should be part of the national conversation that needs to be had about the role that media plays in our American culture of violence.

When I was a child I wasn’t allowed to watch very violent movies. To this day, I very rarely do. However, I was allowed to watch movies that had nudity and some adult/sexual content. I can even remember my mother sending me upstairs once when she felt like the movie was too “adult” for me.

 I think my parents had it right and my friends have it wrong. I am not saying that my friends are bad parents, on the contrary they are great parents, they love their children and they really want what’s best for them. I suspect that there are a lot of parents that agree with them. I just think that when we as a society think its ok to expose our children to movies that glorify violence (like Saw, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc) or a movie with (at least in my mind) the very adult content of torture over a movie that has a tasteful sex scene or some adult content than we have a problem.

For the record, I am not advocating that we allow our kids to watch porn (although a lot of them already are) and there are a lot of movies that are rated R for sexual content that are not appropriate for kids. However, maybe, just maybe parents need to think about what seeing all that senseless violence can do to a child. A movie is rated R for a reason and while we can’t control what movies parents show to their children at home, maybe its time to not allow small children in R movies or maybe its time for more movies to get an R rating for violence instead of a PG-13.

I am not saying that watching violent movies or playing violent video games is the sole cause of what makes a mass murderer but isn’t Sandy Hook enough of a reason to take a closer look? Every kid is different and it really is up to the parent to determine if the child is ready to see any form of adult content. However, its time we take a hard look at what our children are watching or playing and the effect that senseless violence has on them. Its time we talk about the responsibility of parents to ensure that children who are not capable of understanding the difference between fantasy and reality don’t live in a fantasy land that is filled with blood and guts. This isn’t something that we as a society should legislate but I really hope that the next time your child wants to see a violent movie you might just stop and consider what all these violent images are doing to your child’s soul. I find it ironic that European countries where sexual content is everywhere and violence is not do not as a general rule, have the culture of violence that the U.S. does. Maybe we could learn something from them.

Common Sense vs. the Paranoid

The head of the NRA recently proposed that we should provide some form of an armed guard at every one of our schools. I have just one question for him. How did that work out at Columbine? There was an armed guard there that day and he did exchange fire with the shooters but he was repelled by their superior fire power. Are they saying that every school should have someone with some form of a semi-automatic or even better an automatic? Because, if they were honest about it, that’s where our society would be headed if we follow their advice. We’ll keep arming our guards’ one better than the last shooting, in hopes of preventing the next one, but we will never succeed.

Another fact the NRA is not being honest about is that most people do not have the training to stop a shooter like that. Most people, in the face of violence, will run away or hide. Sure, we like to think that having a gun will automatically make us a bad ass, but it doesn’t. It takes training to counter most peoples’ natural inclination to run away from violence and instead run towards it. That kind of training is something the majority of us do not have. The truth is that there are not enough sheepdogs in our country to place an armed guard in every school and most sheep have no desire to undergo the training necessary to become a sheepdog.

The conversation this nation should be having is one of common sense, safety and responsibility. Instead, we seem to be letting the paranoid dominate our discussions. I was told that the reason that Americans need high capacity magazines is because our military has them. They also have drones, tanks, nuclear weapons, etc. If we follow that line of thought, should we then allow everyone to have those as well? I would hope that the majority of Americans have enough common sense to realize how paranoid those who make this argument are.

Why are we allowing the small (but vocal) minority that believe that everyone should have the ability to arm themselves like our military and that every law that concerns the regulation of guns is a gateway to banning all guns to dominate our national conversation? It is time to take our nation back from the nuts and pass some common sense measures about guns. It is time to address our mental health problem in this country and look for solutions to keep guns out of people’s hands that have no business possessing them. It is time to fix the loopholes in our background checks and make sure the national registry is updated regularly. It is time to ban the sale of high capacity magazines. And finally it is time to pass a common sense law keeping weapons of war in the hands of our warriors and not our civilians.

The beginning of a civil conversation about guns, mental health and our society

To start with let me be clear, I do not want to take your guns (well most of you, anyway), nor am I saying that guns kill people (they don’t, people do), but what in God’s name does it take to have a civil conversation about the steps that we as a society can take to try ensure that tragedies such as Sandy Hook do not happen again? What steps do we have to take to ensure that our babies don’t die in a hail of gunfire, whether it was from a legal, registered gun in a quaint New England town or an illegal gun bought on some street corner in a city?

There is a beautifully written piece circulating on the internet that was written by a woman with a mentally ill son who has tried to kill her. It brings up the issue of mental health and our healthcare system’s inability to appropriately address it. I honestly think that changing the way we treat the mentally ill is a huge part of the conversation. However, I think it also brings up another issue and that is personal responsibility. This mother, knowing that her son was violent had collected all the sharp objects in the house (i.e. potential weapons) and carried them with her. There is a lesson here, which we as a society, could learn from her. If you have a loved one that you know or suspect has mental issues, why would you have a weapon of any kind unsecured in your house? Isn’t it your responsibility, whether you are a gun owner, a knife collector, etc. to make sure that someone who has no business being around such weapons can not access them?

 Why is it that we can’t even begin to discuss the issues of personal responsibility, weapon safety and the mental ill? Just like we encourage parents to lock up their firearms around small children, shouldn’t we be encouraging people to secure their weapons to keep them out of the hands of mentally ill or unstable? I would like to see the NRA and the gun control lobby come together to produce Public Service Announcements that encourage and educate people on the steps they should take to be a responsible gun owner.

 In 1997, I lived in Richmond, VA. A new program called Project Exile had just begun. The purpose of Project Exile was to get illegal guns off the street. It was supported by the NRA and the Brady Campaign. I remember it vividly for two reasons. The first was the brown public buses that had painted in HUGE white letters on their sides “an illegal gun will get you 5 years.” The second reason was that I lived in a downtown neighborhood that had seen its fair share of gun violence and the police officers in the neighborhood told me that since the program’s enactment that they had noticed the drug dealers were not carrying guns as often as they had in the past and that shootings were down. Project Exile has now become Virginia Exile. (http://www.co.henrico.va.us/com-atty/virginia-exile.html I believe that programs such as these are blueprints for the kinds of laws that are needed nationwide.

I believe that the majority of gun owners in this nation are responsible, law abiding citizens who have every right to own a gun, whether it is for hunting, self defense, sports, etc. As a survivor of a senseless act of violence, I will be the first to say that people have the right to self defense. As someone who has earned two belts in the self defense system Krav Maga, I also believe that self defense is something that is learned and practiced. The NRA and many other organizations have excellent curricula on gun safety, gun knowledge, etc. that I would like to see every prospective gun owner be encouraged to take prior to owning a gun. To be honest, I would like to see it become mandatory. If you need to pass a driving test in order to drive a car, shouldn’t you be required to pass a basic gun knowledge and safety test?

I sincerely hope and pray that in the coming days and months this nation can have a civil conversation about the tragic events in Newtown, CT and all of the others that have occurred since Columbine and how we can prevent them in the future. I will be honest; I do not have much faith in our polarized political system’s ability to get much accomplished. However, I do have faith that if enough reasonable people make their voices heard that our politicians can no longer kick the can down the road. There are a lot of reasonable ideas that should be addressed. My personal belief is that gun safety and education is a starting point but I would also like to see assault weapons addressed as well as high capacity magazines. There also needs to be a national conversation on mental health and how we address it in this society. I hope people will call their elected representatives and let their voices be heard. We can not afford to be silent any longer.