Lemmings have nothing on many Americans
We can’t control what others do and we can’t stop misfortune from striking. But we can control our own actions. Those who are financially prudent will most likely enjoy success, even if events don’t always go their way.
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
And, with respect to SNAP, keep in mind that many states have eliminated asset tests for certain programs, where they use eligibility to authorize SNAP. Bottom line, a number of states allow individuals with substantial savings, high-value retirement accounts, and multiple vehicles to qualify for food stamps, so long as they keep their income below their state’s maximum income thresholds. It has also produced absurd outcomes, including lottery winners and millionaires receiving food stamps. For example:
An early retiree in Minnesota with millions of dollars in assets received over $6,000 in SNAP benefits over 19 months.
In 2011, a man from Michigan won $2 million in the state lottery, but still received SNAP benefits. That same year, a 25-year-old Michigan woman won a $1 million jackpot and kept receiving benefits.
In 2014, a $1 million lottery winner in Massachusetts continued to have an EBT card in his name.
In 2021, 13 lottery-winning households in North Carolina spent a combined $40,585 in SNAP benefits after the substantial lottery winnings were claimed.
In just 13 states, 65,000 lottery winners ($4,250 or more) received SNAP benefits from 2019 to 2023, including a $2 million jackpot winner in South Dakota in 2021.
While these examples are uncommon, they point to a larger structural issue.
So, perhaps SNAP was once well managed, but, increasingly enables absurd outcomes – today’s crap … just like families of 4 with incomes that far exceed 400% of the federal poverty level (
$128,600) qualifying for taxpayer subsidized coverage where the median full time worker income is only ~$62,000.LikeLike
Just like seniors keeping income low, using Roth accounts to avoid IRMAA premiums.
When there are real problems as you mentioned they need to be fixed, but not with a broad brush that affects all.
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Why do they pass laws that favor their factions? Beyond buying votes so that they can remain in office, some would say “quid pro quo” (something for something) baby!
Some members of Congress, especially the leadership, are pigs at the trough.
Much the same can be said for certain Presidents, who entered office with modest levels of wealth, and left with accumulations of assets in the tens of millions, or with guaranteed book deals and speaking fees in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
From one recent study:
Using transaction-level data on US congressional stock trades, lawmakers who later ascend to leadership positions perform similarly to matched peers beforehand but outperform them by 47 percentage points annually after ascension. Leaders’ superior performance arises through two mechanisms. The political influence channel is reflected in higher returns when their party controls the chamber, sales of stocks preceding regulatory actions, and purchase of stocks whose firms receiving more government contracts and favorable party support on bills. The corporate access channel is reflected in stock trades that predict subsequent corporate news and greater returns on donor-owned or home-state firms.
See: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34524
See also: https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/joe-biden-is-struggling-to-cash-in-on-his-presidency/ar-AA1MChv2
I was at SHRM’s annual conference this year, and, many in attendance left long before President Biden spoke.
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Al Lindquist
sure was nice that the country was not divided 4 years ago–the corpse did a great deal to bring us all together calling us racists, bigots, and other many other epithets.
I thought it was the loons on the left who blamed the woes of the country on those with assets–your looney friends are now bragging about being socialists and promising us “free” everything–talk about envy and jealousy–you probably will fall for their garbage like you did for the lies you fell for when the corpse was sleeping 10-hours a day.
it’s true there is no fraud and scams unless you are in Minnesota and the goofy VP candidate is governor and seemingly responsible for billions being stolen–even the employees of the departments looted are furious with that clown.
history might rightly judge him harshly–just think how you and your buddies with your Hitler photos and Nazi talk might have led a crazy man 3000 miles to D.C. to shoot and kill one soldier and seriously wound another.
the Orange man says lots of inane and stupid things but nothing what we hear from you and yours on the left- -just check out AOC and her band of crazies–the Gov. of Il. and the real crazy Mayor of Chicago–what about Maxine Waters the one with a bird’s nest on her head– and what they say about ICE and the Nat’l Guard–any surprise that someone is shooting at them–
you really ought to think twice before you continue with the Hitler garbage–a man your age should have more sense–hate is never a positive and you seem to be taking on the character of what you write about.
only thing worse than Trump would be the loons on the left who now take a full throated defense of the killer of United Health Care CEO and the rest of their crazy ideas.
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You worry about the wrong things, it’s not what he says, but what he does. If this is the MAGA world you want, you are welcome to it, but it’s sad it affects everyone.
If the so-called left is so bad, make sure you don’t use any of the programs they put in place.
NEW YORK – Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the federal government has slashed approximately $2.7 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health, including a proposed 37% cut to the National Cancer Institute.
The Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium – a network that has spent 26 years developing experimental treatments for the leading cause of cancer death in children – learned in August that it would lose its federal funding.
Clinical trials have stopped accepting new patients. Families whose children were weeks away from experimental treatments are scrambling for alternatives.
But much more than cancer research is on Trump’s chopping block, including the architecture of international peace. Trump has announced plans to halt security assistance programs for Europe’s eastern flank, even as Russian drones violate NATO airspace.
His defense secretary, former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has called European NATO allies “pathetic” and dismissed them as “freeloaders.” Josep Borrell, the European Union’s former foreign policy chief, recently declared that the United States “can no longer be considered an ally of Europe.” After 80 years of leadership in the transatlantic alliance, America is walking away.
