The ones that are actually working (but not reporting the income), and/or who have people living with them that are paying the bills and they’re not reporting the income or help as they’re supposed to be doing, that’s who. Like my cousin. She was on welfare for 20 some odd years, but whatever welfare didn’t pay for, her parents did, all under the table of course, not reported. So it’s not as if she had to actually try to survive on welfare alone. In her case, it wasn’t pearls or furs, but horse breeding. Yup, her parents subsidized what welfare didn’t so that she could basically have her own horse-breeding farm. And she sold the foals under her parents’ name, so that none of that income was reported. Not that she made very much, mostly it was just her way of doing what she wanted, when she wanted and not having to pay for any of it.
Something none of them would have been able to do had her food, shelter and other living expenses not been paid for by the taxpayer.
That’s just one of the ways to defraud. And one of the reasons that (lo these many moons ago) I got 19 katrillion more “home inspections” than the average welfare recipient. I don’t know what made my caseworkers suspicious, but for some weird reason they got it in their wee little government worker minds that I was lying, and in the interest of trying to “catch a welfare defrauder” I somehow got in their sights.
I lived in a tiny trailer with a wood stove. So when they came for their first “inspection” I could hear one of them whisper to the other “oh, there IS a wood stove”. No morons, I was lying about that because it’s so grand and wonderfully convenient to try and keep warm using one…:rolleyes:
I was constantly getting checkup calls to make sure that what I’d reported that week was true, and the tone and attitude was always one of disbelief. I don’t have a clue why, maybe they’re always like that to everyone, I don’t know, but based on what some of my neighbors told me, no, they didn’t treat people like that usually.
Other weird little things kept happening too. Such as, welfare recipients were supposed to randomly get “drawn” for certain types of “job training” ( a real joke those were, basically 2-4 hour long “interview tips” like don’t chew gum when you go to an interview…or “here’s how you turn on a computer”, though I was already extremely computer literate.), and typically a person’s name might come up once a year, if that. Mine came up every other month, sometimes two or three months in a row.
It was very frustrating, but I DO understand why it was happening, even if I also knew that it was very stupid of them to have chosen me to target. They have a lot of fraud, so they have to do their best to try and track it down. There aren’t enough of them to go around or actually do a good job finding those who are defrauding the system though, so the make halfhearted efforts in the name of “eyewash”. Sort of how the government makes it *look *as if we’re doing something to combat terrorism by foisting the TSA on us.
A lot of people do play by the rules, but a lot DON’T and it’s quite understandable that “welfare” gets judged on those that don’t. So, some defraud and screw the system with impunity, while those who are working (and their fellow welfare recipients for that matter) pay for them to do nothing. Of course it gets a bad name.
And of course it starts feeling like “you’re taking money from MY paycheck, and food from MY mouth, that I legitimately earned, so you can sit on your ass and eat bon-bons and lobster”. For a lot of them, that’s absolutely what’s happening.
How do you sell a SNAP card? Do you get a percentage of what will come to your account over the life of your benefits, or do you just get enough meth to last a day?