$7K in Food Stamps?

[roddma]

For some reason, i am not buying this story as no major news outlet has reported it. It seems like yet another attempt by GOP to condemn the needy. I doubt if anyone could save $7 K in food stamps.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02 ... rise-you/#

[Lillybee]

I worked as an eligibility worker and I think that the 7k in FS could well be an urban myth along the lines that many people on FS purchase lobster tails, etc with them. Sure there are some abuses but normally people really do not get that much on FS. However, the part about one person on FS driving a Mercedes may well be true. In California, all vehicles are exempt property even one's airplane and yacht. Actually the Mercedes may be all that is left after the person lost his job.

[Jiraffe Jirl]

I think it's strange that the clerk could allegedly see the balance. I got food stamps (EBT) in CA for a couple months a few years ago. It was like a normal debit card, and I'm 99% positive the clerk could not see the balance.

I received around $200 a month, which was kind of a lot for a single person. But I'm glad we have them, and I'd much prefer we have a system that's occasionally abused rather then no help for those in need. The lack of compassion and sense from the commenters on that article is embarrassing.

[Lillybee]

Could the card owner be a Mormon with 7 wives and 29 children?

[wild little fox]

The part about balance showing on the recipt is true.

http://www.hhsc.state.tx.us/providers/l ... y_benefits

Do I need to keep my receipts?

Yes. Your receipts show how much you have left in your account (your balance). You will get a receipt every time you use the Lone Star Card.

Always get your receipt from the cashier. Make sure the amount printed on the receipt matches the amount you spent or withdrew.

Keep your receipts in case there are questions about your balance. You should keep your last receipt with your Lone Star Card.

If you have a question about a purchase or balance, show your receipt to the store manager.

(back to top)

How can I check my balance?

Your last receipt will show your balance.

If you lose your last receipt, call 1-800-777-7328.

Always check your balance before you go to the store.

link not broken: public site

ETA: fix tag

[Rosa]

Thinking about how some of the 2nd graders I know read numbers, is it possible that store clerk doesn't understand about decimal points?

I think it's bullshit too, and they could probably use the Freedom of Information Act to get actual amounts, even without names attached, if they wanted to use real named sources.

According to the actual numbers they quote, the average SNAP recipient in Hidalgo county gets $117.65 a month and in Cameron County, $109.24/month. That's just a plain average from dividing the total by the number of recipients.

[MrsYoungie]

“According to the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, there are more than 238,000 people on SNAP in Hidalgo County, costing tax payers more than $28,000,000 dollars this month alone,†the report notes.

By my arithmetic this averages out to about $117 per person per month. Not exactly lobster money.

[longskirtlotsakids]

I could see this happening. I have a fundie Catholic friend with four children who got $760 a month. She was very good at pulling at heartstrings and getting others to take care of her kids. I remember she had a balance of a few thousand.

[Rosa]

$760/mo for a family of 6 is just a little higher than the per-person figure we figured out from that article.

It would still take having SEVENTY PEOPLE grouped together on one card to get to $7,000.

[August]

By my arithmetic this averages out to about $117 per person per month. Not exactly lobster money.

It's not averaged per person. They look at your income, and figure out how much you need to bring you up to some number. You might get the maximum, you might get $5 a week.

I may have hypothetically once known a hypothetical person who, when she had to leave the country to live with family in another country to avoid homelessness, leaving months of unpaid bills all over the place (with an income of zero the only things she hypothetically got were WIC, food stamps and medicaid), had several hundred dollars balance in her hypothetical food stamps account, and a pantry full of peanut butter and cold cereal (hypothetically before WIC reforms). It would hypothetically have taken a friend who got her pantry months to hypothetically eat their way through it. It had taken less than a year for one adult to accumulate.

It's a broken system.

[Burris]

I could see this happening. I have a fundie Catholic friend with four children who got $760 a month. She was very good at pulling at heartstrings and getting others to take care of her kids. I remember she had a balance of a few thousand.

I don't know anything about the US food-stamps, but is it possible that unused portions - say someone gets $300 a month in FS and only uses $250 - are simply stored in the account for the following month?

If so, I guess it's possible for a family with a passel of kids to end up with 7k in back-FS allowance if they're frugal with their buying each month.

In that case, however, the balance would be evidence of good stewardship rather than bad.

And besides that, I thought FS could only be used to purchase certain items (though maybe it differs by state)?

