Government Social Programs Need Tougher Guidelines

Listed: March 10, 2010 12:13 am

Where there are free hand outs there will always be fraud and abuse. This statement could not be more true when it comes to programs like food stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). I use the term “food stamps” because that is the term most commonly used.

I would like to shed some light on just how much money is wasted with food stamp programs. This article is not meant to discriminate in any way. Regardless of race, gender, age, religion, or ethinicity. Everyday mass amounts of people are serverly abusing the food stamps programs.

What if I said your tax dollars are paying for smokers to buy their cigarettes, for alcoholics to buy their booze, for drug addicts to get their fix. How does that make you feel? This is the reality.

Not too long ago I had the pleasure of doing loss prevention for a large chain of convenient stores and guarding low income housing. This job allowed me to see your hard earned tax dollars at work. I can tell you the only people working for this money are the tax payers. Let me tell you exactly how you are supporting the addicts, alcoholics, and smokers.

Most low income housing for starters are surrounded by expensive convenient stores. How many people do you think are going to pay a bus fee to get groceries at an actual grocery store when they have a convenient store right around the corner. You would be suprised at how many people are spending food stamp funds at these expensive little stores. That is just the begining. Many of the people that shop at these convenient stores are smokers, alcoholics, and drug addicts. So what do they do? They purchase a bunch of expensive junk food and pay for it with their food stamp card, then ring up their alcohol and smokes with the cash they earn. Have you seen the price of cigarettes? It doesn’t stop there, many of these people are buying multiple packs of cigarettes, flavored cigars, cases of beer, and whatever else their heart desires. Is this making good use of of food stamp funds? Absolutely not.

How are the drug addicts benefiting from food stamps? I thought you would never ask. The going rate for food stamps is about fifty percent of the actual value on the blackmarket. So, if a drug addict needs a fix and the two hundred dollars of food stamps just hit his or her account, they can bank on getting at least one hundred dollars cash just for going gorcery shopping with a stranger. Does the stranger need the food stamps? Maybe, maybe not, but they did not obtain them legally.

If you think this kind of activity is is rare or minimal you could not be further from the truth. I invite you to spend a couple late nights at a convenient store in any low income housing community and you will see the severity of this situation.

So how do we reduce this kind of behavior? I believe there are many things the government could do to give food stamps to the needy and not the abusers. Here are some of my ideas.

1. Smokers should be automatically rejected from the program. I don’t just mean ask if someone is a smoker. We should actually get references or even do testing of some sort.

2. Random drug testing. You may think this would be over kill and would not be cost effective. However, I believe the amount of people failing these drug tests would far out weigh the amount of benefits being paid out to drug addicts.

3. The government employees conducting the interviews for food stamp acceptance should be well trained in detecting alcoholism, drugs and or addictive behavior.

I believe strict enforcement of these guidelines alone would relieve much of the unnecessary benefits currently being paid out.

Another thing to note is that many of the people abusing food stamp programs are abusing other government social programs like section eight housing. Why should people that are not even working or contributing to society in anyway be living an almost middle class life style? That is a question I will let you answer.

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