USA becomes Food Stamp Nation but is it sustainable?

when is the government going to stop taking the easy way out and give out things for free without verification. when you see/hear about people on welfare going away to disney on vacation, drive new cars, have iphones, etc. i have seen kids with expensive clothes which might have been given to them by corporations but these same kids go out to lunch everyday and have iphones. these same kids if they have a medical problem refuse to go to the clinic and just go to the er because they do not want to have to wait which they might have learned from their parents. heck most people i know who work and have insurance stay away from the er because the copay is exorbitant and they cannot afford it. their children do not go out to lunch everyday nor do they all have iphones (some do) nor do they all wear $150-$200 sneakers. A good example would be a woman living with her children in subsidized housing where the government pays the whole tab. the boyfriend also lives there and makes good money but the government overlooks that. the woman does not work because she has a daughter with a slight learning disability but goes to school full time and even goes to camp all summer at government expense. when asked why she doesn't work at all since her child is in school full time her response was that if she worked, the government would take away her free housing, free food money, etc

frustration .... A family member is posting on FB that she has no food in the pantry or fridge ... that she and her daughter have not eaten in two days ... FS office "screwed up" and now she will have to wait a week for them to "fix" it. The frustration is because she got a tattoo on Monday... if she had $180 for a tat on Monday ... why is she complaining about no food on Thursday ??

Guess How Many People Work Versus How Many People Take? You Might Be Shocked!
By Steve Straub On April 16, 2014

http://thefederalistpapers.integrate...le-working.jpg

This is truly shocking and a must read for any taxpayer, or anyone who care about liberty.

There are more people receiving means-tested welfare type benefits that there are people working full time!

Via CNS News: http://www.cnsnews.com/commentary/te...benefit-takers

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Buried deep on the website of the U.S. Census Bureau is a number every American citizen, and especially those entrusted with public office, should know. It is 86,429,000.

That is the number of Americans who in 2012 got up every morning and went to work — in the private sector — and did it week after week after week. It is not a rancher with a few hundred head of cattle that is attacking their habitat, nor an energy company developing a fossil fuel. It is big government and its primary weapon — an ever-expanding welfare state.

First, let’s look at the basic taxonomy of the full-time, year-round American worker.

In 2012, according to the Census Bureau, approximately 103,087,000 people worked full-time, year-round in the United States. “A full-time, year-round worker is a person who worked 35 or more hours per week (full time) and 50 or more weeks during the previous calendar year (year round),” said the Census Bureau. “For school personnel, summer vacation is counted as weeks worked if they are scheduled to return to their job in the fall.”

Of the 103,087,000 full-time, year-round workers, 16,606,000 worked for the government. That included 12,597,000 who worked for state and local government and 4,009,000 who worked for the federal government.

The 86,429,000 Americans who worked full-time, year-round in the private sector, included 77,392,000 employed as wage and salary workers for private-sector enterprises and 9,037,000 who worked for themselves. (There were also approximately 52,000 who worked full-time, year-round without pay in a family enterprise.)

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At first glance, 86,429,000 might seem like a healthy population of full-time private-sector workers. But then you need to look at what they are up against.

The Census Bureau also estimates the size of the benefit-receiving population.

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This population, too, falls into two broad categories. The first includes those who receive benefits for public services they performed or in exchange for payroll taxes they dutifully paid their entire working lives. Among these, for example, are those receiving veteran’s benefits, those on unemployment and those getting Medicare and Social Security.

The second category includes those who get “means-tested” government benefits — or welfare. These include, for example, those who get Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, public housing, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Women, Infants Children.

Let’s examine this second category first, which the Census Bureau reports as “anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program.”

In the last quarter of 2011, according to the Census Bureau, approximately 82,457,000 people lived in households where one or more people were on Medicaid. 49,073,000 lived in households were someone got food stamps. 23,228,000 lived in households where one or more got WIC. 20,223,000 lived in households where one or more got SSI. 13,433,000 lived in public or government-subsidized housing.

Of course, it stands to reason that some people lived in households that received more than one welfare benefit at a time. To account for this, the Census Bureau published a neat composite statistic: There were 108,592,000 people in the fourth quarter of 2011 who lived in a household that included people on “one or more means-tested program.”

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Those 108,592,000 outnumbered the 86,429,000 full-time private-sector workers who inhabited the United States in 2012 by almost 1.3 to 1

How much more can the American worker endure before he or she simply gives up? What do you think about this?

http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/u...ght-be-shocked

I’m on your side, I’m a fiscal conservative who thinks that our budget/debt is direct result of corrupt politicians spending without restraint, bribing the electorate with entitlements, and all out refusing to pass a balanced budget. I do not approve of parasites leaching off of the working man’s tax dollar or the politicians who make it possible.

