| It was intended to stop newly minted millionaires (or, in the case of the latest outrage, someone who won less than a million but was called a millionaire, anyway), but they wound up setting the bar ... err, somewhat less. LANSING — Legislation sponsored by Sen. John Moolenaar to help prevent large lottery winners from receiving public food assistance is on its way to the governor’s desk to be signed. "Food assistance is intended to help put food on the table for families struggling to make ends meet in tough times," said Moolenaar, R-Midland. "I sponsored this reform to ensure this important aid goes to those who truly need it and not to million-dollar jackpot lottery winners." Moolenaar’s bill, Senate Bill 711, requires the Michigan Lottery to notify DHS of the name and other information of a winner of a prize of $1,000 or more within seven days. Let's do a little quick math here. The average benefit for a single person who receives federal food assistance is $200 a month. The stated intention was to cut off from food assistance someone who nets a lottery jackpot capable of providing the same food purchasing power for 5,000 months, or 416 years. What they crafted instead was a bill cutting off from food assistance anyone who gets enough money in any lottery game to cover five months of food assistance. By the way, have I mentioned that the state is wasting all this time on a federally funded program? If the food benefits don't go to Michiganders, they go to people who live in other states ... who'll spend those federal dollars in local retailers in those states. You couldn't script this sort of mean-spirited incompetence if you set 1,000 monkeys sick with some strange and novel form of pox to work doing it. |
