This is what's wrong with our system today.

I spotted this up in Frederick, MD the other day. I actually had to drive around the block and take another look.

Yep. Rather than subsist on basic staple foods, today's welfare recipients can now use their EBT cards to buy shrimp, lobster and crab cakes even though many of the working people whose salaries are taxed to fund those EBT cards cannot afford to buy luxuries like that.

So why would anyone on welfare ever want to give that up for a job that requires them to actually get up every morning and go work 40 hours a week at some job? Heck, it's so much easier to just sit on your couch and watch Oprah on the flat-screen TV while munching fried oysters, knowing that all you ever have to do to keep the free cheese coming is to show up at a polling place every couple of years and cast your ballot for every candidate with a big "D" after his or her name.

This is why welfare needs time limits on it, and/or a requirement that the recipient work or go to school while collecting it, and in the interim, EBT cards that were intended to look like regular debit cards specifically to shield users from any possible embarrassment related to being supported by those around him or her need to be done away with completely. Instead, let's turn their support back over to churches and other charities willing to hand out staple food and clothing and other essentials. Maybe if being on welfare meant making sandwiches from loaves of generic white bread and government cheese and spending your days in job training programs or a minimum-wage job at McDonalds, more people would be inclined to try to leave poverty behind and work a bit harder to obtain a better lifestyle.

But since history has shown us that those who earn their own money tend to vote for those who let them keep more of it, a mass exodus of people off of the welfare rolls could really kick a dent in the Democrat Party's voting base. It's much better and safer for the Dems to just keep giving people free phones and cash cards to buy seafood, and expanding eligibility for those programs to ensure that the people getting something for nothing always comprise more than 51% of the voters in any given area. And it's working. Now all that they need to do is make millions of illegals legal and give them the vote while making them eligible for all of these goodies, and we'll be irreversibly on our way to the sort of country depicted in Atlas Shrugged, a country where only self-deluded fools and suckers keep working and inventing and achieving.

I just hope that it's not finalized before I can retire, buy myself a rural homestead, and get my savings out of the economy.