5,000 Dead People Getting SNAP

[Ninurta]

I was always told "you can't take it with you".
Guess 5,000 have found a way.

I know that in Virginia at least, dead folks regularly vote, and they always vote Democrat regardless of how they voted when alive. Even Ray Stevens' grandpa got caught voting Democrat after he was dead. Ray wrote a humerous song about it, but it actually happened to him.

Have a heart, bro - you don't expect dead folks to vote on an empty stomach, do you?

=========================================================================

One of the problems with food stamp fraud is that the Feds only pump in the money - they haven't overseen it's distribution for years. They farm out the distribution to individual states, who then further farm it out to private companies - who of course skim their cut off the top. it's a business, y'know?

All of that means that it goes through too many hands, too many "cut-outs", to be properly overseen. There are too many places for fraud and abuse to enter the equation unnoticed.

Back when I was young, the feds directly distributed food stamps. They used to come in a little book that you tore individual certificates out of, and then "spent" at the store like they were dollars. When you overspent, the change you got back was often in real dollars, so that got abused, too. That's why they moved to disbursement on plastic - no change coming from that. Oh, I know the government said it was to avoid "stigma" and preserve "dignity" of people in the checkout having to hand over those colorful food stamps, but the real bottom line, as always, was the Benjamins, and reducing their fraud and theft. The bottom line is always the money.

They also issued vouchers back then for products the USDA bought from farmers and stored in warehouses. Usually dairy products and the like, as I recall. "Government cheese" was a real thing back then. It was American cheese, and came in 5 pound blocks in brown cardboard with black stamps on them, like military rations. When you cut into it, you could actually see raw chunks of salt peter that they used to preserve it with. I knew several folks that wouldn't eat it on account of that - salt peter was so-called, they said, because it kept your peter limp, and they wanted no part of that. You could trade those folks a few shotgun shells for their block of cheese, everybody happy.

The first step in cutting the fraud and waste, i think, should be to get the private companies out of the distribution loop.
Putting the benefits on cards is still a good idea, as it does tend to eliminate chances for fraud and theft - can't steal them out of a mail box if they never enter one. Refreshing the rolls yearly at the least should tend towards reducing dead people getting or staying on them, and stop the double-dippers. Hell, just putting everyone in a database, and then sorting that database by individual information fields should reveal the double-dippers pretty handily. A match in a single field - name or address, for example - might not really show them, as those things could be coincidental, but a match on 3 fields or more... well, then you'll have caught a fraudster.

And, under NO circumstances, should illegal aliens qualify for food stamps! If they are not here legally, then why should they get the benefit of the government assistance? that's like paying burglars to invade your home and raid it!

Also, the census and illegals - census records are used to apportion seats in congress, and to determine how much money each census area is entitled to for various programs from the federal government. Because of those things, illegals should not be enumerated in censuses. On paper, they are not allowed to vote, so why should they get extra seats in congress? Why should they be able to increase federal payouts to an area for breaking into it illegally? That, too, is like inviting burglars to invade your home and raid it, and then paying them extra for the privilege of having been raided!

If any place or area wants to shelter illegals, then THEY should have to foot the bill for it themselves - no reason I should have to pay for their folly. They ought to pay for their own damned idiocy, out of their own damned pockets... not everyone else's pockets. There is a lot of truth to the saying that democracy is the fine art of spending OTHER PEOPLE'S money..

.