"No joke: 500k food stamp recipients to lose benefits on April 1.

Just thought you should know. Batten down the hatches.”

-Travolta

Thanks, Bro. I know you are glad to be out of retail food for good.

From my reading of this the effect is going to be primarily on junkies and other lowlife forms, who will amp up shoplifting and panhandling and burglary. The welfare mammas and their vast broods will not be touched. The two populations of adults hit with this are going to be 20-something slackers and 50-something losers—mostly palefaces—the first group mostly addicts, the second group mostly being pushed out of the workplace by younger competition. The second group is mostly going to roll over and die and the first group is already causing trouble, so I think the result in supermarkets is going to be felt mostly by loss prevention operatives as an escalation of existing theft patterns and by the rest of us as more aggressive panhandling.

This will not be Yomaggedon, but a baby step toward eventual welfare-cutting measures that must eventually happen as the economy continues along its course, and will, in the end, spark more aggressive looting behavior. Do note that once looting occurs across a community, the looters discover how powerless the police are, and will continue looting activity at lower intensity indefinitely, which has happened in Baltimore, where much shoplifting is now indistinguishable from small scale looting.