The Philadelphia City Paper's Daniel Denvir does a great job debunking an absurd op-ed from a wingnut think tank (Crazy Pat Toomey is one of their "directors emeritas") that ran in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, justifying Gov. Corbett's hard-hearted application of a means test for Pennsylvania food stamp recipients:
“Asset test for food stamps a sound idea for Pennsylvania,” proclaimed a column in yesterday's Sunday Inquirer from the conservative Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives. The position it takes ― that Gov. Tom Corbett's move to exclude people with more than $2,000 in assets (largely excluding homes and cars, but largely including savings) is a good thing ― is not surprising. But the arguments it makes in Corbett's favor are, at least if you take truthfulness (perhaps naïvely) as a standard for political discourse, astounding:
Right-wing claim: “The measure is necessary because welfare eligibility and spending — including for food stamps — have exploded, threatening to crowd out everything else in the state budget.”
Fact: Actually, the federal government picks up most of the tab. According to the Inquirer , “Pennsylvania receives about $2.5 billion in federal SNAP [that's food stamps: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] funds annually and pays about $160 million annually in state money to maintain the program.” That's just over one half of 1 percent of Pennsylvania's state budget. And as I reported last week, the state of Pennsylvania taxpayers spends nearly $2 billion on prisons ―$463.8 million more than generally reported.
Right-wing claim: “Despite indisputable evidence that welfare fraud and waste are alive and well, many politicians in Harrisburg and Washington have downplayed it, while actually expanding welfare benefits to the detriment of the truly poor.”
Fact: Pennsylvania has been recognized for having an extraordinarily low rate of food stamp fraud: one-tenth of 1 percent.
When you're at the end of the road, food stamps are the only thing left. Most people don't qualify for welfare, the unemployment extensions for 99ers are gone, and there are no jobs to be had. Many people will read this and shake their heads at what this desperate mother did. I look at it and think of all the politicians who didn't lift a finger to help people like this:
(Reuters) - A woman in the border city of Laredo, Texas who was angry because she had been denied food stamps killed herself and shot and critically wounded her two children late on Monday, authorities said on Tuesday.
The 38-year-old woman entered the Texas Health and Human Services Commission office in downtown Laredo on Monday afternoon and demanded to speak to a supervisor, said investigator Joe Baeza of the Laredo Police Department.
The woman, whom he declined to identify, pulled out a handgun and started walking through the office, threatening several employees, he said.
"She had issues and felt that she had been let down by social services in general," Baeza told Reuters on Tuesday. "She was making all sorts of outlandish claims."
She took an office supervisor hostage in a room in the office, he said, and a SWAT team managed to evacuate the other three dozen people in the office and clear the area.
After two hours of negotiations, the woman allowed the male supervisor to go free, but she remained in the office with her two children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl.
"About 11:45 last night, she hung up the phone with negotiators, and a little bit later, negotiators heard three shots," Baeza said on Tuesday. "What had happened was that she had shot each of her children once and herself once."
The children were airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio in extremely critical condition, he said. The mother was dead at the scene, he said.
Baeza said the woman, who was from Ohio, arrived in Laredo about eight months ago and had lived with her children in several locations around the border city of 236,000.
Stephanie Goodman, a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services Commission, confirmed that the woman applied for food stamps in July and was denied. Goodman said the woman's application was incomplete and that she was not sure whether the woman qualified for assistance.
Occasionally, someone asks me why I don't cut Obama some slack. Stories like this one from Rock Center are why. Because when we have so many people in such desperate need, and so very little political capital has been expended to help them (especially that decision administration officials made not to help struggling homeowners, citing "moral hazard") -- well, he didn't step up to this enormous task when he took office. It is a disgrace that people are living like this in the richest nation on earth, especially where there's always money for military weapons:
At the stroke of midnight, a growing number of Americans are lining up at Walmart not to cash in on a holiday sale, but because they’re hungry.
The increasing number of Americans relying on food stamps to survive the sluggish economic recovery has changed the way the largest retailer in the United States does business.
Carol Johnston, Walmart’s senior vice president of store development, said that store managers have seen an “enormous spike” in the number of consumers shopping at midnight on the first of the month. That’s typically when those receiving federal food assistance have their accounts refilled each month.
“We’ll bring in more staff to stock. We’ll also make sure all of our registers…are open…Some people may think at 12:01, Walmart’s very quiet, but in a lot of our areas of the country, 12:01 is a big day or a big night for us, actually,” Johnston said.
Becca Reeder and her husband, T.J. Fowler, are one of the families shopping before the sun rises.