[NotALoserLikeYou]

What it means is that they are saving up their food stamp money like rollover points each month. What you don't use will be added to the next month. If you claim a lot of dependents I can see it being possible but on the whole most people use their entire ebt each month. Also sometimes they apply it retroactively based on when you became eligible and you might get two months worth dumped on there in the middle of one month and 2 weeks later you get the next months.

[August]

$760/mo for a family of 6 is just a little higher than the per-person figure we figured out from that article.

It would still take having SEVENTY PEOPLE grouped together on one card to get to $7,000.

Max for 6 people is $952. For a family of 4 it's $166 per week. I spend $150 a week for four, and I buy organic. And yet, if we were eligible for max food stamps we'd probably be homeless. A toddler is a foodstamps cash cow compared to a teenager. You could go from feeding a family of five with a baby, two and four year old with WIC* plus $800 a month foodstamps to feeding a family of five with a 12, 14 and 16 year old on $800 a month. It's a stupid, unbalanced system.

*WIC for a baby and two kids per week would be:

3/4 gallon of juice

milk 3.5 gallons

cereal 27 ounces

pound if cheese

1 dozen eggs

$5.50 for produce

1 1/4 pounds of bread

7.5 ounces canned fish

3/4 pounds dried beans

4.5 ounces peanut butter.

6 ounces infant cereal

83 ounces baby food

http://www.fns.usda.gov/wic/benefitsand ... wances.HTM

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1269

And I never knew this

Unemployed childless adults who do not have disabilities are limited to three months of SNAP benefits every three years in many areas of the country, though this time limit currently is temporarily waived in most states because of high unemployment

Fucking REALLY?????

[clarinetpower]

Re: the lobster, etc. I had a friend who was on assistance for a while, and from the food *bank* (not stamps), they received things like porterhouse steaks, etc. because no one bought them, so when they were about to go past the sell by date, the store donated them to the food bank. Some of my FB friends get all up in arms about it, but where would that food go? I don't buy it, partially because it's ridiculously expensive, but also because rich food like that isn't very healthy and kind of turns my stomach. But the cow isn't born without a porterhouse because no one wants to buy it this week.

I know WIC has a list of what you can and cannot buy, but I don't think food stamps does, though I really don't know for sure.

[Wolfie]

And I never knew this

Fucking REALLY?????

Not a surprise. About 15 years ago I was making about $1000 a month total. At the time I didn't qualify for any assistance because I was single without kids. In the US there is a lot of predudice against single childless adults for benefits, and socially once you hit your 30's.

[Rosa]

SNAP doesn't have a list, but it has limitations - only food, only non-deli/prepared food/hot (which is plain stupid. Are homeless people supposed to subsist on salad and raw fruit? Also, a $7 frozen pizza from the grocery store is eligible but a $5 hot pizza from Little Caesar's isn't). In some places people report a lot of fraud, mostly on convenience stores that sell both mis-classifying their cooked food so people can buy it on EBT. Some people trade SNAP for things like rent - I've known people to live in households where one person gets SNAP and WIC and buys the staple foods for everyone and other people cover her rent. I guess that's technically fraud but only because we expect people on assistance to be continually desperate and nearly homeless.

I see women using EBT at Aldi having to use cash to buy their grocery bags all the time, because the bags aren't food.

It's administered by the state, right? So each state does it differently? I know with the changeover to debit-style cards, people were worried about cryonyism in awarding the contract to whoever handles the actual charge process, because some states have bad history with state administered benefits (*cough* Florida *cough* Medicaid fraud*)

[longskirtlotsakids]

Actually Rosa, if a family gets an average of $119 per person, its not hard to see how a family with kids gets up to a $700 balance quickly, if they don't buy food. Yes, the money they dontt use goes to the card and stays there like a savings account.

However, here in WI you have a six month limit. If you dont use the balance in six months you lose it. That also happened to my friend. When she remarried her husband tried to keep it a secret and make her get food stamps so he dodnt have to fred her kids. Only when I told him he'd get found out at tax time did he drop the idea.

[Rosa]

Yeah, $700 is totally plausible. Even "thousands" to mean one or two thousand, which one of the anonymous sources in the article says, is plausible. But the headline & another source in that that article are alleging seven THOUSAND. That's up in ridiculous urban legend land.

[longskirtlotsakids]

Yeah, $700 is totally plausible. Even "thousands" to mean one or two thousand, which one of the anonymous sources in the article says, is plausible. But the headline & another source in that that article are alleging seven THOUSAND. That's up in ridiculous urban legend land.