Trump has also accelerated fossil fuel production while canceling $7.6 billion in clean-energy projects. On day one of his second term, he declared a “national energy emergency” – even though the United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer.
And although 2024 was almost certainly the hottest year on record, with global temperatures on track to exceed 1.5º Celsius (the threshold scientists say will trigger catastrophic climate effects), Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has moved to repeal all emissions limits on power plants.
Nor has Trump spared American farmers, who gave him more than 75% of their votes in 2024. His tariffs have been devastating: soybean farmers are under extreme financial stress, and farm bankruptcies have reached a five-year high. As one Kansas rancher said when Trump floated the idea of buying Argentinian beef for US markets: “an absolute betrayal.”
Dec 1, 2025 STEPHEN HOLMES Project Syndicate
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“… If the so-called left is so bad, make sure you don’t use any of the programs they put in place. …”
When Congress buys votes by passing legislation that taxes specific Americans who disagree with certain policies to favor others, the rent seekers, we are only a short hop, skip and a jump from “killing the golden goose” – capitalism.
Try James Madison on for size from Federalist #10:
“… Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. …
Complaints are every where heard … that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties; and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority. …
By a faction I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves. The diversity in the faculties of men from which the rights of property originate, is not less an insuperable obstacle to an uniformity of interests. The protection of these faculties is the first object of government. From the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property, the possession of different degrees and kinds of property immediately results: And from the influence of these on the sentiments and views of the respective proprietors, ensues a division of the society into different interests and parties.
The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them every where brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society.
But the most common and durable source of factions, has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold, and those who are without property, have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination.
No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause; because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity. With equal, nay with greater reason, a body of men, are unfit to be both judges and parties, at the same time; yet, what are many of the most important acts of legislation, but so many judicial determinations, not indeed concerning the rights of single persons, but concerning the rights of large bodies of citizens; and what are the different classes of legislators, but advocates and parties to the causes which they determine?
The apportionment of taxes on the various descriptions of property, is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality, yet there is perhaps no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party, to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they over-burden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets.
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So SS and Medicare, SNAP, labor laws, etc are only there because Congress wanted to buy votes? If “empowered” all Americans have the ability to be self sufficient if they only had more money in their pocket? You really believe that?
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“So SS and Medicare, SNAP, labor laws, etc are only there because Congress wanted to buy votes? If “empowered” all Americans have the ability to be self sufficient if they only had more money in their pocket? You really believe that?”
Social Security (1935), Medicare (1964), National Labor Relations Act (1935), Taft Hartley Act (1947).
Times change.
Medicare Modernization Act (2003), PPACA (2010), Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), American Rescue Act (2021), Social Security Fairness Act (2024), One Big Beautiful Bill (2025) were all vote buying exercises that favored factions who would vote for the incumbent President and others in their party while assigning the majority of the expense on others, or on those too young to vote or generations yet unborn.
Yes, I really believe. I really believe that President George W. Bush, President Obama, President Trump and President Biden put in place legislation (Medicare Part D (Bush), Health Reform (Obama), tax cuts (Trump), COVID era super dollop of subsidies for Exchange health coverage and unwarranted Medicaid expansion AFTER the COVID pandemic ended plus the Butch Lewis multiemployer plan bailout (Biden), improvements in Social Security benefits for state and local government workers who didn’t pay Social Security taxes on much of their wage income (Biden), extension of 2017 tax cuts (Trump)) that would buy votes and send the bill to Americans too young to vote and generations unborn. It is how we added $32+ Trillion to our national debt since implementation of Medicare Part D in 2006.
They put those new entitlements, new spending into place to favor their faction, to buy votes, sending the bill to unknowing Americans, or knowing that they would run deficits (because there were no provisions for sufficient revenue raising from those who would benefit) – instead, they sent the bill to be paid by those of other factions, or generations too young to vote and the unborn.
What reason do you give for the 80+% of Americans who respond to improperly worded poll questoins that they believe the COVID-ERA super duper dollop of Exchange subsidies should be continued – even though they only apply to 20 Million Americans?
https://paragoninstitute.org/paragon-prognosis/the-aca-subsidy-myth-misleading-the-polls-and-the-public/
Even when you ask the question honestly, 47% still believe the super duper dollop of Exchange subsidies should be made permanent. Why? It is because no current taxpayer is asked to pay taxes to specifically fund those subsidies, no current American is shouldering the cost.
makes you wonder if many of that 47% are made up of the same 47% of voters mentioned by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2012/sep/18/mitt-romney/romney-says-47-percent-americans-pay-no-income-tax/
Bottom line, Republicans and Democrats are more than happy to buy votes from their faction and send the bill to others. Worse, many Americans embrace a variant of the Wimpy version of federal government, “… someone else will gladly pay you tomorrow for a subsidy I receive today. …”
Go ahead. Tell me how the Social Security Fairness Act was anything but favoring the faction that almost always overwhemingly vote Democratic, without at least requiring them to pay FICA taxes on all their wages going forward, sending the bill to those who have and continue to fund Social Security by paying taxes on all of their wages – concurrently accelerating the date when the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted.
Go ahead. Show me how Biden decided on the Social Security Fairness Act and the Butch Lewis bailout for multiemployer pension plans, how he selected those changes among all the other opportunities out there, and did so for any reason other than benefitting those who reliably vote Democratic.
Times change.
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I wish that the things you posed weren’t true, but they are all too true.
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