AMERICAN DREAM TURNS INTO A NIGHTMARE FOR MANY

The American dream has always been to have a good job, drive a nice car, own a good home and take nice vacations. That dream has turned into a nightmare for 45.8 million Americans who now depend on food stamps. The number for the State of Alabama alone is 1.762 million. That’s right, 15 percent of Americans and 36 percent of the people in Alabama are depending on food stamps for their subsistence.

I was discussing this shocking news with my son. He questioned whether all of those food stamp recipients were really in need of the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. His wife is a nurse at a large Houston hospital that serves a lot of Medicaid patients. She recalled one Medicaid patient who was upset because the hospital did not offer its patients Wi-Fi, pulling out an expensive smart phone and hollering about not being able to use it. Upon discharge, another Medicaid patient was picked up by her husband driving a Cadillac Escalade.

OK, we can question why people with expensive smart phones driving Cadillac Escalades are getting Medicaid. We all know there is fraud in Medicaid, just as there is fraud in Medicare. But are the Wi-Fi and Cadillac owners typical Medicaid recipients? Certainly not!

All this reminds me of the 1950s and 60s when it was common to hear about those ‘Welfare Queens’ driving up to the welfare office in a Cadillac to collect their welfare checks. While there were a few welfare recipients who drove a Cadillac, the fact is that the vast majority of welfare recipients, if they had a car at all, drove what we now call clunkers. Another tale going around then was that most welfare recipients owned a color TV set, a very expensive item at the time.

As a cop and later as a parole agent during those years, I entered the homes of many welfare recipients. I can tell you that I never encountered a color TV set in those homes. While many had black-and-white TV sets, those sets were small and inexpensive. Nor can I recall a single welfare recipient with an expensive car.

Today a lot of former wage earners have been seeking gainful employment for many months without finding a job. Some have lost their homes and are up the creek without a paddle. For them the American dream has turned into a nightmare. When you add these unfortunate souls to the people who have always been mired in poverty, you arrive at that alarming number of people who depend on food stamps for their subsistence.

More than 20 million Americans can’t find full-time jobs and a good number of them, after months of futility, have given up looking for work. Many of us can remember this line from Hamlet: There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. When there are 45.8 million people - or one in seven households - depending on food stamps, with 1.762 million people in Alabama alone, there is something rotten in America!