By Michelle Malkin
Friday, January 11, 2013
From New York to New Mexico and across the dependent
plains, welfare recipients are getting sauced on the public dime. Drunk,
besotted, bombed. But while politicians pay lip service to cutting government
waste, fraud and abuse, they're doing very little in practice to stop the EBT
party excesses. Where's the compassion for taxpayers?
You see the signs everywhere: "We accept EBT."
Fast-food restaurants do. Clothing retailers do. Auto repair shops, liquor
stores and even sushi joints are joining the club. "EBT" stands for
the federal government's electronic benefits transfer card, which is intended
to provide poor people with food stamps and cash assistance for basic
necessities. The two separate programs were combined into one ATM-like card
designed to reduce the "stigma" attached to Nanny State dependency,
and -- voila! -- an entirely new method of mooching was born.
If the idea was to eliminate the embarrassment of life on
the dole, the social justice crowd succeeded phenomenally. Last weekend, the
New York Post blew the lid off scammers who brazenly swiped their EBT cards
"inside Hank's Saloon in Brooklyn; the Blue Door Video porn shop in the
East Village; The Anchor, a sleek SoHo lounge; the Patriot Saloon in TriBeCa;
and Drinks Galore, a liquor distributor in The Bronx." Out: Cash for
clunkers. In: Cash for drunkards!
My home state of Colorado has seen similar abuse. Last
year, local TV station 9NEWS reported that more than $40,000 was withdrawn from
ATMs in metro-area liquor stores despite prohibitions against such spending.
Colorado EBT users also splurged at Denver's Elitch Gardens amusement part,
Disneyland, Universal Studios in Los Angeles and on the Las Vegas strip.
In New Mexico, Jim Scarantino of Watchdog.org reported
that in just a three-month period, EBT cards were used at multiple liquor
stores, girly bars, smoke shops and casinos both inside and outside the state.
Californians are notorious EBT fraud artists; some $70 million in EBT funds
were withdrawn from outside the state's borders over the past several years,
including nearly $12 million taken out in Las Vegas. Watchdog.org kept tabs on
government workers in Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa and Wisconsin nabbed in EBT
fraud rings and schemes.
Several state legislatures have barred EBT spending on
these vices, along with tattoo parlors, lottery tickets and cigarettes. Last February,
President Obama signed GOP-backed welfare reform measures into law aimed at
closing the so-called "strip club loophole" and preventing welfare
recipients from blowing their cash benefits on booze, porn and gambling. But
that law doesn't go into effect until next year. And many politicians are just
shrugging their shoulders, muttering "Whaddya gonna do?"
Here's a radical idea: How about making taxpayer
protection a priority for once and, yes, getting serious about strengthening
the stigma on bottomless entitlement dependency and entitlement abuse?
According to the Department of Agriculture, illegal food
stamp use costs the public upward of $750 million a year. A report by the
Government Accountability Institute last fall revealed that "few security
measures are in place to monitor EBT card fraud. ... Nationwide, the USDA has
approximately 100 investigators policing over 200,000 authorized EBT
retailers." In Florida, the report noted, 63 investigators carry the
burden of policing more than three million EBT users.
Excuse-makers for the welfare-takers emphasize that both
eligibility fraud and EBT card trafficking fraud are minuscule. But a bottle
here, a case there, a pole dance here, a lap dance there, and soon it all
starts to add up. With food stamp rolls exploding under both Republican and
Democratic administrations while enforcement resources shrink nationwide, EBT
has taken on a whole new meaning: Exploitation of Broke Taxpayers. Shame.
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