Not at all. There are families out there with 7-12 children all on food stamps. THere is one (and yes, I know them personally as I worked with them on a volunteer basis) family out here that has 12 children, both parents are on SSI and food stamps. They get $2300 in food stamps a month. A MONTH. Can you imagine what you could buy with $2300 a month? (THey also get $3000 in SSI)

(Of course, they got their kids all taken from them, because despite having no job and nothing to do, they let their 5 bedroom apartment become so filthy and destroyed it was a hazard. I was one of the volunteers that helped them with family care skills. She was mentally disabled- I'd say about the level of a 12- 13 year old- and had no idea how to cook and clean. It was Macky's every night. She relied on the schools for 8 of the kids free breakfasts and lunch. The litte ones got snack food like fruit snacks and chips for breakfast. I shit you not, she complained about cold cereal being a pain to make.)

SO, if a large family got that much, and did not go shopping, a balance of $7000 wold only take three months to accumulate. Families that size are the exception rather than the norm, true enough- but they do exist. If there are 380K in that county ALONE, it is not hard at all to see how he might come across families like that quite often!

[docmom]

Unemployed childless adults who do not have disabilities are limited to three months of SNAP benefits every three years in many areas of the country, though this time limit currently is temporarily waived in most states because of high unemployment

Fucking REALLY?????

Yes, childless adults apparently don't need to eat.

[August]

Yes, childless adults apparently don't need to eat.

Or have shelter. Fuck that makes me angry.

[flyawaystray]

I get $174 in food stamps monthly (disabled). And to be honest, where I live, it is not really enough. I usually run out 3 weeks into the month. I rarely buy fresh fruit and veg. Strawberries are $5 a pound so I only buy them when they're on sale for $1.99.

I bake my own bread and pizza to save money. I don't buy meat, milk, and most dairy. I do buy cheese and yogurt, though. I've stopped buying nuts and other things because it's just too expensive.

[chaotic life]

A family with 12 children would only come close to feeding their family adequately every month IF they were cooking everything from scratch on $2300/month for groceries. You would have to forgo most prepackaged food, go shopping at Aldi's, day old bakeries and Walmart AND forgo most fruits and vegatables to feed 14 people adequately on $2300/month.

There are 10 people in my household. To feed us comfortably and have enough to still provide fruits, veggies and the ability to still have 1 or 2 easy prepackaged meals in a month, we shop day old bread for ALL bread products, Aldi's for ALL produce and Walmart for nearly everything else we can get there. We save the actual grocery store for the speciality items we really cannot find elsewhere, and we spend $2000/month. We spent a LOT less when they were younger, but most of them are not now. School breakfast and lunch can take the edge off of a teen's hunger, but my kids still require at least one meal as soon as they get home to compensate for the reduced volume and calories they get at school, in addition to dinner. School meals run us $300-400/month on top of our grocery budget, so if the kids aren't going to school, that's money you have to compensate in all the meals they eat at home, but a responsible parent must still feed their kids at least two meals a day even if the kid eats breakfast and lunch at school, because the portions are small at school.

$2300/month in EBT benefits for a family of 14 is NOT leaving much room for a family to gorge on food. Plus, EBT can only be used on food--no hot deli items, no alcohol, no non-food items. It can be carefully planned to provide a holiday meal or even a birthday party, but you have to work around and adjust the rest of your budget in a month to do so. A mother too impaired to make meal plans, shop low budget stores, make careful grocery lists and cook from scratch is going to struggle to feed 14 peope on that $2300/month.

I know that sounds like a lot of money when you are one or two people, but it's NOT for a large family. My grocery budget is bigger than my house payments and will be until my kids leave home. My kids are super skinny but they eat constantly. They are active, athetletic, growing kids and NEED to eat.

I actually do know a family who falls in this myth realm. It was a large family in CA who was *barely* making it on the grocery budget on the EBT benefits they were getting. Mom woke up one day and found $6K deposited into her EBT account. She called her caseworker to find out what happened. The state had been under-estimating her benefits for a long time. The money was the balance of what she should have been getting. She didn't consider she was somehow in possession of too much month. She wept for joy because her kids were hungry and stocked up on staples to tide her family over through the rough times.

[wild little fox]

I watched the news story linked with the article. Yes, they show a receipt with a $7K balance.

The only thing I can think is that they have a rollover balance or a social worker is contributing to the fraud.

I guess they found their "Welfare Queen" and they will use it as leverage to hurt people who really are in need.

[longskirtlotsakids]

Oh, I wasnt trying to imply they were getting too much. I just wanted to illustrate it was possible to reach that balance.