When NBC News visited their home six days before the first of the month, they had no milk in their refrigerator. Among the few things left were water, bacon grease for the dog’s food, a little bit of apple juice, cheese and tortillas.
The couple and their 2-year-old son, Miles, live in Nampa, Idaho, about a 30-minute drive from Boise. Reeder and Fowler married in September. She recently had to pawn her wedding ring to help support the family.
“As long as I got my family, I’m good,” she said.
The newlyweds are both certified nursing assistants but have been unable to find work in their field. Fowler is commuting an hour and a half round trip to a part-time job flipping burgers at a fast-food restaurant and Reeder is not working.
In an article at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi contrasts the story of a woman who committed food stamp fraud and recieved a harsh penalty with the fraudsters of Wall Street, who, at worst, got slaps on the wrist for their crimes. Taibbi explains:
Last week, a federal judge in Mississippi sentenced a mother of two named Anita McLemore to three years in federal prison for lying on a government application in order to obtain food stamps.
Apparently in this country you become ineligible to eat if you have a record of criminal drug offenses. States have the option of opting out of that federal ban, but Mississippi is not one of those states. Since McLemore had four drug convictions in her past, she was ineligible to receive food stamps, so she lied about her past in order to feed her two children.
The total "cost" of her fraud was $4,367. She has paid the money back. But paying the money back was not enough for federal Judge Henry Wingate.
Wingate had the option of sentencing McLemore according to federal guidelines, which would have left her with a term of two months to eight months, followed by probation. Not good enough! Wingate was so outraged by McLemore’s fraud that he decided to serve her up the deluxe vacation, using another federal statute that permitted him to give her up to five years.
He ultimately gave her three years, saying, "The defendant's criminal record is simply abominable …. She has been the beneficiary of government generosity in state court."
Compare this court decision to the fraud settlements on Wall Street. Like McLemore, fraud defendants like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Deutsche Bank have "been the beneficiary of government generosity." Goldman got $12.9 billion just through the AIG bailout. Citigroup got $45 billion, plus hundreds of billions in government guarantees.
All of these companies have been repeatedly dragged into court for fraud, and not one individual defendant has ever been forced to give back anything like a significant portion of his ill-gotten gains. The closest we've come is in a fraud case involving Citi, in which a pair of executives, Gary Crittenden and Arthur Tildesley, were fined the token amounts of $100,000 and $80,000, respectively, for lying to shareholders about the extent of Citi’s debt.
Neither man was forced to admit to intentional fraud. Both got to keep their jobs.
Anita McLemore, meanwhile, lied to feed her children, gave back every penny of her "fraud" when she got caught, and is now going to do three years in prison. Explain that, Eric Holder!
Taibbi is right to be outraged. This is another in a long line of false crises pushed by Republicans that, instead of targeting real problems, target populations that can't speak up for themselves as well or who already suffer from low public approval. For decades, conservatives have targeted the recipients of government assistance programs, trying to pain anyone in one of these programs as part of the "unworthy poor" who are "stealing" from the rest of us. These campaigns heavily target the most vulnerable of the 99 percent and few people are willing to defend the targets.
Think Progress recently pointed out the weakness of the conservative argument against the food stamp program:
But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found, SNAP errors are currently at an all-time low, with errors accounting for less than three percent of the program’s cost:
"To ensure that benefits are provided only to eligible households and in the proper amounts, SNAP has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program and, in recent years, has achieved its lowest error rates on record. In fiscal year 2009, even as caseloads were rising, states set new record lows for error rates. The net loss due to errors equaled only 2.7 percent of program costs in 2009. There is no evidence that program errors are driving up SNAP spending."
During the recession, SNAP has been critical for reducing poverty and pumping money into local economies.
It's clear that food stamp fraud is not a real issue. If anything, the biggest problem in the program comes not from program recipients, but stores that accept food stamps, who are committing significant fraud:
A criminal swindle of the nation's $64.7 billion food stamp program is playing out at small neighborhood stores across the country, where thousands of retailers are suspected of trading deals with customers, exchanging lesser amounts of cash for their stamps.
Authorities say the stamps are then redeemed as usual by the unscrupulous merchants at face value, netting them huge profits and diverting as much as $330 million in taxpayer money annually a year. But the transactions are electronically recorded and federal investigators, wise to the practice, are closely monitoring thousands of convenience stores and mom-and-pop groceries in a push to halt the fraud.
