When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, both of my parents lost their jobs at the same time and we had to go on welfare.
It wasn’t exactly something that either of them were proud of from what I remember. It lasted about three or four months before one of them found a job and the other parent found one about two weeks after that.
When you’re a kid, you tend to know that changes are going on with the family finances even if you aren’t directly told.
Give you an example or two. The first thing that I remember is that any and all trips to restaurants were cut out entirely. The second thing was that while we still had cable, it was the barest of the bare. All of the premium channels were gone.
No trips to the movies. No big anything that cost a whole lot of money for the longest time.
As a matter of fact, whenever we did go grocery shopping there would be so many coupons in my mom’s coupon book that she had to have someone else carry it because it wouldn’t fit in her purse anymore.
She hated the idea that she needed help from the government to feed our family. She got off of welfare as soon as she possibly could.
The idea that there are some people that revel in getting as much money as they can from the government without doing anything for it is beyond me.
Take the care of welfare queen Mandy Cowie. She has been on welfare for decades now, and has about ten children from five different men.
This of course ups the amount she gets from the government every year, and at this point she gets somewhere around thirty-five thousand dollars in addition to housing.
You would think that she would be spending this money on her kids, or maybe bettering herself.
Nope, she spends about three thousand dollars on tattoos every year.
When I see stuff like this, I tend to think of what my mom would have done with half that amount.
We would have eaten for months.