The median annual income for a person right after they are released
from prison is $6,500, so it’s understandable why 70% of them receive
food assistance of about $200 a month. This summer the House passed a
bill that will deny food stamps to people who have served their
sentences for violent crimes.
From Alex Busansky (founder of Impact Justice) and Gary Maynard
(former president of the American Correctional Association) in the Washington Post:
even if the fraud was like 5% it wouldn’t compare to rich people cheating the system by trillions lmao
Also, SNAP “fraud” is like exchanging some of your stamps for cash to buy necessities you can’t buy with stamps, like soap or deodorant or tampons
TBH even if one hundred percent of people on food stamps were committing food stamp fraud I’d still be in favor of keeping the program around
Hey I wanna talk about this.
I work at a drug addiction counseling center. A ton of my clients have, at one time or another, sold their food stamps. This is basically exactly what the GOP is afraid of, right? Drug addicts selling their food stamps.
I have learned, now, to ask them WHY they sold their food stamps. Here is an incomplete list of the answers:
– I need tampons, and you can’t buy them with foodstamps
– See above RE: toilet paper
– I was living in a hotel with no kitchen then. I had to buy pre-prepared food
– The homeless shelter won’t let me keep food in my locker or room, so I have to buy pre-prepared food (Yes, really)
– I had to make rent
– My sister had to make rent
– My son had to make rent
– I needed co-pays to get my medication or I’ll die
– I needed co-pays to get my medication or I’ll loose control of my mental health
But the absolute most common form of food stamp fraud I see? Giving away food stamps to other family members who get no food stamps or insufficient food stamps to feed their families. I see that every month. People glassy eyed and hungry because they gave away their food to their adult kids, their grand kids, cousins, siblings etc.
So, is food stamp fraud rampant? In some places, yes. And I’m not about to chastise people for it.
The House farm bill would make the work requirements
stricter. Able-bodied adults between the ages of 18 and 59 without
dependents would have to work at least 20 hours per week or be part of a
job training program to be eligible for benefits, beginning in 2021 —
and prove that they did so monthly. That minimum work requirement would
be increased to 25 hours by 2026. Those who violate the requirements
would be cut off from benefits for an entire year. If they violate the
requirements repeatedly, recipients could be cut off from benefits for
up to three years.
The impact of these reforms is clear: The Congressional
Budget Office expects it would cut around $20 billion in costs from the
program over the next 10 years, derived directly from reducing the
benefits. Instead, the reforms would increase administrative costs by
requiring beneficiaries to file more paperwork to maintain eligibility.
There are currently about 42 million Americans
living below the poverty line, almost half of whom are children, who
rely on SNAP to purchase food. It’s expected that roughly 2 million
would be pushed off the rolls altogether, or see reductions in already
meager stipends.
There are some investments in the benefits, with funding
for the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive Program, which would double
SNAP benefits when buying fruits and vegetables. But those improvements
largely pale in comparison to the cuts low-income families would
experience.
“This bill as it is written kicks people off the SNAP
program,” ranking member Peterson said at the bill’s mark up hearing.
“The chairman calls it self-selection. Call it whatever you want, it’s
reducing the SNAP rolls.”
The farm bill is expected to be debated in the House early May; it’s currently not clear whether or not it has enough support to pass. Contact your legislators in both House and Senate and tell them not to pass any version of the farm bill that introduces new work requirements or cuts for SNAP.
Tell them that SNAP is an efficient program that reduces food insecurity, work requirements aren’t effective in getting people to work, and all Americans deserve to eat. If you or someone you know has ever been helped by SNAP, tell them your story, too.
I mean, this is an obviously crazy-impractical half-assed undercooked sorta-half-idea that someone threw in there as an “innovation” that couldn’t possibly be enacted (for one thing, grocery chains will have a FIT), but let’s focus on how cartoonishly evil this is:
Under the Trump proposal, which the Agriculture Department has dubbed “America’s Harvest Box,” all households receiving more than $90 per month in benefits — 81 percent of SNAP households overall — would begin receiving about half their benefits in the form of government-purchased, nonperishable food items.
Those foods would include shelf-stable milk, juice, grains, cereals, pasta, peanut butter, beans and canned meat, fruits and vegetables, according to the USDA. The department estimates that it could supply these goods at about half the cost of retail, slashing the cost of SNAP while still feeding the hungry.
No fresh fruit or vegetables for you! No more actually choosing the food you eat, dietary requirements be damned! We hate poor families this much!
You really have to admire the mental gymnastics lefties like OP are capable of pulling off by arguing that literally giving poor people food is the exact same thing as making them starve to death. That type of impressive athletics is something you’d only imagine seeing at the Olympics.
Hi!
I’m a disabled person whose family literally receives SNAP right now. Why we receive it or the circumstances under which we receive it is nobody’s business but ours: the social safety net is here for us because we fell on hard times. One of my disabilities? Celiac disease. And yes, that is an ADA disability.
I cannot simply eat a box of food that someone gives me. Canned foods often use glutenated substances as preservatives, making them literally poison for me. I must very carefully choose my foods. A restricted diet is the only treatment for my life-threatening disease.
So, yes, handing people like me a box of food absolutely is asking us to starve, because most canned meats, canned vegetables, and cereals are not edible by me, nor is it safe for those items to be eaten in a kitchen used to feed me; gluten adheres to porous surfaces such as Tupperware, plastic bowls, and non-stick cookware. That food cannot be eaten in my home without making me sick, so no one in my family can eat it either.