Known as food stamp trafficking, the illegal buying or selling of food stamps is a federal offense that has resulted in 597 convictions nationwide and $197.4 million in fines, restitution and forfeiture orders, over the past three years, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Office of the Inspector General. The USDA last month awarded a 10-year contract worth up to $25 million to SRA International to step up the technology used to combat fraud.
...
Last year, 931 stores nationally were dismissed from the food stamp program for trafficking and 907 others were sanctioned for lesser violations — 37 percent of the nearly 5,000 retailers being investigated.
So the real significant fraud in food stamps comes from retailers -- who are being caught in significant numbers already. On top of that, the president is ramping up enforcement, which is already good. So, again, this isn't a problem that is costing the government or the taxpayers much money in the big picture. The combined fraud rates from individuals and retailers is like 3.5 percent of a $65 billion program, accounting for less than $3 billion annually. The entire realm of fraud for the entire program is less than numerous individual cases of fraud on Wall Street. And that's not even to go into the subsidies, tax relief and bailout money the Wall Street fraudsters got.
Conservatives complain about a few anecdotes of millionaires getting food stamps because of loopholes as if the anecdotes were proof of broader problems. They complain of Barack Obama pushing more to get people enrolled in the program than to prevent fraud, as if making sure that people eat during bad economic times is somehow a crime. And they complain about the lack of inspectors able to pursue fraud cases, despite it being their push for downsizing government that led to that shortage.
Taibbi adds another thought:
Here’s another thing that boggles my mind: You get busted for drugs in this country, and it turns out you can make yourself ineligible to receive food stamps.
But you can be a serial fraud offender like Citigroup, which has repeatedly been dragged into court for the same offenses and has repeatedly ignored court injunctions to abstain from fraud, and this does not make you ineligible to receive $45 billion in bailouts and other forms of federal assistance.
As part of the fraud hysteria promoted by Republicans, people are given penalties way out of proportion with the crimes they are committing. In particular, poorer people are given these penalties. What the proponents of these types of laws -- denial of food stamps because of drug use -- are literally saying is that the punishment for drug use should be starvation.
Jackie Spier is discovering how difficult it is to shop and buy food on just over $32.00 per week. She and seven other Congressional Democrats have taken the Food Stamp Challenge, where they commit to planning and buying food under the same limits as food stamp recipients. This year, more than others, it's a very big deal since Rep. Paul Ryan and his cohorts seem to think they can slash funding to the SNAP program and people will still be able to survive.
“Day 2 of #foodstampchallenge so I can't drink Joe's coffee,” Lee tweeted Friday before her appearance on the MSNBC show "Morning Joe." “Had peanut butter and crackers for breakfast.”
Schakowsky has taken to Twitter, as well, seeking suggestions for nutritious meals under $1.50, the average limit per food stamp meal. She said she is also keeping a diary of everything she ate and will post it at week’s end.
Her followers tweeted suggestions ranging from wholegrain pasta and chickpeas to a peanut butter-and-banana sandwich.
Del. Donna Christensen (D-Virgin Islands) — who is also participating in the challenge — said she checked grocery store prices and found the challenge would be harder than expected.
“Ok this #foodstampchallenge is going to [be] really hard.,” Christensen tweeted Thursday. “Checked prices in Safeway and so easy to blow the whole week's allotment.”
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) along with eight other congressional Democrats are eating on a budget of about $4.50 a day to show solidarity with food stamp recipients who receive $32.59 a week.
The personal thrift, which is part of a challenge organized by Fighting Poverty With Faith, was reported by Pacifica Patch. The site also listed the food items that Speier was now buying.
Speier displayed some of the items she was able to purchase for her first day of living on a food stamp budget: a bag of coffee and a loaf of bread from the Dollar Warehouse; a can of Campbell's low sodium chicken noodle soup; and a can of sweet peas, possibly to put in a tuna casserole later in the week."And this is my treat for the week," Speier said, holding up a box of microwave popcorn packets.
Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.), along with his wife and daughter, chose to live on a food stamp budget of about $1.59 per meal. He tweeted about the challenge, relaying that he ate "generic cereal and part of a banana for breakfast."
Toward the end of Rep. Joe Courtney's week-long SNAP Challenge, during which he and his family — including wife, Audrey, and teenage daughter, Elizabeth —- lived on just over $32 a week apiece, the pickings were slim. For his last meal of the week, Courtney had leftover spaghetti with a little cheese sprinkled on the top.
So Thursday, the first day back on his regular diet, Courtney was acutely aware of the $4.25 bowl of chili he ordered from his Washington, D.C., cafeteria.
