Enquiring minds want to know: where do you swipe the card if you want to tip Tiffany/Brandy/Destiny for her dance?

[Apologies in advance to the Taste Police...]

Gee, the heart of the ´Rat Party. Quelle´ surprise!

Glad our tax dollars are being spent to stimulate the economy...

Why is cash even available (through ATMs) for welfare recipients? Why isn´t the money paid directly from the agency to the housing or utility since that is what the money is for? Why make these programs so that it is so easy for the cheaters to cheat? It´s not rocket science!

They are confiscating my money to pay for this?????

Here´s the deal and this is just the tip of the iceberg. As more regulations and rules are implemented there needs to be more enforcement entities to catch the perps who have learned how to game the systems already in place. The enforcement folks will see the futility in busting only a couple of crooks while the rest run wild and they will eventually give up trying to catch them. See Detroit. See Chicago. The cops have surrendered. The crooks win. It only gets worse.

Let´s not forget the ladies who get hair weaves and porcelain finger nails. Conyers - D from MI doesn´t have to worry about reparations. It´s already happening.

They be privileged, we owe them.

End it don´t mend it. We are broke and can´t afford to pay deadbeats to party.

The bankrupting of America continues.......

The bamboozler really/really/really hates Americans.

He´s determined to bring US to our knees. OMG -- that poor excuse for a man. His white family really did a number on him.

AND -- of course -- the hateful boomers of the 60´s and 70´s hating are going along for the ride. Presidents Roosevelt and Truman must be rolling in their graves....

LZK

This welfare spending should be accessible by everybody, just click a few links on HHS website, go to your local town, see who is buying what with your tax dollars. That will put an end to this cheating.

Why yes, #5, yes they are. And they´re laughing at you all the way to the liquor store. Why do they get away with it? RATs and their media whores.

add to #11, problem is, libs are terrified that if and when the massive fraud and waste becomes common knowledge, the Dems will be finished. That´s why they want all this stuff kept secret.

I live in Ma. and we had a story in the Boston Herald this past week that 19,000 EBT card holders can´t be found. All kinds of rip off stories have come forward regarding these welfare cards but our political hack governor, Deval Patrick, calls them anecdotal evidence. Out of sight out of mind, that´s how government works today.

Great opening line, Kate.

Obama give us a phone. He gonna give us more free stuff!

#16 "...Obama give us a phone…"

He gives more than that. He gives gasoline, for sure.

The gas station at my Walmart has a decal on the pumps:

"EBT cards accepted"

In the grocery store I watched an Hispanic(probably illegal) male use a Delaware card to buy some snacks. He most likely has one from VA and even possibly one from MD. Another group, same day, loaded down cart with meats and junk food could not find her card to pay. The other day this same store had 2 carts of food that had to be put back on the shelf because the cardholder did not have enough funds to pay. I watch what they buy...shrimp,crab legs etc. Frozen pizza by the dozens. All dressed nice, new shoes, nice car....it goes on and on. We buy meats and dairy that is out of date and discounted. It is demoralizing.

Much as I despise the current regime I don´t think you could get a lap dance from Hillary for $ 200. Certainly there is abuse. But if you shut off their government checks there will be cries of heartless GOPers who want people to starve. The Free Stuffers are in charge.

This appears to be the fault of New York state for the way they dispense the cash. But why is the government giving people cash??? Don´t they know it is an invitation to fraud?

Can you sign up for an absentee ballot there too?

Publish the names and addresses of everyone getting an EBT card and then publish their charge list.

#12-´´Why do they get away with it?´´
Have you considered the responsibility of the Republican Members of Congress?

I can´t speak directly to welfare, but I know that the SSI rules require such detailed accounting that people would need to hire a CPA to totally comply. With such over-the-top standards that most very poor, very disabled people can´t comply with, the bureaucrats have no choice but to just accept whatever ´documentation´ they receive, or waive it entirely.

Seems to me an easier approach would be a code embedded as to what the cards could be used on. For example, grocery stores know that only certain products qualify for WIC. That is programmed into their registers. Strip clubs, etc. which accept these specially coded cards after knowing that they aren´t valid there should be fined.

The "point-of Sale" technology already exists to limit not only where EBT cards can be swiped, but also includes databases to allow or dis-allow a transaction by product code number (UPC) or service code.
The fact that EBT abuses occur is direct proof of mis-management by state governments. The private sector has the answer, the politicians choose to waste our money.

Forget welfare sheep. I wonder where the CEO of Solyndra spent his money.

Big abuses in my state occur with "cash back" purchases on EBT. Welfare recipient buys a minor item at the store and then takes out the maximum "cash back" allowed (usually $50) on that purchase; then goes and does it again somewhere else. Pretty soon they´ve got cash to spend on whatever they want....

What astounds me is not what the author calls dozens of cases of misuse, but the fact that in 18 months, one state had 200 million Electronic Benefit Transfer transactions...

