Free Republic

Since President Obama took office the number of able-bodied-without-dependents who are receiving government food subsidies has soared by 370%. This increase in participation by persons who in another era would have been expected to fend for themselves was hailed as "great progress on the President's goal of transforming America," by Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell. "Relieved of the burden of feeding themselves, these individuals are free to pursue goals higher on Maslow's hierarchy of needs." One of the favorite "higher goals" of this segment of the population is smoking. Fully 50% of the subsidized beneficiaries are smokers...

The Executive Office of the President of the United States -- aka Barack Obama -- released a document in the days leading up to Christmas that proves once again that reality conspires against even the most careful liars. The White House intended the document in question -- dryly titled "Long-Term Benefits of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" -- to build the case for expanding the value and availability of food stamps. What the document demonstrates is that even the Obama White House knows that an unborn child is a child. During his political career, Obama has made great exertions to...

Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards intends to remove work requirements that Gov. Bobby Jindal has enacted for more than 60,000 food stamp recipients. Edwards sent a letter Monday to the U.S. Department of Agriculture saying he will seek a federal waiver of the work requirements. The governor-elect says Louisiana's unemployment rate qualifies it to skip the work mandate. He's asking the USDA and the state social services department to stop any interruption of benefits until Edwards can reapply for the waiver that Jindal allowed to expire. The work requirements are supposed to kick in Jan. 1 for adults aged 18 to...

Emily BadgerDeember 9, 2015Toward the end of every month, hospitals in California see a curious uptick in admissions for hypoglycemia, the kind of low blood sugar that can affect diabetics. The pattern, detected in a recent study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, is almost entirely driven by low-income patients. The non-poor don't show much change in admissions at all. The researchers suspect this trend may point to an underlying challenge for the poor: Food stamps, given out in a lump sum at the start of each month, run out for many families before they reach the...

Two city workers exploited flaws in the city’s welfare system to swipe $2.1 million worth of food stamps and rental subsidies — and then spent $120,000 on Red Bull, authorities said Tuesday. Petronila Peralta of The Bronx and Cherrise Watson-Jackson of Queens — both longtime employees of the Human Resources Administration — were charged with fraud, along with 11 co-conspirators who allegedly helped carry out the scam between 2008 and 2013.

Mary Mayhew, commissioner of Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services, knows her politics aren’t always popular. “I can’t stress enough what an attack campaign it has been from the media for four and a half years,” Mayhew said Thursday at an anti-poverty forum in Washington, D.C., hosted by The Heritage Foundation. Then there are the more personalized critiques: “There is a poet, or he calls himself a poet, and he sends me poems all the time,” she added. “They are not nice poems.” Mayhew claims that detractors—who mostly take issue with welfare reforms enacted by Gov. Paul LePage, a...

ABC News(NEW YORK) — A Donald Trump rally was interrupted several times by protesters Wednesday night and the outspoken presidential candidate suggested that one of them, whom he described as “seriously overweight,” was upset because he was talking about food stamps. “You know it’s amazing, I mentioned food stamps at that guy who’s seriously overweight went crazy — Amazing. Amazing,” Trump told the audience in Worcester, Mass. “That’s an amazing sight.” The protester was escorted out of the rally. Just before the protester interrupted Trump, the candidate was talking about the need to roll back the number of people on...

New data released by the Department of Agriculture Oct. 9 shows the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, with enrollment exceeding 45 million for 51 straight months. The population of Canada: 34,834,841. “Between 2007 and 2011, new eligibility rules by themselves added 3.4 million people to SNAP enrollment and naturally tended to increase SNAP spending. At the same time, SNAP began to pay more generous benefits to people who enrolled,” Casey Mulligan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, told the Washington Free Beacon on Thursday. The growing SNAP population is a far cry from the 2.8 million enrolled...

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson used a Sunday campaign stop in Georgia to accuse politicians of using poverty to bolster their voting constituencies. In his eyes, open-ended welfare has not only perpetuated poverty, its sustained a loyal voting bloc for certain politicians.“False compassion is patting them on the head and saying, ‘You can’t take care of yourself and I’m going to give you food stamps, a housing subsidy and free health care,'” Carson said according to the Gainesville Times. “And all the things you need so you can stay dependent and vote for me.’”His criticism of welfare is not new....

