In response to HuffPo FAIL: Food Stamps Used to Buy Crab:
Well, of course Food Stamp Nation is buying all kinds of luxury goods with the public’s $82.5 billion in compulsory “charity.” There are very few restrictions on what EBT cards can buy, and of course once the beneficiary gains the ability to stick them in an ATM machine and get cash, all bets are off.
The government is not making any significant effort to track the purchases made with those electronic cards. Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) had an amendment to the “agriculture bill” (i.e. food stamp giveaway) called the SNAP Transparency Act, which would have compelled the Government Accountability Office to begin collecting data on food stamp purchases and making it available to the public, beginning with a modest pilot program. The amendment was defeated. “It is inconceivable that at a time when Americans are demanding increased transparency and accountability, more than 80 percent of my colleagues are simply okay with having no clue how these dollars are really spent,” said a dejected Marino.
I don’t think that word “inconceivable” means what he thinks it means. Of course the taxpaying chumps of America aren’t allowed to know what their money is being used for. They might get angry and demand reforms. We can’t have that.
And we don’t want Food Stamp Nation to feel restrained or humiliated by data-mining their EBT card purchases. The rest of us get data-mined to within a megabyte of our lives by Obama’s surveillance state, but the fraud-riddled welfare start marches on without the most minimal supervision. Even the ObamaCare exchanges are going to run on the honor system now.
What we should have done, right from the start, is sharply limited food stamps to the purchase of nothing but minimal nutritious essentials. Eligibility should be limited to the truly needy, and abuse should be grounds for lifetime suspension from the program. But instead, talk about temporary emergency assistance for people who would otherwise starve is just empty rhetoric for when the suckers get crabby about the wanton abuse of their hard-earned tax dollars. More people now receive food aid from the government than have full-time private sector jobs, so it’s folly to pretend we’re talking about subsistence for the destitute… and the outnumbered tax serfs are losing the political leverage to do anything about the situation.
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