Free Republic

The Federal Communications Commission has announced plans to fine a mobile provider $51 million for defrauding its Lifeline program, which subsidizes wireless service for low-income Americans. The FCC accused California-based Total Call Mobile of fraudulently enrolling tens of thousands of duplicate and ineligible consumers in the Lifeline program. The company received an estimated $9.7 million dollars in improper payments since 2014, according to the FCC. In the fourth quarter of that year, 99.8% of the company's enrollments allegedly involved overriding a system designed to stop the registration of duplicate customers.

The Republican bill would hold those who intentionally make illegal purchases under the law to existing penalties for violations including making false statements on forms. A first violation is a one-year suspension, the second is two years, and the third is a lifetime ban. Democrats have said that is too harsh for a violation as small as buying a pack of cigarettes. In their version, the penalty for a first violation would be restitution, the second would be a maximum three-month suspension, and it would be a six-month maximum for subsequent violations. Advocates of the bill have said the department...

Welfare queen from Austin, Texas says that she makes at least twice as much money on public assistance as she could at any job. AND SHE GIVES DETAILS on how she scams/leeches the system. God help us.

Let's not be coy. There's a certain population in this country that expects unlimited government handouts despite its piggish unwillingness to work. Don't tell me this is about their child-care responsibilities, or lack of access to transportation or education. Nonsense. These people simply don't want to work. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new welfare queens: your democratically elected U.S. legislators, the laziest, most do-nothing generation of federal politicians in decades. Sure, they talk a big game about work ethic and personal responsibility. With the stated goal of promoting personal responsibility, the House Republicans' 2017 budget proposes newly attaching work requirements...

Nearly a third of people without health insurance, about 10 million, live in families that received a federal earned income tax credit in 2014, according to a new study. But the Internal Revenue Service doesn't tell those tax filers that their low and moderate incomes likely mean their households qualify for Medicaid or subsidies to buy coverage on the insurance exchanges. That's a lost opportunity to identify people who are eligible but not receiving government assistance to gain health coverage, the researchers say. More

There used to be a rule in place – part of the sadly abandoned movements toward welfare reform in the 80s and 90s – which required food stamps recipients to do at least some work in order to receive the benefits if they were childless and able bodied. That rule was suspended in most places since the beginning of the crash in 2007, but now that unemployment is allegedly back down to nominal levels and the economy is “stable” across most of the country, that exception is being rolled back. This, of course, has liberals up in arms. (WaPo) The...

States are moving to once again require able-bodied adults to put in work hours in exchange for food stamps, after the requirements largely were suspended by the Obama administration. The slow-moving reversal follows the administration pulling back on Clinton-era changes that required recipients to work for government welfare benefits. Signing the reform bill in 1996 alongside then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, then-President Bill Clinton said the goal was to make welfare “a second chance, not a way of life.” But during the last recession, President Obama allowed states to suspend a requirement that able-bodied adults without children work at least 20 hours...

The [PA] state Department of Human Services will pay about $390,000 a year to rent space in Liberty Place for its newly opened call center there, a state official said Monday. . . . The call centers field calls from consumers seeking or receiving various types of public assistance. Consumers typically call to report changes in their address, income or household, to request replacement of EBT (electronic benefits transfer) cards and to inquire about the status of an application for benefits.

When she isn’t shipping in more Syrian refugees, or trying to find new ways to destroy the Greek economy, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel is fond of quoting an alarming statistic: Europe accounts for just 7pc of the world’s population, and 25pc of its GDP, and yet it also accounts for a massive 50pc of its welfare spending. The point is an important one. Europe’s welfare spending is out of control, and is on a scale that is both lavish and unaffordable compared with the rest of the world. There is a problem, however. Neither she, nor any other political...

This is a radio interview with a 32 year old in Austin, TX, who thinks there is nothing wrong with taking welfare even though she's capable of working. She's a second generation welfare con artist and expects her kids to be the same. Listen at: http://safeshare.tv/w/csrqsTAmSx

The farcical American welfare-state has a new posterchild. Meet Florida-resident Nicholas Jackson, who tried to purchase a brand new $60,000 BMW X-6 SUV with his Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card ... That's not what Food Stamps are for!! But, as New York Daily News' Sasha Goldstein explains, after failing to use his us-taxpayer-funded credit card to buy the high-end German luxury car, he decided to steal it...but was caught when he ran out of gas (according to police). Nicholas Jackson, 36, showed up to a Pompano Beach dealership with little in the way of currency and was sent away, the...