Now that’s leaving aside entirely the fact that I have a hard time, due to my disease, with absorbing nurtients from food, so I must carefully choose what I eat to maximize my nutritional absorption. Hint: canned foods have much lower nutritional value and would not meet my needs either.
The article – had you read it – makes very clear that those proposing this hadn’t considered how to handle people with food allergies or celiac disease. So we could go with this massively-expensive, incredibly invasive, paternalistic, infantilizing and ineffective system that would leave someone like me not only hungry but sicker, making more use of the Medicaid that I currently receive because I am permanently disabled, and thus more expensive…
… or we could keep it the way it is, not waste all that money setting up a ridiculously bad system that will make people sick, and trust poor families to know how best to feed themselves for their specific needs.
Oh, but wait! There’s more! This plan would take money away from small mom-and-pop grocery stores and farms who currently accept EBT and supply a lot of the food stamp needs for rural working poor.
It requires an awful lot of mental gymnastics to justify taking money away from small business owners and also giving poor people food less-nutritional food that a lot of us can’t even eat. It takes absolutely none to say ‘gee, here’s your food money, you know better than we do what your individual needs are, sorry life’s kicking you right now, hopefully things get better, I hope this system is here to help me if I need it.’
But, you know, go off, I guess.
Except it is my business it is my business because you being on snap costs anyone who pays taxes money in the form of taxes. So yes it is my business and you shouldn’t be on it.
Now that means, get a job, make money and take care of yourself so you aren’t on this program is fine with me.
And before you get offended at me even suggesting such a thing, is this not what you want? To be independent and self sustaining?
Oh but it’s hard. Still doesn’t change my position. Work is hard difficult and at times dangerous but if we want this world of ours to keep spinning it must be done.
So don’t sit there and tell anyone it’s not my or anyone’s business that you use this system that costs people money, because it is. And your job as a being with the ability to reason, is to self improve. So improve yourself and gain your independence.
My being on SNAP costs you less than a hundredth of a penny a year. So you may have exactly a hundredth of a penny’s worth of concern about my circumstances.
That said, I have a job. I own a business, as a matter of fact. You’d know that if you took so much as a cursory look at the header of my Tumblr.
Let me rock your fucking world: most people who receive SNAP have at least one job. Most of us (like me) have two or more.
Let me rock your fucking world again: I could be eligible for disability, but I choose not to seek it for as long as possible, if ever. I am permanently, multiply disabled, which you would know if you had actually read everything that I wrote. I am literally doing everything within my power to be as independent as possible for as long as possible.
I work hard. I work as hard as my body will allow me, and sometimes more than, causing myself to become sick, to require hospital admission, because I seek again the kind of independence that I used to have before a tumor was taken out of my spine, permanently scarring my spinal cord, and setting off a chain reaction that left me at the mercy of a body that would no longer obey me. I went from having a hefty 401K, a job in the finance industry, and significant savings to starting a business that I’d be able to run around the restrictions of my body because I can no longer work a traditional 9-5 job. I physically cannot do it. I continued to work my finance job for 4 years after my tumor was removed, as my health has slowly deteriorated, until my job was eliminated. I will never be able to work a 9-5 job again, because I will not have FMLA protection for my unpredictable flare-ups. That is not my opinion: that is the assessment of four different doctors. See also: I could seek disability and probably get it, but choose not to do so for as long as I can.
Let me rock your fucking world yet again: I have paid more in to the system than I have ever gotten out of it. You haven’t paid a fucking penny to me, because I paid in to the system for my entire working life, from before I was even an adult.
But even if none of that were true, even if I’d never been able to work a day in my life, even if I never had worked a day in my life, even if I didn’t work my fucking ass off as much as my body will let me, even if I weren’t constantly turning out new products for my business, new writing for my patrons, making as much money as I can, you still don’t get to have a fucking opinion about why I’m on SNAP, you know why?
Because the right to food is recognized in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 25) as part of the right to an adequate standard of living, and is enshrined in the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 11).
Food is a basic human right, as recognized internationally, and understood by everyone who isn’t a solipsistic jackass.
I know it’s really scary to think that you, too, might suddenly be unable to adequately provide for yourself, and acting out of that fear makes you insist that everyone who needs help must simply not be working hard enough, because the alternative is that our economic system is broken and that, G-d forbid, you might suddenly, through no fault of your own, be at the mercy of the same system that you purport works for everyone. You might not be able to provide for yourself if you got sick, or if something went wrong, and that’s scary. I get that.
But I’m under no obligation to pat your bottom and reassure you that you’re right, golly gosh, if I worked harder I wouldn’t need any help, and so your deeper fears that you might find yourself in my shoes just aren’t true, because you’re totally in control of your situation with all your hard work, and an uncaring universe would never do you dirty the way it’s done me.
So fuck off, bro. And leave everyone else who needs a little help alone.
People will really go out of their way to blame poor people for being poor and disabled people for being disabled.
It’s honestly heartbreaking that so many people feel that way about SNAP. Like. They don’t care for their fellow man enough to feed them when they’re hungry. Hungry kids? Also not worth helping, apparently, as like 75% of SNAP recipients have kids in the household.
I’m infuriated that this seems to be a common sentiment. How selfish and cruel do you have to be to tell someone who is less fortunate than you that they aren’t working hard enough to deserve to eat? All because you pay a few dollars in taxes per year? I’m just. So disappointed that so many people are that selfish.
Someone’s reasons for needing assistance are their own. If the Health and Human Services department deemed that someone is eligible for benefits, that’s the end of it. No one deserves to invade on a person’s privacy. SNAP recipients are actual human beings who DESERVE RESPECT.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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