This effort is particularly poignant as I begin my annual task of picking through some FEC and IRS disclosures for different Republican organizations. Eric Cantor, for example, spent $365.00 on one meal in New York in September. That's one meal, equal to roughly ten times what SNAP recipients can spend in a week. On August 4th, he spent $370.00 in Washington DC for one meal. Those were not fundraisers. They were simply meals.
Eric Cantor has repeatedly voted to reduce SNAP allotments. Senator Jeff Sessions' PAC spent over $1,800 on meals in August. Not fundraisers. Meals. You may recall Sessions as the one who was so concerned over waste, fraud and abuse in the SNAP program that he wanted even more cuts to it along with assorted other hoops to jump through.
It's good to see some elected officials learning to live on what's allocated under SNAP. Unfortunately, it's not the ones who could really benefit from the learning experience, but at least some can testify.
Senator Jeff Sessions is very, very, very worried about fraud, waste and abuse within the Federal food stamp program (SNAP). So worried he has introduced an amendment to cut funds to the program because he's certain there are just a bunch of poor deadbeats out there taking advantage of the Feds' largesse.
Consider the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP”—the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is the largest item in Agriculture Department’s budget. Spending on food stamps has surged over the last decade. It’s nearly doubled since President Obama took office. And in the appropriations bill before us this week, Senate Democrats propose another increase that would quadruple food stamp spending from what it was in 2001.
Eleven million more Americans are on food stamps now than when President Obama first took office. The size of the benefit has increased 31 percent since 2008. When the food stamp program was expanded nationally in the 1970s, food stamps were used by 2 percent of the population. At the beginning of the last decade, they were used by 6 percent of the population. Today that figure has risen to 13 percent—one in eight Americans. This seven-fold increase in food stamp usage demands honest examination.
It’s time to look under the hood.
Gosh, that couldn't be because this crappy economy has fattened the wallets of rich folks while millions are unemployed and desperate to feed their families while still paying the rent, could it? As an experiment, I went to the USDA website and put in a hypothetical family of 4 earning $1500 per month. Estimated benefits were about $490 per month for that family of four with no children under the age of five. The estimated income was unemployment benefits for the 2 adults and rent of $1,000 per month. The UI estimate was high; the rent was on the low end. $490 per month won't stretch over that family without some serious sacrifice. It's not like these folks would be out eating filet mignon every night.
So what, exactly, does Senator Sessions see as the flagrant abuse? Well, he singled out a couple of weird examples of people who, on first blush, shouldn't be eligible.
So it's white U.S. citizens who make up the bulk of food stamp users. Damn, there goes another tea party myth! I'm not shocked that this is the sole source of income for many, since I'm sometimes approached by locals who try to sell me their food stamps:
The Agriculture Department’s annual snapshot on the characteristics of food stamp households, released Friday, shows that seven in 10 households receiving food stamps had no earned income last year, though many got other forms of government benefits.
Nearly 21% of households on food stamps also received Supplemental Security Income, assistance for the aged and blind. Some 21.4% received Social Security benefits. Just 8% of households also received Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, the cash welfare program.
But some 20% of households had no cash income of any kind last year, up from 15% in 2007, the year the recession began, and up from 7% in 1990.
That’s partly because most household heads who were receiving food stamps were also out of work. Just 21.8% of them had jobs in 2010, while 19.8% were jobless and looking for work.
There's no sign of Speaker John Boehner's promised "jobs, jobs, jobs." Instead, extremist teabagger Republicans are busily trying to take care of the already-rich, kick people when they're down, and further weaken the ability of those who do have jobs to strike against employers:
All around the country, right-wing legislators are asking middle class Americans to pay for budget deficits caused mainly by a recession caused by Wall Street; they are attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, which has provoked a huge Main Street Movement to fight back.
Now, a group of House Republicans is launching a new stealth attack against union workers. GOP Reps. Jim Jordan (OH), Tim Scott (SC), Scott Garrett (NJ), Dan Burton (IN), and Louie Gohmert (TX) have introduced H.R. 1135, which states that it is designed to “provide information on total spending on means-tested welfare programs, to provide additional work requirements, and to provide an overall spending limit on means-tested welfare programs.”
Much of the bill is based upon verifying that those who receive food stamps benefits are meeting the federal requirements for doing so. However, one section buried deep within the bill adds a startling new requirement. The bill, if passed, would actually cut off all food stamp benefits to any family where one adult member is engaging in a strike against an employer.
The bill also includes a provision that would exempt households from losing eligibility, “if the household was eligible immediately prior to such strike, however, such family unit shall not receive an increased allotment as the result of a decrease in the income of the striking member or members of the household.”
