>“Can you imagine when we get our hands on the blue state data what we’re going to find?”
What morally bankrupt, divisive leadership.
They get two lists of people (list of votes/program enrollees and one of "dead" people, etc) that were not designed/cleaned for this, and do a very loose match and then declare just based on that it must be fraud.
Are there some that are fraud, probably, a bit of that is just the cost of dealing with the public. Private companies get it just as much.
But I'll bet almost all of it is either bad matching, poor record keeping, or honest mistakes.
So they're making everyone reapply because their disbursement headcount is off by less than 1% (180k vs 41M). It's hard not look at stuff like this and not see gross oppression.
0: https://usafacts.org/answers/how-much-does-the-federal-gover...
1: https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/a-closer-look-...
For example, the 40 billion dollar bailout of the Argentine economy.
Yes we should prevent starvation but the program does need some reform. Far too much of it is spent on junk food and soft drinks. Something like 23% of SNAP is spent on junk food.
Restricting SNAP purchases to be more aligned with health would very likely save lives.
Sounds reasonable in theory but has little basis in our current political reality.
Or even better we could give some more money to Argentina.
[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/snap-food-assistance-is-a-sound-in...
There are much bigger wastes of money. Tax cuts for billionaires for example. Even SNAP itself is effectively welfare for billionaires - it means they don't have to pay a fair wage.
If someone doesn't reapply for food stamps then they weren't that critical for their survival.
The alternative thing you're saying is the same racist/classist BS used to justify not requiring voter ID. "It's just too difficult for these people! (because they're somehow incapable of doing basic things for something they care about)".
They did it once. It's annoying for sure but they can do it again if they need it.
For a good number it might be that they don't successfully reapply due to living on a knife edge that lacks the slack to jump through yet another hoop.
The experience here in Australia is that raising welfare barriers hurts those that need welfare the most, the actual fraudsters have the resources to beat the system.
sipofwater•1h ago