So, making our way through North Carolina to visit with friends, on the 'Never gonna drive through Atlanta ever again' route.
NPR on the radio, 'cuz country radio is like fingernails on a chalkboard these days.
Floating up through the speakers, a constant flow of polite talk on innocuous subjects, competing with the road noise, and suddenly we hear someone being interviewed about State of California cash cards issued to welfare recipients being used to withdraw cash in the ATMs of over half the casinos in California.
What???!!! Mrs. Os and her stunned husband listen in disbelief as Jack Dolan of the Los Angeles Times calmly (and wittily) tells the tale of what he found by checking the publicly available records.
Of course, the Guhvernator is all over it, by gosh and by golly.
Turns out, 1.8 million dollars flew out California's door via these ATM's since October 2009.
Now, given the fact that California hands out some 6.6 billion dollars in cash assistance every year, 1.8 million is really in the statistical realm of a rounding error. Or, one can contemplate the fact that 1.8 million is a drop in the bucket of the breathtaking 6.6 billion welfare tab that California spends every year.
Six billion six thousand million, heading out the door, most of the money borrowed from the rest of the world.
It's not about the money. It's about a culture where this sort of behavior is chatted about cheerily on NPR, in almost an amused tone of voice.
The days off in Florida were all too brief. It took two days just to begin to get caught up on sleep from the previous month's non-stop work. OS and the sainted Mrs. OS have spent the past twenty years working and parenting, parenting and working, and working and working and working...and paying taxes...and paying taxes...and see government at all levels spend more and more, and give the money we earned and the taxes we paid to people who take it to casinos for gambling.
The words to describe the feelings just won't line up tonight.
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