The Welfare State Becomes More “Efficient”

So I’m waiting on a checkout line at the grocery store when I notice that next to the cash register, there is a machine that is reading WIC checks from the customer in front of me. I then notice that EVERY CASHIER has next to their cash register one of these machines. I’m starting to think the worst. Just to be sure, I ask my cashier if the check reader she is using is for all checks or just WIC checks. As I strongly suspected, it was just for WIC checks. (By the way, they’ve been in the store for a while; this was just the first time I became aware of their specific purpose.)

[When I first noticed the WIC debit cards years ago, I thought how “efficient” Gunvernment was becoming, i.e., replacing food coupons with one piece of plastic–it makes it so much easier to dole out the dole: better record keeping plus it replaces environmentally-unfriendly paper coupons.]

So now the Gunvernment (or, perhaps, a private manufacturer?) is taking “efficiency” one step further with machines that are produced that only read WIC checks. Of course, this is more inefficient–at least the WIC debit cards can be read by regular card-reading machines.

Unbelievable. Welfare has become so prevalent in this country over the last 40 years (I’m sure it has “nothing” to do with Tricky Dick closing the foreign gold window) that, now, there are dedicated machines in private sector stores to facilitate even more the Federal Gunvernment’s ever-growing, wealth-destroying welfare system.

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1:35 pm on March 25, 2009