With that said, this article strikes me as poorly done smear job which is intentionally misrepresenting numbers/facts to incite anger and outrage. If the outrage is just then it should not need sneaky articles and incomplete implications to achieve said outrage. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth should suffice. When we start play the same dirty games that our opponents play then we begin to look like the same lying douchebags that they look like to us.

Here’s my problems with the article’s numbers.

First off, all of the numbers are based on “anyone residing in a household in which one or more people received benefits from the program.” So, stating that 82,457,000 live in a house where someone receives medicaid means next to nothing. We don’t know the average, but if 4 people live in the house, and 1 is on medicaid then this 82 million number is 4 times higher than the number of people actually receiving medicaid. It’s grossly over inflated and completely useless in any kind of meaningful measurement. Same with the other entitlement numbers listed.

Next, the article doesn’t provide any info on how many of the entitlement recipients are also working! It is basically trying to create the appearance that there are 102 million unemployed people receiving benefits vs the 82 million workers who are paying for it all. But the 102 million could be 3x 4x 5x higher than the actual number of recipients, and any number of them could be hard working tax paying people that still unfortunately qualify for aid. Aren’t these the people that we claim we want to assist?

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How many people are in both groups? How many work, pay taxes, and still need Medicaid or WIC? Entitlement fraud is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed, but let’s not be as divisive as the left. Let’s attack the issue, not the individual.

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Exactly, slamradio! It also doesn’t take into account those recipients who are retired, disabled, or are children, who can’t possibly work. Right now, because of the exceedingly large Baby Boomer population retiring, who at the age of 65 need to go on Medicaid to be covered. As cold as it sounds, once the Baby Boomers all die off, the statistics will change and this narrative will cease.

we can't fprget that this year obama told the people that if they were not happy at their jobs and were only staying there for health insurance, then they should quit their jobs. now if people do as he says, then the numbers will change again. In addition when people applied for medicaid, the government changed the numbers so that more people would qualify therefore more people getting government assistance of which we have to include those who qualify under obamacare. who knows what the real numbers are...and if they know them, will we be told?

Obama Free to Go on Advertising Food Stamps in Mexico
January 15, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield

Magnet? What illegal immigration magnet? That’s immigration reform magnet, now.

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The omnibus spending bill before Congress continues to fund U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) advertising programs for food stamps in foreign countries like Mexico, Breitbart News has learned.

The bill was hashed out between House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) and Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD). The funding will continue despite claims in a document the House Appropriations Committee published that the bill contains a “prohibition” on such programs. Page three of this press document states regarding food stamps that the omnibus spending bill contains a “prohibition on advertisements or outreach with foreign governments.”

The entire paragraph that contains that statement reads: Requirements for the Secretary of Agriculture to help weed out and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the SNAP program – including a directive to ban fraudulent vendors, and a prohibition on advertisements or outreach with foreign governments.

However, upon reading through the text of the bill and the bill summary explanatory document, there is no such “prohibition” included in it. Instead, the explanatory document that Rogers published just states that USDA is “strongly discouraged” from advertising food stamps programs with foreign governments.

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The more things claim to have been changed, the more they stay exactly the same. A Republican deal with a Democrat invariably ends with the Democrat getting everything he wants on policy issues and the Republican getting bragging rights based on meaningless language.

Similarly, during the Senate Budget Committee markup of the Democratic budget that Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) offered last year, Sessions offered an amendment that would have ended the USDA’s partnership with Mexico on food stamp advertising in that country. Senate Democrats unanimously voted against that Sessions amendment.

And let’s not forget that…

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Department of Agriculture personnel in the Obama administration have met with Mexican Government officials dozens of times since the president took office to promote nutrition assistance programs — notably food stamps — among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.

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:mad:

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“Nearly 1 in 6 people living in the US are now on food stamps,” Sessions noted. “How can the administration justify trying to increase that number through outreach on the foreign soil of fifty consulates?”

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Somebody’s got to move here and vote for him six times.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgr...mps-in-mexico/

"There’s gonna be a Rodney King, baby"
recipients in LA threaten riots after card outage
Written by Allen West on June 19, 2014

It’s often said, if you give a man a fish, he will eat for one day but if you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a lifetime. Attributed to Benjamin Franklin is a similar sentiment: “I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”

And we see this theory playing out right before our eyes, in a very negative way. Hat tip to a friend of mine, a New York Police Department detective, who sent this my way from Americanoverlook.com: “Residents of Los Angeles’ Skid Row threatened to riot this weekend because their Electronic Benefit Transfer cards stopped working temporarily. The brief EBT card outage was the result of a routine back-up check on the vendor’s Xerox Corp. systems. The system began working shortly after it was restarted, however, California welfare recipients weren’t happy about the inconvenience.”


