This story is getting a lot of play and its one of my hot buttons so I thought I’d give it a shot. First my home state of Maine…in the Wal Mart I used to shop at.
During the 2010 and 2011 summers, I was a cashier at Wal-Mart #1788 in Scarborough, Maine. I spent hours upon hours toiling away at a register, scanning, bagging, and dealing with questionable clientele. These were all expected parts of the job, and I was okay with it. What I didn’t expect to be part of my job at Wal-Mart was to witness massive amounts of welfare fraud and abuse….a) People ignoring me on their iPhones while the state paid for their food. (For those of you keeping score at home, an iPhone is at least $200, and requires a data package of at least $25 a month. If a person can spend $25+ a month so they can watch YouTube 24/7, I don’t see why they can’t spend that money on food.)
b) People using TANF (EBT Cash) money to buy such necessities such as earrings, kitkat bars, beer, WWE figurines, and, my personal favorite, a slip n’ slide. TANF money does not have restrictions like food stamps on what can be bought with it.
c) Extravagant purchases made with food stamps; including, but not limited to: steaks, lobsters, and giant birthday cakes.
d) A man who ran a hotdog stand on the pier in Portland, Maine used to come through my line. He would always discuss his hotdog stand and encourage me to “come visit him for lunch some day.” What would he buy? Hotdogs, buns, mustard, ketchup, etc. How would he pay for it? Food stamps. Either that man really likes hotdogs, or the state is paying for his business. Not okay.
Go read the whole thing its an amazing post. Now on to Massachusetts.
Abuse of the Electronic Benefits Transfer cards that are issued to needy families in Massachusetts is apparently so rampant that we won’t be surprised if drug dealers start hanging “We Accept EBT!” signs in their car windows.
The latest scam was revealed this week, with prosecutors alleging that employees of four Lynn convenience stores allowed customers to withdraw hundreds of dollars from their EBT accounts, which was then used to buy crack cocaine. The stores kept half the withdrawn cash as a fee, authorities allege.
I think at this point we must ALL know somebody who has or is abusing the system. Hell back when they had actual food stamps people would buy the stamps from the junkies for 50c on the Dollar so they could eat on the cheap, and the junkie can stay balls-deep in their sweet-sweet vice…and on the government’s dime!
I’m sure there are lots of people who don’t cheat the system and DO use EBT and other welfare programs to feed themselves and their families…but at this point the well is officially poisoned and we need to 100% re-think how things are done.
My sister in law reported the same results when she was a cashier at a grocery store. In IL they’re allowed $20 cash back, so after buying their steaks and brand name milk, they get their cashback for booze and smokes.
Sometimes I think it would be less frustrating if the politicians actually came out and offered money for votes, rather than disguising it in “assistance.”
A pawn shop in Portland called Onion John’s use to pull that scam. The owner had a grocery store in another part of town.
They had a list of food items they would buy, and a list of prices they would pay for them. Bums would go buy the food on the list, and trade it for beer and drug money. He would then sell the food at a steep profit in his grocery store.
The cops couldn’t close him down. So he had a mysterious arson at his business. He put up a big sign on the burnt out property saying the Portland Police won, and that he was leaving town.
Wow what a great scam, and another sad example of “I fought the law, and the law won”.
A local (western MA( dairy delivers milk in glass jars to the food co-op and the glass jars have a $2 bottle deposit on them.
The law allows bottle deposits to be paid for with SNAP cards, so people are coming in and purchasing the whole organic local dairy milk, taking them outside to the alley and dumping the milk on the ground then coming back in to ask for $2 in cash for the bottle redemption.
The alley stinks of rotten milk.
In fact, everything stinks about this.
I wrote my state senator.
I know in Maine they have a deposit on bottled water, so the bums buy cases of cheap bottled water, then dump them in the parking lot, then return the empties for cash deposit.
This proves that the capitalists are right. The abuse is also called free trade. You have food stamps that you can’t buy illegal drugs with. I have cash. We trade and both benefit. The only looser is the Progressive that thought he could make social engineering work.
yep, 100% correct, you can’t STOP this abuse…you can stop throwing money at problems and hope that you’ll improve things.