For rent: brand new one-bed apartments in the shadow of downtown Dallas, a short walk from one of the city's trendiest areas. On-site concierge. Successful applicants will be homeless, mentally ill and possess criminal records. . . . All for a rent of 30% of the tenant's monthly income - whether it is $1,000 or $10. The only requirement? "Be a good tenant," James says. That means no criminal or disruptive behaviour; but no pressure on residents to immediately go sober if they are addicted to alcohol, for example.

Former first daughter Chelsea Clinton told attendees at a Utah campaign stop that her mother is eager to extend Obamacare "to people who are living and working here, regardless of immigration status, regardless of citizenship status." The apparent promise to extend Obamacare to illegal immigrants came Tuesday at a campaign stop for Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton in Salt Lake City, where an unidentified man questioned Chelsea about the intersection of heath care and immigration policy. "I'm a proud gay Latino immigrant, now a U.S. citizen. So I support your mom," the man said in a video of the encounter...

(Colorado) Between May and November last year, 5,000 welfare recipients withdrew taxpayer money more than 10,000 times at casinos, liquor stores and pot shops despite a new state law requiring agencies to block the abuse, officials told lawmakers Tuesday. The numbers, which show 9,204 withdrawals at liquor stores, 40 at racing establishments, 134 at marijuana shops and 737 at casinos are higher than the numbers Watchdog.org found in a similar six-month period in 2014, when we wrote stories that sparked the legislation. But Watchdog.org’s analysis was conservative and excluded many venues that sell both food and liquor, like Sam’s Clubs....

On two different occasions Congress has rejected laws to give “needy” families government-subsidized diapers—in addition to free food and medical care—but President Obama is determined to make it happen, allocating $10 million in taxpayer money to the highly unpopular cause. The multi-million-dollar initiative is being promoted by the White House as essential to eradicate a national “diaper divide” and the goal is to abolish “diaper disparity” by expanding access to affordable diapers for America’s poorest families. Behind this high-priced mission is Cecilia Muñoz, the White House Domestic Policy Director. A renowned open borders lobbyist in Washington D.C., Muñoz was vice...

Gov. Rick Snyder signed a workers’ compensation reform bill over four years ago and the real world results of that legislation are now in, and they are very positive. As the Detroit Free Press recently reported, premiums for workers’ compensation fell by 28 percent since 2011, while the national average rose by 11 percent. This is good news for a state competing with others for investment and jobs. Michigan’s 2011 workers’ compensation reform was both substantive and procedural. Most of the substantive changes were codifications of Michigan Supreme Court case law over the preceding decade. The procedural changes were largely...

Chris Weller March 5, 2016 Finland and The Netherlands have already shown their interest in giving people a regular monthly allowance regardless of working status, and now Ontario, Canada, is onboard. Ontario's government announced in February that a pilot program will be coming to the Canadian province sometime later this year. The premise: Send people monthly checks to cover living expenses such as food, transportation, clothing, and utilities — no questions asked. It's a radical idea, and one that has been around since the 1960s. It's called "basic income." In the decades since it was first proposed, various researchers and...

Let’s say computers come for most of our jobs. This may not seem likely at the moment; computer scientists and economists offer wildly varying ideas for how deeply automation will affect future employment. But for the sake of argument, imagine that within two or three decades we’ll have morphed into the Robotic States of America.

"With a one-way ticket home to Iraq in his hands and seven months' worth of frustration over intransigent German bureaucracy in his heart, Gazwan Abdulhasen Abdulla gave up on his dreams of a better life in Europe." "I wanted to live in peace with my family as far away from war as possible," said Abdulla, a 37-year-old who had worked as a truck driver in Iraq. "But what I've seen in Europe is not what I dreamed about. It's not what [the smugglers] told me it would be. "The food was terrible, so disgusting that not even animals should be...

Friends who own resort hotels dependent on high season occupancy on the West Coast tell me the same story over and over...Locals 'pretend' to apply for a job, so that they can check the 'Job Search' box on their unemployment requirement. They call by phone, hang up and are no shows for interviews. Or, they show up stoned. Or, they only want to work enough hours so that they don't 'ruin' their benefits....they actually say this. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the issue at hand. They 'pretend' to look for work, while the Employment Office 'pretends'...