Welfare programs often account for a state’s largest and fastest-growing budget line items, and as these programs grow, the likelihood of waste, fraud, and abuse grows too. Welfare fraud robs resources from those who are truly needy, and stories like this are infuriating.Vida Ofori Causey, a 45-year-old convenience store owner in Worchester, Massachusetts, was charged in a federal court last week after she pled guilty to a multimillion dollar food stamp fraud scheme.Food stamps are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), and eligible low-income individuals and families receive monetary benefits they...

My name is Christine, and I get food stamps. I've had to apply off and on over the past 16 years in order to make sure my family was fed. I don't feel the least bit ashamed of myself for this, but apparently some people think I should. Some people think I, and people like me, am lazy. Or that we're taking advantage of other (smarter, harder-working) people. Those people seem to have an image in their heads of how someone who "deserves" assistance behaves, and a very narrow idea of how we should feel about it. Those people are...

<p>Progressives will tell you that food stamp fraud is basically a problem that doesn’t exist. At best they’ll admit that, perhaps, there are a few instances where a store sells something to a customer that shouldn’t be covered by the SNAP program - but they’ll claim those minor transgressions are extremely isolated cases. They’ll regale you with tales of the hard-working poor who hold down two jobs and receive welfare just to make ends meet.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) — A government shutdown Oct. 1 could immediately suspend or delay food stamp payments to some of the 46 million Americans who receive the food aid. The Agriculture Department said Tuesday that it will stop providing benefits "within the first several days of October" if Congress does not pass legislation to keep government agencies open.

Washington (CNN)—Corinne Cannon had a tough time adjusting to motherhood after the birth of her first child, Jack. "We were ecstatic to have him, but he was a difficult infant," Cannon said. "He cried pretty much all the time, and it was so emotionally exhausting." That's an experience many new mothers can relate to. But Cannon knew she had the resources and support to get her through that many families do not have. She felt compelled to help them, so she called local organizations to ask what she could do. Over and over, the answer she got was "diapers." Nearly...

Unemployment has dropped in recent years, yet still—far too many people are participating. One out of every seven Americans received SNAP benefits in 2014, and the program cost $74.1 billion, making it one of the largest means-tested welfare program. You’d think the improving jobs situation would translate to the number of SNAP beneficiaries declining by a much larger margin. But that hasn’t been the case. Another reason for saying that food stamp numbers aren’t really going in the right direction? Look at how the SNAP demographic has changed. Before the 2008 recession, 55 percent of SNAP households consisted of children...

The quickest and surest way to make things more expensive for most of us is for someone in our government to attempt to make such things “free” for some. As I noted earlier this year, the largest “charity” in the U.S. is government (which, of course, brags about it!). Americans gave a total of approximately $3.4 billion (about $2.4 billion from individuals) to private charities in 2013. In the same year, Americans received over $600 billion from means-tested (recipients required to be below a certain income level) government programs (housing, food stamps, WIC, Medicaid, and the like). When non means-tested...

In a blog posted on Friday on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website, the department boasts that food stamp spending at U.S. farmers markets has increased “nearly six-fold” since 2008. “National SNAP redemptions at those outlets totaled $18.8 million during fiscal year 2014 (Oct. 1 to Sept. 30), a nearly six-fold increase since 2008,” the blog states, calling the increase “a win-win for all.” (SNAP is the acronym for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the food stamp program.) […] Calling food stamp payment at farmers markets a “top priority” for the USDA, the department is providing free wireless equipment to...

the nation’s legal and illegal immigrant population hit a record 41.3 million in the summer of 2013 – up 1.4 million since July 2010. ... refugees from both Africa and the Middle East were users of the most cash assistance – noting that 91.4 percent of refugees from the Middle East were on food stamps, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

From the Conservative Tribune: “Right now American conservatives are arguing over the idea that the US should provide at least a minimum safety net for citizens who fall on economic hard times and need assistance to get back on their feet. One thing conservatives are not arguing about, however, is the idea that too many freeloaders consider such assistance an entitlement and abuse it for as long as they can. The use of food stamps is a case in point. More and more families use food stamps as their primary means of receiving not only groceries but also questionable items...

OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - The Oklahoma Republican Party on Tuesday removed a Facebook post that compared people who receive food stamps to wild animals after it set off a social-media storm. Titled a "lesson in irony," the post from Monday night says the U.S. government is proud that its food stamp program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, this year reached 46 million people. "Meanwhile, the National Park Service, administered by the U.S. Department of the Interior, asks us 'Please Do Not Feed the Animals.' Their stated reason for the policy is because 'The animals will grow dependent on...