Another Liberal Morphing

When did feeding hungry children morph into providing bail money for a convicted drug dealer?  The answer is ... when liberals are given their leash ... as they have continue to enjoy in our current bleeding-heart society.  Recently in Massachusetts, a drug dealer was re-arrested and made bail by having a compatriot use his food-stamps allocation to bail him out of prison ... see Boston Herald Story. OK, it wasn't actually food stamps, it was the modern-day equivalent ... his EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) card. The EBT card came about because the old food-stamp program was deemed to humiliate those people who paid for their groceries with food stamps.  Soooo ... now indigent people have been given a debit-card like appliance that allows them to swipe it, without embarrassment,  like other shoppers would do with their bank or credit cards.

There, like with most good intentions, is where things have gone awry ... because the administration of this program is lax to say the most ... and the road to hell is now paved with EBT cards.  Since recipients complained that it was sometimes more convenient to pay in cash, EBT recipients (at least in Massachusetts) were allowed to swipe their cards almost anywhere as though they were real debit cards ... such at automatic teller machines (ATMs), gas pumps, liquor stores, casinos, nail salons, tattoo parlors, strip clubs, etc. ... even on luxury sea cruises.  And, in supermarkets, EBT holders are quite often also allowed to buy cigarettes, lottery tickets, and many other non-food items.

The list of abuses goes on and on ... see More Abuse Examples.  Around the country EBT holders have gotten quite clever in converting what is meant for children's hunger relief into hard cash.  At the start of each month, newly-credit-filled EBT cards are often sold to other shoppers at substantial discounts outside of grocery stores.  One enterprising woman even bought cases and cases of soda with her card and then ran the (full) cans through the deposit-return machines just to get the cash.  (It broke the machine.)  Yesterday while listening to Massachusetts state Rep. Shaunna O’Connell (R-Taunton) on local talk radio I heard some even more disturbing facts about how poorly this program is administered in this true-blue state:

- People, here, who have "lost" their EBT cards, can have them replaced with no consequences.  As a result, there are 20,000 EBT cards that are "lost" in Massachusetts each month.
- Here, 85% of all EBT card use is to retrieve cash directly and not to purchase food.  And even most of the use to purchase food involves substantial cash-back requests (eg., buying a pack of gum with an EBT card and getting $49 back in change.)
- There is no restriction in Massachusetts on the use of EBT cards outside of this state ... say in Las Vegas.

In fiscal 2011 the United States spent $75 billion on "food stamps," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That's more than double ... up from $34.6 billion in 2008 (see: CNN Report), George W. Bush's last year in office.  Newt Gingrich has called Obama the "food-stamp President."  Perhaps he better should have called him the EBT-card President.

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