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Redstate
Food stamps for
illegal aliens
By John Hayward
April 30th, 2013
There has been much controversy over the government’s efforts to
advertise welfare programs, particularly the Supplemental Nutrition
Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as the “food stamp”
program. Only they’re not “stamps” any more. The dependent
masses of Food Stamp Nation get a little credit card, called an EBT
Card, which they can use in the checkout lines, just like people who
pay for their own food.
In theory, this electronic processing of food stamp benefits should
have provided a data-processing defense against abuse. In
practice, tales of outrageous abuse have only grown more common, as EBT
cards are used to purchase everything from unhealthy groceries the
Nanny State otherwise discourages – such as sugary carbonated beverages
– to luxury foods, and even more creative uses like posting bail or
tipping exotic dancers. The latter incidents are among the many
bizarre abuses that arise from the ability of EBT card holders to
withdraw cash from ATM machines, at which point all public
accountability for the money is lost.
Amazingly enough, there isn’t any serious effort currently being made
to process data from EBT card transactions, although Rep. Tom Marino
(R-PA) has been trying to change that with a bill called the SNAP
Transparency Act. The Washington Times describes the goal of this
bill as the creation of “an online, searchable database that uses bar
codes to break down how many taxpayer dollars in food stamps are spent
on individual products, from Kit Kat bars to whole milk.”
Marino described it as “downright irresponsible” that an $80 billion
program “is subject to virtually no oversight.” All of the
government’s efforts are currently invested in recruiting new
dependents to the SNAP program, not monitoring what existing
beneficiaries are doing with the largess of the taxpayers. Those
recruiting efforts know no boundaries… or borders, as watchdog group
Judicial Watch just discovered.
It has long been known that the USDA was producing Spanish-language
advertisements for the food stamp program. Judicial Watch filed a
Freedom of Information Act request to determine how closely this effort
was coordinated with the Mexican government…
Read the rest of the article at Redstate
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