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90 days to go...
One day I was talking to a voter and all of the sudden his cell phone rang and he asked me to excuse him for a second. I was happy to, but I have to admit I heard his side of the conversation which consisted mostly of one word answers ("Yes", "No", "Sure", etc.)
He apologized, I replied that it was ok, but asked him out of curiosity who it was.
It turns out the caller came from New Hampshire Vocational Rehabilitation. The voter lives a subistence life, he couldn't afford a car, he could barely afford his rent and utilities, and he had just gotten a job as a cook at a local diner, but wouldn't be able to accept it unless he got special shoes with certain inserts that would not slip on the kitchen floors and could support him since he had some kind of osteoporosis.
However, since he could barely afford the bare necessities of life, he couldn't afford these special shoes, so he went to voc rehab.
The voter wanted to work and be a productive member of society, but he wouldn't have been able to without that little boost, and was grateful for the assistance he had gotten.
After I left, I thought hypothethically as to what the financial costs and benefits were to what must have been a $60 or $70 pair of shoes in this man's case.
The government probably got back their investment in one or two lunch rushes from meals tax. The owner of the diner might have gotten someone else to fill the job, but maybe they wouldn't be able to and would have either had to raise their wages to attract a new employee or turn to undocumented immigrant labor. And perhaps without that job, that voter may not have found another job and lost his apartment, and the landlord wouldn't have been able to pay the property taxes on the property and it would fall into disrepair, lowering the property values throughout the neighborhood degrading the tax base to the point where it would no longer be able to sustain the services expected by its residents.
Then again, everything might have turned out just fine. The thing is though, why leave that to chance in cases like these when the solution was as simple as a pair of shoes?
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