Yet removing entire families from eligibility while a single adult family member is striking would have a chilling effect on workers who are considering going on strike for better wages, benefits, or working conditions — something that is especially alarming in light of the fact that unions are one of the fundamental building blocks of the middle class that allow people to earn wages that keep them off food stamps.
But here's the punchline: Striking workers have been ineligible for food stamps for years. (The only way a striker is eligible right now is if you met the eligibility standards before you went on strike -- and if you belong to a union, odds are, you didn't.) So not only are teabagger Republicans just plain mean and pandering to special interests, they're stupid to boot!
Their bill also rolls back back spending on government assistance programs back to 2007 levels, plus inflation, once unemployment falls below 6.5 percent. (Well, at least we know that won't be anytime soon!)
New Jersey's Rep. Scott Garrett, a teabagger hero, is also busy trying to slash funding for the SEC - but denies that he's doing it. (Says the fact that its spending has gone up so much since the market crash proves the agency has plenty of funding, thank you very much!) Oh, and he's one of the Republicans who voted against extending the budget.
Rep. Jim Jordan, the other person who wants to kick voters when they're down? Was he working on "jobs, jobs, jobs"? Nope. He's chair of the extremist Republican Study Committee, a caucus that exists to push House Republicans Further. To. The. Right.
Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) wasn't working on "jobs, jobs, jobs," either. He voted against the budget extension, too. Instead, he introduced a nasty little states-right bill:
“Last week, President Obama made an unprecedented decision to declare a Federal law unconstitutional and thereby abdicate his own constitutional responsibility to uphold and defend that law. Activist judges, and now an activist President, have been trying to unilaterally define marriage for too long. This issue should instead be decided once and for all by the American people and the states.
“That is why I have introduced the “Marriage Protection Act” which simply states that no Federal Courts will have jurisdiction to hear cases regarding same-sex marriage. Instead, the definition of same-sex unions would be determined by the people through their State legislatures or via referendum.
And he also sponsored a bill that would strip President Obama "of his power to waive a law requiring him to move the embassy to Jerusalem."
Last but not least, South Carolina's Rep. Tim Scott. The poor guy's really got to prove himself - first, because he voted for the continuing resolution that extended the budget for three weeks, but also because he's a black Republican. So he's a member of the Club for Growth, plus he just introduced the Rising Tides Act of 2011.
And what does it do, exactly? It cuts the corporate income tax rate by 10% on companies making more than $10 million annually.
I just have to wonder what kind of inhuman people want to ignore this. Hell, I wonder if most members of Congress even know about it! Are we supposed to believe that the United States of America can't afford to feed struggling people?
(CBS) OKLAHOMA CITY - For millions of Americans the economic recovery can't get here soon enough. In 2010 a record 40.3 million Americans received food stamps. That's a 20 percent jump from 2009.
CBS News correspondent Seth Doane reports that even with that help, many are just getting by. By the end of each month the question in Sheri Lopez's kitchen isn't what's for dinner but will there be dinner?
Her daughter says, "At the end we're all just trying to find something in the cabinets. Sometimes you go to bed kind of hungry."
Sheri's husband lost his construction job a year ago.
"It has been downhill," says Sheri. "There've been no ups and downs. It has just been downhill."
This Oklahoma family of five saw no choice but to apply for food stamps. Their $500 benefit lasts two to three weeks but hardly four.
Just before midnight on the last day of every month, Sheri and her husband make a trip to the grocery store to beat the midnight rush.
"We get excited," says Sheri. "Like, 'Oh, we're going to go shopping tonight!'"
On the first of the month food stamp debit cards are automatically refilled with benefit money from the government. On an average night between midnight and 3 a.m., a store could bring in about $3000. On the first of the month that number is 10 times as much with almost everyone using food stamps.
In his race to the very bottom, media hack Tucker Carlson goes lower, sending a college student undercover to see what he can buy with food stamps:
For creative college students planning a party, the possibilities are endless. Here are some things you can buy with food stamps without breaking the law or the bank:
Limes for Coronas or other Mexican beers
Soda water or tonic water for mixed drinks
Coke for Jack and Cokes
Drink mixers, as long they have an FDA nutrition label on them and don’t have alcohol in them
Appetizers from the frozen food section
Chips, salsa, cheese, and crackers
Red Bull for Jager-bombs
Jell-O to make Jell-O shots
Any other snack product
Gatorade for nursing the next day’s hangover
Egg Nog (for Egg Nog and Brandy mixed drinks during the holidays)