“My heart goes out to people who don’t have food right now,” one welfare recipient told the media. Another man said, “We had to cancel a picnic today cause we were gonna use EBT cards to buy hamburgers and stuff.” While these men were fairly understanding about the outage, one man threatened, “They had better resolve something because if it stays like this there is gonna be an uproar in the city of L.A…A Rodney King, baby.”

My heart goes out as well. It goes out because we have completely destroyed the individual initiative of Americans and destroyed the opportunities for them to be able to feed and care for themselves — now they just sit and wait to be given their fish.

But what is amazing is how this poverty state and food stamp dependency have skyrocketed under the Obama administration. The numbers are staggering — to include taxpayer-funded government advertisements for food stamps south of our border. Today we refer to the Food Stamp Program as SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and what was intended for good has now become an addictive drug.

We now issue EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) cards which are loosely controlled and regulated, and can be used almost everywhere — don’t believe me? Check out your local gas station convenience store.

And so I decided to do a little research for you via the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and present the original intention of the Food Stamp Program (FSP):

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On Jan. 31, 1964, President Johnson requested Congress to pass legislation making the FSP permanent. Secretary Orville Freeman submitted proposed legislation to establish a permanent FSP on April 17, 1964. The bill eventually passed by Congress was H.R. 10222, introduced by Congresswoman Leonor K. Sullivan. Among the official purposes of the Food Stamp Act of 1964 were strengthening the agricultural economy and providing improved levels of nutrition among low-income households; however, the practical purpose was to bring the pilot FSP under Congressional control and to enact the regulations into law. The major provisions were;

– the State Plan of Operation requirement and development of eligibility standards by States;

– the requirement that recipients purchase their food stamps, paying an amount commensurate with their normal expenditures for food and receiving an amount of food stamps representing an opportunity more nearly to obtain a low-cost nutritionally adequate diet;

– the eligibility for purchase with food stamps of all items intended for human consumption except alcoholic beverages and imported foods (the House version would have prohibited the purchase of soft drinks, luxury foods, and luxury frozen foods);

– prohibitions against discrimination on bases of race, religious creed, national origin, or political beliefs;

– the division of responsibilities between States (certification and issuance) and the Federal Government (funding of benefits and authorization of retailers and wholesalers), with shared responsibility for funding costs of administration; and

– appropriations for the first year limited to $75 million; for the second year, to $100 million; and, for the third year, to $200 million.

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So I ask you to consider, how far away from the original intent and purpose have we come? This is yet another example of a “Great Society” program that has only served to promote a sense of economic servitude and individual enslavement.

We’re certainly spending a whole lot more than $200 million, even if you adjust the dollars for inflation.

Yes, those words of Franklin have come to fruition but shrewd politicians know they’ve created a permanent welfare system which plays into their hands as people will always vote for those promising more benefits and largesse from the public treasury.

http://allenbwest.com/2014/06/theres...W7vublVjqc3.99

people are able to buy lobster, liquor, porn, able to gamble etc all on the backs of the working taxpayer. government has enabled them...enabled them to the point that people who are collecting the benefits of welfare have admitted that they get more for not working.

just today O has told iraq, that if they want to survive, they have to do it themselves..........................so why does he keep enabling those on welfare (i am not talking about those people who physically and mentally need assistance)? why has he told ppl that if they are only working for health insurance and hate their jobs, to quit? does he get an award for increasing the number of people reliant on government (taxpayers) assistance?

http://www.tpnn.com/wp-content/uploa...helle-Wine.jpg
Welcome to Obama’s America: Brawl Breaks Out at Welfare Office
June 26, 2014 By Jennifer Burke

WARNING – GRAPHIC CONTENT: The video below contains more crack than your eyes can likely handle and I’m not referring to the drug.

As an American, I am appalled as I witness Barack Obama systematically attempt to bring America to her knees with an attack on freedom, abuse of the Office of the Presidency, foreign policy decisions and inaction that not only make America a laughingstock, but also put us in danger, and economic policies that are negatively impacting the bottom line of American families around the country and creating burdensome debt and fewer opportunities for future generations.

Nowhere is the economic impact being felt more than in the black community. As a black woman, it pains me to witness so many caught up in the cycle of welfare and poverty, made worse by Barack Obama, continue to support and defend Obama. They dissolve him of any guilt and blame, many defending him to no end.

