Here is how the scam works
Married couple through religion but never file for marriage certificate from state
they have 7 kids
husband owns a business or is a lawyer or good paying career, makes over 200K a year
wife files for and gets food stamps, section 8, welfare for her and her 7 kids
husband owns the family home under a LLC Holding company
husband “rents” the family home to his wife so he can collect section 8 voucher
dozen of people were caught doing this, and not a single one was punished, the worse offender was a couple that had a business making a profit of 1.3 million a year.
Public assistance is overall a scam on the tax payers and needs to be abolished.
This happens daily in the Hasidic communities of Rockland County, NY and in a town called Kiryas Joel. NYS prohibits any marriage officiator from not signing a NYS marriage license when performing a wedding. Rockland County has some of the highest percentage of Medicaid, food stamps, Section 8 and WIC recipients in NY. And the elected officials allow it to go on in exchange for block voting.
If you’re asking me which I would prefer to see; absolutely, abolish all public assistance and let charities handle it. But absolutely let charities handle it, don’t handcuff them with dozens upon dozens of regulations, requirements, minimum standards, etc, etc, etc.
But so long as public assistance exists, it should take into account the areas where people live, what the current rents are, etc. I’ve seen the scam in many many different forms. I’ve also reported many for doing the scam (and almost never is there any follow up...)
But the scam artists are really few and far between. Most are just trapped in the public assistance treadmill.. Get an extra day in the week, loose your foodstamps. Hit the wrong mark, rent goes from $300 to $900 (or much more), etc.
There needs to be an incentive to get off public assistance, the way it is currently set up, there’s every incentive to live there for the rest of your life (and your children’s lives, and their children’s lives..) The problem is that it’s currently managed by politicians who are extremely susceptible to sob story newspaper reports, whereas most private charities are much more likely to reply with what really happened.
So yes, ideally, abolish public charity, put it back in the hands of the community where it belongs. Until that happens, the hard cut off lines need to be prorated into something far more sensible that doesn’t punish people for working for themselves.