The US Department of Agriculture has spent the past week notifying people that the country is (allegedly) overrun by individuals who are fraudulently claiming SNAP benefits, while (allegedly) driving luxury vehicles.
“In just ONE state, 14,000 individuals receiving SNAP benefits were driving LUXURY VEHICLES!” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins posted on X last week. The official USDA account made similar claims, which were then amplified by figures like Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul.
Those numbers are questionable at best. For one thing, the report they come from doesn’t name the state where thousands of people are allegedly buying Ferraris while using government money to buy food. For another, that report doesn’t include any explanation of its methodology.
I drove a '98 Lasabre for most of the 2010s. Absolutely loved it: parts were ready to find, could repair it myself at home, and the dashboard had so many weird sliders and knobs that it felt like piloting a TARDIS.
Anyone enjoying that kind of luxury should be starving to death. It’s just not fair for someone to have both a beautiful, faux-wood paneled dashboard and three meals per day.
A Buick LeSabre was my first car. It was the 1989 model. Red “velvet” interior. That thing was sexy af
Same, we called it the boat and referred to the backseat as the couch. It was defeated by a young sapling in a low-speed head-on collision unfortunately. I wish theyd make something like that again but its probably past its time.