This video speaks volumes about just some of the issues plaguing the black community, and society in general. It documents a fight between two women at a welfare office. Children are present, but that doesn’t cause anyone to stop and rethink their actions. Also, rather than stop the fight or seem frantic at what is going on, someone starts filming with a smartphone while laughing. (Why does anyone getting welfare have a smartphone anyway? Maybe they have ‘Obama phones.’ But, that’s another story.)

While I don’t know what they were fighting about, one thing is certain – tensions are running high in Obama’s America everywhere, even within the black community at the welfare office. People get closer, but only to cheer her on and film. As one guy gets closer, maybe to stop the fight or maybe to just get a closer look, he is met with multiple punches by a group of girls who push him away from the fight.

This is a sad testimony to victims in Obama’s America. Even worse in this case, many of them probably don’t even realize they are victims of his big government destructive policies. They likely continue to blame Bush and view Obama as caring and benevolent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inI7N...layer_embedded

http://www.tpnn.com/2014/06/26/video...elfare-office/

LA DCFS responds to million dollar food stamp mistake
Tuesday, July 8, 2014 - 3:05pm

BATON ROUGE — Louisiana distributed more than a million dollars in SNAP benefits to people who were no longer alive.

A state audit shows nearly 4,000 households received SNAP payments where the primary recipient was dead.

In the four years from July 2009 to June 2013, the people who had died received nearly one-point-three-million dollars in SNAP benefits.

Officials say it's hard to know exactly who was using the program's cards after the owners were dead.

"On the DCFS funds, the SNAP benefits, you're not going to recover those funds. So, that's just taxpayer money that's gone,” said Louisiana Legislative Auditor Daryl Purpera. “Those are federal funds, taxpayer funds that we'll not be able to recover."

Officials say the Department of Child and Family Services was only checking eligibility every six to 12 months, doing so by looking at social security records.

DCFS Secretary Suzy Sonnier released a statement Tuesday morning, saying: “DCFS has addressed this issue by entering into a formal agreement with the Department of Health and Hospitals to receive more timely information about deaths in Louisiana. This new process will reduce the time it takes for a death record to become available and certified in order for the household to be determined no longer eligible for benefits. The Fraud and Recovery unit is already investigating the cases in this report and will seek recoupment and prosecution of guilty parties to the full extent of the law.”

http://www.nbc33tv.com/news/louisian...ponds-to-milli

government is notoriously dysfunctional when allocating taxpayers money: children being claimed by ppl filing taxes who do not live in the US nor are Americans where the IRS is handing then each thousands of dollars of money they are not qualified for..........obamacare questioning the citizenship of a large percentage of the 2.6 million who are signed up for obamacare (perhaps these could be the ppl that the mexican embassies in US cities helped to apply?).......pentagon acknowledged they had paid ppl who had died, did not have ssn, never worked there etc......social security has sent checks to dead ppl for years......didn't the irs lose millions that was for the implementation of obamacare? I am sure it is not just LA that has been supporting dead ppl! (how many elected officials have received salaries while imprisoned for cheating the taxpayers?)

Busloads of Illegals Shopping at WALMART with EBT Cards
by Sean Brown / on July 14, 2014 at 11:27 am

If we were to listen only to the mainstream media and the talking points from the White House, they would have us believe that not only is the government doing everything possible in order to stop the invasion of our Southern border, but those who are crossing are refugee children who can’t be turned away. However, a video that was recorded on Sunday by a North Carolina woman places serious doubts on whether or not either of those things are true, as it allegedly shows busloads of adult illegal immigrants getting dropped off at a local Walmart to shop for supplies for their shelter. http://www.breitbart.com/InstaBlog/2...od-Stamp-Cards

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaJH5Me8TUc&feature=player_embedded

In the video above, Sylvia can be heard talking to another person who presumably was curious about what was going on, so she explained to them that prior to taking the video she had tried to talk to the people on the bus. Not only could they barely speak English, but one of them had said they had just arrived in America.

We all know that this has been happening, however, the sheriff of her town had said that they weren’t allowing any illegals to be shipped in, so it would appear as if the Obama regime is once again placing undue burdens on the states and not even letting them know what’s going on. What’s worse is that in the comments under the video she posted to Facebook, Sylvia said that when she was in line behind them that they were using government-issued EBT cards to pay for their purchases.

The Kannapolis Police Department wouldn’t comment on the video when I reached out to them, and the sheriff couldn’t be reached for comment. However, there’s been many reports of illegals being shipped to towns without the knowledge of town officials as Judge Jeanine points out below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Rk2MypUb6J0

http://madworldnews.com/video-busloa...art-ebt-cards/