An open letter to food stamp & unemployment recipients:

You should be ashamed.

First, you should have realized 8 or 12 years ago, when you chose to have kids, that your jobs would be outsourced, your employer would go bankrupt and you would wind up unemployed (no matter how hard you worked or how skilled you were), and you should have planned accordingly. Unless you were 100% positive that our nation would never go into another Great Depression, you had NO business ever getting married and having sex!

Second, it pisses me off to see you people standing in line at the grocery store wearing actual clothes, rather than flour sacks. Maybe you bought your clothes before, when you were employed – I don’t know. But you have no business wearing them now that you’re on aid. (I know you can find a designer dress at Goodwill for $4 – but be warned: if you are wearing something pretty, I’m going to assume you spent $400 at Neiman Marcus or Bloomingdale’s. And, you should be barefoot.)

Third, how dare you have a cell phone! Granted, these days a cell phone is often cheaper than a land line. You might not even have a fixed address FOR a land line. And if you’re job-hunting, you don’t want to miss any phone calls. But I don’t think you should be spending time communicating when you could be self-flagellating instead.

Fourth, I can’t help but notice as I look into your cart that you have hamburger, cereal, canned pasta and fruit juice in your cart. Food stamps for junk! You should be buying avocados, mahi-mahi, tofu and soy milk. Of course, if you’re feeding two adults and several kids, it’s cheaper to fill them up on potatoes instead of spinach. And the one grocery store you can access via the Number 4 bus might not have much fresh food. But I’m going to sneer at your eating habits anyway. Pigs.

Fifth, I’m going to assume you have a wide-screen TV, because ALL you people do. Well, I checked. Walmart has 32-inch HDTVs for $298! Almost three hundred bucks! Don’t you see that’s money that could go toward a second college degree? Or toward the $2,000-a-month health insurance you claim you can’t afford to buy? Besides, it’s really pathetic that watching TV is your family’s main source of entertainment. I’m spending $340 on four tickets to “Les Miserables” at the Overture. Too bad you’re not exposing your kids to that kind of culture.

And last, I don’t buy this whole “I can’t find a job” BS anyway. I read there are five people for every available job right now. So statistically, doesn’t that mean you just have to apply for five jobs and you’ll get one of them? How hard would that be?

Instead, you’re getting $175 a week, courtesy of those of us who are working, to sit on your butt. So what’s your incentive to work and earn $800 a week (which is what you used to earn, and would actually cover your mortgage so you wouldn’t be in foreclosure right now)? Your greed makes me sick! I heard you’re trying to find a job with health insurance because you’re using your MasterCard to pay for COBRA. Picky, picky! (If you ate that tofu, you wouldn’t NEED health insurance.)

And then you turned a job down last week, because, you said, “the salary would not even cover the cost of my child care and transportation.” Whine, whine, whine! You really have to re-set your expectations. What do you want? A red carpet…?

I know what you thought: “Do what you love and the money will follow.” I know you assumed that getting a four-year degree would allow you to get a job with a “reasonable salary.” I know you were under the impression that by being a loyal employee, you would magically have some so-called “economic security.” And your mom and dad always told you that if you worked hard – really hard – you could “be whatever you wanted to be.”

But that’s not the way things work here. After all, this is America.