The Food Stamp President
We are now spending $80 Billion dollars of our taxes giving people Food Stamps and we do not know what this is being spent on.
From
The Washington Times:
Top secret: $80B a year for food stamps, but feds won�t reveal what�s purchased
Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent.
Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show.
But the government won�t say which stores are doing the most business in food stamps, and even it doesn�t know what kinds of food those taxpayer dollars buy.
Coinciding with lobbying by convenience stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program in conjunction with states, contends that disclosing how much each store authorized to accept benefits, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), receives in taxpayer funds would amount to revealing trade secrets.
As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to evaluate.
Emphases mine -- Bullshit. The C Stores are afraid that their complicity in fraud will come to light and they will be penalized. We need more sunlight, not less. Trade Secrets? Gimme a break.
More:
Maryland denied The Times� request for data under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the information belonged to the federal government, which instructed states not to release it.
Legislation seemingly designed to protect the industry goes so far as to say that anyone who releases the amount of food stamp dollars paid to a store can be jailed.
Profiting from the poor�s taxpayer-funded purchases has become big business for a mix of major companies and corner bodegas, which have spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the USDA to keep the money flowing freely.
The National Association of Convenience Store Operators alone spends millions of dollars on lobbying yearly, including $1 million in the first quarter of this year.
Our government at work.
Posted by DaveH at June 25, 2012 1:24 PM