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.
People experience job loss, lose their income become briefly eligible for food stamps get a job get off food stamps ALL the time during this difficult period they don’t lose their homes, cars, fancy clothes or their iphones.
Ah of course it’s the poor that are ruining your country - that makes sense 🙄
Someone tell these people to shut the fuck up already.
Go after the real welfare queens. The Walton family, Elon Musk, the oil and gas industry. Big corporate farming. Ending subsidies for oil and gas alone would pay for Medicare for all
Businesses not paying workers fair wages like Walmart forcing 1.6 million by themselves to take public assistance like food support is going to effect a ton of people and be a huge draw on the system compared to any other fraud on the system.
26.8% of 41.7 million is 11 million people. How much do you want to bet they can’t find 11 hundred people committing fraud against the system like employers are.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/14/what-the-data-says-about-food-stamps-in-the-us/
Tax payers subsidizing corporations to further exploit tax payers
When I lived in a poor area I saw a ton of luxury vehicles but they were a decade older than most non-luxury cars and were beat to shit. I’d believe the numbers but I don’t think they say what this idiot is implying.
Its demoralizing that this type of messaging resonates with such a large portion of Americans, honestly.
Look over there at the guy stealing bread for his family, no mind the BILLIONS of dollars being stolen by this admin every week. God i hate the GOP.
I’d rather a hundred people get benefits they “don’t need” than have one person go without the support they require.
Not that it’s even happening, but even if it were I really wouldn’t care even a little bit. And furthermore, food stamp benefits are pathetic in the US.
I remember some Republican chud or another saying they’d rather have innocent people imprisoned than let a single criminal walk free. Absolutely cannot fathom that mindset. Completely ghoulish.
I mean i can imagine it, it’s just patently anti-American. Benjamin Franklin is widely quoted as saying “I’d rather let 100 guilty persons go, than imprison one innocent person.”
No, that was William Blackstone. Maybe Ben Franklin also quoted it, but he’s not the one who was famous for it.
I feel like if someone quotes another person and then that quote becomes associated with them more thoroughly it would count as famously said. Doesn’t stop the first person from being a thing just a matter of having less fame or relevance.
In principle, maybe, but I’m fairly well-read and I have literally never heard of that quote being attributed to Ben Franklin until the earlier comment so I don’t think that’s the case here.
Could be down to a bias of what you are exposed to, which can heavily influence what you hear. Anyways I think it was in one of his letters but I can’t quite remember cause I just woke up.
Apparently you’re right: the other reply cites the letter.
But still, Ben Franklin is famous for a ton of stuff, including actual published works full of quotable aphorisms like Poor Richard’s Almanack (as opposed to some random private letter that was only published after-the-fact). Meanwhile, Blackstone is remembered mainly just for Commentaries on the Laws of England, of which the Blackstone’s Ratio quote is part. Can’t we let poor old Mr. Blackstone have this one thing?!
Like maybe 25 years back I remember a viral video of someone in Cali or something buying a lobster with his food stamps and everyone was freaking out. I dont know much of the american food stamps system but I’m pretty sure just blew his budget or something. Really its just proved some idiot was doing dumb stuff for likes before TikTok.
Generally, any food product is going to be eligible. They give you a bank card that has your monthly funds on it. Prepared products such as from the delicatessen, alcohol, and cigarettes will be blocked but there’s not much else to stop someone from letting their benefits add up and then wasting them on something like lobster.
You don’t want to make this entire thing onerous for everyone, so there will be some activity like this occassionally. It’s not even something that would appear outside the statistical noise.
I was on SNAP several years ago. We saved a small bit of the relatively meager amount every month for like 6 months, then had a really nice BBQ for my kids bday. In a vacuum, I’m sure someone would have lost their shit watching me spend like $150 on steaks and burgers and sides using my SNAP card.
The only reason thats any different than just saving your own regular money for it and blowing that on the exact same thing is the optics.
Like if you get the bennies, its not like people know that every single time you buy stuff, only when you use that specific payment method
Dude, it seems everything the GOP claims lacks evidence.
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.
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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.
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 $100,000, but regardless, she was cooked.
The “luxury vehicle” angle is clearly a scam, but there is evidence of SNAP fraud, at least here in Oregon, it’s just being done with card skimmers stealing legitimate SNAP data and funds from the people who need it most:
"How the scam works
Scammers place an overlay device on card readers or keypads, often at smaller retailers such as dollar stores or community markets.
These devices look nearly identical to real machines but secretly collect card numbers and PINs.
Stolen card data is then used in other states to purchase high-demand items like baby formula or resold goods"
The fix for this should be simple: EBT funds should only be accessible in the state where the card was issued.
So what you’re saying is people in need are getting their benefits stolen. That’s not at all what the administration is claiming or expressing concern about.
Nope, still fraud, just not on the part of the benefit holder.
So if these machines are skimming all cards numbers/pins then surely the answer is to restrict everyone’s cards, credit, debit, everything to their own state?
Why is it your logic that only the poor people need to be restricted because other people are stealing from them? Where’s the logic in going after the victims of fraud?
Other cards already have these protections, the EBT cards do not. That’s the problem.
If they were secured the same way as credit/debit cards we wouldn’t be seeing this problem.
I should say too… EBT cards are already restricted as far as what they can be used for, it only makes sense to flag where they can be used as well.
So then protect the cards without excessive restrictions that aren’t put on other cards. Freedom of movement is a human right so to restrict someone’s essential payment method state to state seems like a breach of that.
Again, EBT cards are already restricted.
https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/eligible-food-items
They just aren’t restricted in a way that would prevent stealing the funds.
luxury vehicles
What do you want to bet they’re talking about poorly maintained 15+ year old lexuses and 30+ year old bmws? Just kidding, it’s most likely entirely unfounded.
They’re trying to bring back Welfare Queens. I’m sure almost everyone’s forgotten, but this was the kind of accusation that led to Welfare being viewed so negatively and eventually being renamed entirely.
Ironically, it’s middle-class suburban homeowners who are the real welfare queens. They may not get the actual government program called “welfare,” but they get so many other kinds of subsidies for their lifestyle that the stereotypical urban renter single mom is probably subsidizing them instead of the other way around!
I’d go even further and say that they are classifying vehicles themselves as a luxury, not even the make or model.
The good old “oh you’re poor? How come you have a phone then?”
Remember when Fox News got all worked up because poor people had a microwave? And a refrigerator???
In my state, if your apartment doesn’t include a fridge-freezer and cooktop-oven, it’s not considered habitable.
