[TheRealThing]

You forgot to mention lottery tickets- beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets. To the professional non-working, able bodied "poor," those are all necessities.

I cringe when I watch people checking out using their "free" food card and then shelling out cash for lottery tickets and luxury items for which taxpayers are not yet on the hook.

You and me both. The truth is in the case of government as graft and waste exponentially consume our extorted generosity, it's far easier to just keep increasing taxes than to put forth any meaningful effort to manage those taxes with any degree of integrity. The vast majority of the Kings and Queens of both Houses, are too arrogant and self impressed to care about anything but themselves. And the deepstate are similarly smitten. Nobody's watching the store.

Therefore the very questionable apologetics by which welfare proceeds are distributed and to whom. In any case, I've been numb to Sci-Fi's brand of threadbare and faux concerns for quite some time now.