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A Virginia lawmaker has filed a bill establishing new rules for government benefits based on a news report from New Hampshire.
A store clerk in New Hampshire says she was fired because she wouldn’t let a customer buy cigarettes with a debit card for government assistance. Del. Riley Ingram in Virginia promptly files a bill to bar Temporary Assistance to Needy Families recipients from using their benefits for alcohol, tobacco, gambling or strippers.
How can the sound of an employee getting chopped in New England be heard in the Old Dominion? Via Fox News.
September 12, 2012 - 6:20 AM
I think it interesting that this delegate decides the way to keep an employee from being fired is to make life harder on those so desperate they need social support.
Why doesn’t he focus his attentions on the proximate cause of this employee being let go, which is the ability of the employer to hire/fire at-will?
You know why don’t you? It’s because this delegate is one of those people who believe (despite the evidence) that you get what you deserve and deserve what you get. He’s blind to the idea that companies can be and maybe should be regulated to some extent. He’s indifferent to the plight of the working class.
In short, he’s a Republican.
I’m sure that Ingram will pay for the cost of this out of his pocket. Or he’ll just reduce the money families can use for food or rent to pay for it.
What a sanctimonious twit.
Maybe we need restrictions on what journalists can report.
@3- hahaha, bingo. Is the press free if it’s bought and paid for? They’re salivating now with it being election season. Ratings, readership and ad buys. The media loves election season.
So they can buy smokes and alcohol and go to casinos with the Welfare money. Interesting.
Since when is it wrong for people to learn about issues from the news and then petition their government representatives to address those issues? Sounds like the free press and democracy at work to me.
LOL, the media is a business too! If there truly were no “restrictions on what journalists can report”, a TP/GOP candidate would never get elected.
Your point would be true tass, except I believe the point is that Del. Riley Ingram, went straight away to writing the legislation without doing any of that old fashioned “due diligence”, and his bill to right a wrong may cost more than the wrong in the first place. In these economic times, that should matter. Actually, it should matter all of the time. We have entirely too many laws just like this one, done for political or payback reason, too costly and hard to live with and with potential to make the situation worse, etc.
I maintain, the LEAST we can ask for is informed and diligent representatives who do not make things harder, more costly or more intrusive than they have to be just because they do not “like” something someone does.
Sandi Saunders, then the problem is with the elected official, not with the constituent or the media, which was the focus of the editorial.
It’s more a matter of asking us to pay for someone to smoke, drink and do drugs. Or in this case, paying someone with our money to vote Democrat in order to keep our money coming to them.
Oh yeah Henry, because if you vote TP/GOP no money will flow to anyone and none of us will “pay for” something we don’t like! Now that is just a laugh.
Yes tass, it is on the legislator to “separate the wheat from the chaff” and few bother IMO. Which is what I thought the point of the commentary was. This blog alone has shown that citizens and activists only see what they want to see and the media reports and pushes what sells. Our elected representatives should be better than that. They are not.