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.
A remix of the old welfare queen lie. smh. Some guy probably used his mom’s food stamps card to get fast food once and they’re going to make it seem like a billion dollars in theft.
You simply can’t it won’t work. POS systems cannot be configured to do this.
I haven’t had a food card for a bit. It was just a prepaid card. I don’t really know what small and insignificant way it’s used that these fucks would complain about but I just made an example off the top of my head.
It’s prepaid with a Visa logo or something like that but it won’t work on anything you are not supposed to buy.
I think some people get other money loaded on it that’s not for food. Like mothers buying school supplies or clothing.
The Welfare Queen was a real person best known by the name Linda Taylor but she was uniquely talented at defrauding the government and she went to prison in 1978 for welfare fraud.
I’m aware.
I’m also aware that she defrauded the government something like $10,000, was caught almost immediately, and as you said, punished. Reagan made her out to be a crime lord stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Real or not, the lie is the gross misrepresentation of who and what she was to the american people, used as a justification to cut social aid programs for millions in need.
source?
sure.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6eFBOBgRrdiSCrCwaxC25o
There you go. The dollop gives all their sources at the end each episode and posts a list for their audience. in fact…
Main
· Levin, Josh. “The Welfare Queen: In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan villainized a Chicago woman for bilking the government. Her other sins—including possible kidnappings and murders—were far worse. Slate. (Dec. 19 2013) http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html Josh Levin’s story has been expanded into a book, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/031651330X/?tag=slatmaga-20 as well as a podcast miniseries: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/the-queen-linda-taylor-welfare-reagan-podcast.html
Other
· Black, Rachel, Aleta Sprague, and the New America Weekly. “The ‘Welfare Queen’ Is a Lie: Programs that should be crafted around people’s needs are instead designed to deal with a problem that doesn’t exist.” The Atlantic. (September 28, 2016) · https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/welfare-queen-myth/501470/
· Bazelon, Emily, John Dickerson, and David Plotz. “The ‘You’ll Drag Me Out of the Supreme Court in a Pine Box’ Gabfest” Gabfest. [podcast] (December 20, 2013) http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2013/12/the_gabfest_on_judge_richard_leon_s_nsa_ruling_ruth_bader_ginsburg_s_refusal.html
All the sources used for a goofy little history podcast.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
There’s her wiki too. Taylor was a spectacle even back then, with the tabloids reporting she stole anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000. It was actually about $8,000. She was a petty criminal who got caught pretty much every time and was arrested for her crimes. By the time Reagan was talking about her, that number had been further inflated (lied about) to be around $150,000, but regardless, she was cooked.
thanks for the sources and podcast link!
sure thing! old Dollop is great. They hosts kind of got crushed by the wieght of the world and life and it shows in their later content. They still try to be funny but the real razzle-dazzle is in the older episodes.