Posted on 12/06/2004 4:24:56 AM PST by spintreebob
Plan may cut food stamps for some.
Chicago(AP) - More people will fall off the federal food stamp rolls if the state follows through with a plan to close 25 regional offices of the Department of Human Services, an advocacy group said.
Only 67 percent of Illinoisans who are eligible for federal food stamps receive them, Illinois Hunger Coalition Executive Director Diane Doherty said.
About 20 members of the Coalition protested the planned cuts Wednesday outside the department's regional office in Chicago.
More people would apply for and receive food stamps if Human Services had a bigger staff, Doherty said.
Illinois is ranked ninth in the United States in food stamp participation, and the state has a record 500,000 families in the program, a 46 percent increase since 1999, Human Services spokesman Tom Green said.
Human Services also deals with Medicaid, other health benefits (kidcare) and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Twenty-five of the state's 200 regional offices were slated to close in 30 to 120 days, Green said, although he declined to provide a list of the offices.
And how many staffers per office? My guess is more than 10 but less than 20 per office.
Illinois is 9th of 52 including DC and PR. So what is the correlation between blue state and participation rate? With all the pressure from the staffers and accusations that they are not good parents unless they apply for food stamps and threats that they will lose their children if they are not good parents, why do 1/3 not apply for food stamps?
In NYC there are radio ads practically begging people to sign up for food stamps.
Obviously, the advertising staff is sufficiently large.
My late brother in law was on food stamps when he died. I was the executor of his will. It took me three months, culminating in a major in-person shouting match with one of the dumbest women in North America, to get him off their rolls. I was later told that many people simply keep on cashing the food stamps because it's impossible to get people to understand that a dead man can't come in and sign forms taking him off the rolls.
What the article assumes is that the 500,000 on the rolls who did apply are all eligible. Other studies consistently show that about 1/3 of those who apply and receive food stamps are not eligible. They lie on their applications .... or more likely the "bigger staff" creates the lies on the application in order to justify the existence of the "bigger staff".
In addition to these state employees, our tax money contracts "outreach programs" to city Human Service departments and to non-profit groups. I was previously on the board of a non-profit which was precinct captains for the Dick Mell-Pat Quinn organization. They were constantly pre-occupied with trying to justify their existence in the face of low numbers of eligible people signed up. It was hard to determine whether Pat Quinn's petition drives or concern for the needy drove the "outreach".
Uh, maybe they are smart enough to stay out of the clutches of the government?
There have been several times in my life I was eligible for food stamps and other government programs.....thank you, but no thank you.
These people are truly sick. And they can't figure out why they are despised and disrespected. They are totally clueless.
To them, the measure of success is how far they are able to induce a bad thing to grow. Success, beyond their wildest imagination, is if 125% of the "eligible" food stamp recipients applied and got food stamps.
(Of course, in the real world, that would never happen; they would "raise" the threshold)
Hello?!!?
These leeches on society had better get a grip. Better yet, how about a real job? Giving away other people's money should be a job the worker pays to keep.
I think it's time to organize a counter move each year, emphasizing that the success of (mandatory for the payer) "charity" is best measured by how much the rolls shrink from year to year.
I'm with you. I've also had times when I could have applied for government help but didn't. My life would be far worse now if I had applied for government help. It was better that I went hungry a few times than it would have been to fall in the trap of dependency.
And the shame of it is, that these programs were originally designed with people like you and me in mind. A helping hand in a pinch, so to speak.
Geez! Now I've heard it all...state food stamp offices who would recruit applicants. It is all about keeping the federal money coming in.
Maybe some people choose not to apply because they want to *solve their own problems* and not let the gov't solve them for them.
I sat in the back room of "advocacy" groups and saw first hand the blatant attempts to design the programs for the poverty pimps. The first time I saw it was when Sen Chuck Percy and his staff sat in the back room of 1109 N. Ashland and cynically deisgned a couple sections of the housing law ... 221(d)3...221(d)4... etc with the express purpose of empowering the poverty pimps.
Then, in the '70's it was the NHITC competing with Hillary's ACORN to come up with the best "community organization friendly" programs. Then it was Msgr Geno Baroni designing programs for partnerships between us Taxpayers and Campaign For Human Development of the Catholic Church.
BTW. That was not a faith based initiative because there was no faith in the Catholic CHD.
I'll take your word for it. I didn't realize it was that bad that far back.
I remember in the early 70s the embarrassment of a friend of my mother's for collecting food stamps. Her husband had been laid off, but they had 5 kids to feed, so he was able to land a well paying, but temporary job up in Canada. Unfortunately there was difficulty getting his pay checks home because he was gone for 6 weeks at a time. All the neighbors helped out, but did convince her that the programs were designed for folks "like us" that just need a temporary hand.
It probably lasted about 6 months and that was the end of that.
That's not the case now - once you're in the system, well you obviously know the rest better than I do. Thanks for the information.
I live in NY also. I don't get it *lol*
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