Wonder how much EBT cash goes for lottery tickets?

Weed? Meth? Crack? Booze?

Free Day Care so mom can go to the Spa all day?

Big screen TV´s? I-Phones?

There is a food shelf near my shop. Nearly all of them drive a better car than we do.

And the recipients aren´t the major problem.

For every dollar they receive, it costs us three three or four dollars in salaries and benefits of gummint workers to dole it out to ´em.

Welfare should be in the form of free dry beans and rice on a special shelf in the grocery store, to make sure no one starves. Period.

I can fix this.

1. Cash back cannot exceed 1/3 of the purchase.

2. Any card used at a sexually oriented business is canceled and the person the card belongs to loses all privileges to acquire an EBT card forever.

3. Any card used to buy lottery tickets, visit nail salons, or race tracks/gambling facilities will be decreased by that amount for a year.

4. No cash withdrawals from ATMs.

This makes the penalty for using the card illegally to be too high for the average card recipient to risk the waste.

FTA: “This is morally scandalous,” said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “I have nothing against strip clubs, but that’s not what benefits are for. I don’t blame [recipients]. If you are poor, it’s a crummy life and you want to have a drink or see a naked woman. I blame the people who are in charge of this.”

This libertarian think tank genius doesn´t blame recipients for their own moral bankruptcy. He says in one breath that it´s not what benefits are for, and in the next breath says that their depravity is understandable. That attitude is one of the problems with libertarianism. He´s right that the people who are in charge are responsible, but he doesn´t assign any responsibility to the recipients who are abusing the system.

They´re victims, don´t ya know. They lead crummy lives, so drinking and strip clubs make them feel ... what? I would hazard a guess that they don´t feel anything, but worse, they don´t think of anything that might make their lives better.

And we pay for them to spiral the drain.

EBT cards and food stamps could easily be modified so they cannot be used for questionable purchases. Protests from the merchants profiting from those purchases would be far louder than the current protests from taxpayers. If food stamp cards can be programmed so you cannot buy toilet paper, they should be able to be modified so you cannot purchase luxury foods the rest of us cannot afford.

A reckoning is coming.

A day will come when all this criminality [no other term applies], by the fraud-committers and by their gov´t enablers and accomplices, will spew out and honest taxpayers, long busy at the full-time task of survival under the gov´ts of the past several decades, will rise up.

The longer delayed, the harsher and uglier the necessary correction will be.

Soon, please, Lord?

#20: One man´s fraud is another man´s vote-buying. Oh. Wait....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wX9KWFaLJ0

And here´s a pillar of society thinking her Zero EBT card is an all purpose card.

Simply limit what foods the users can buy with the cards, remove all cash incentives, and lower the card amounts. Register recipients by SS #, to cut down on the people collecting in multiple states simultaneously. Ensure that only the recipient is using the card, since they are routinely sold. Limit EBT usage for any individual to somewhere between 2 and 5 years.

Firstly, the majority of folks in the US on assistance are not of one race or another. That being said, I was in line in my local grocery store recently and the woman in front of me used her EBT card to buy one item, one item only...a Caravelle Ice Cream cake. I can´t afford to buy one of those for my household, let alone hers. I did comment to her about the purchase but recieved only an angry glare in response. Frustrating.

#4, you deserve an explanation.
Baby momma gets section 8 housing, paid directly to the landlord. She gets energy assistance, paid directly to the utility company.
She also gets a free obamaphone. And free medical care, dental care, vision care, free transportation to and from medical visits, food stamps, WIC if her chillun are under the age of 8, and her school aged chillun get free lunches at school, and in some urban school district, free breakfast and free dinner, and she will stand in line for 12 hours in the cold, to get a free turkey worth 5 dollars. And she will hit the food banks around town as well, for free food. And sell part of her food stamp allotments for cash, to do her nails, buy cigarettes and booze. And her welfare cash benefit is often used, in part, to give money to her baby daddy, who may be collecting money from multiple baby mommas.
And if she deals drugs, or her chillun do, she be rich.

Replace Mr. Potter with Obama (both their MOs being to control all) and doesn´t our ´new normal´ look more and more like Pottersville in ´It´s a Wonderful Life?´ Actually, our world looks even worse.

Instead of allowing the private sector to efficiently and effectively administer a far-reaching, multifaceted project such as this one which benefits welfare recipients, give it to government to handle. Odds are government will do what it almost invariably does; screw it up!

It´s protection money.

Cancel or even diminish this flow of freebies and chaos will erupt.

We´re that close to the edge.

#1 - it took me a few seconds to get the joke. Nicely done - and it probably slipped by the Taste Police.

while with my mother at a hospital, we overheard a women screaming into her cell phone at her daughter who "did her hair" on Friday instead of Saturday...because...the welfareclerk visits on Friday and would see the girls new hairdo....just one of many ways the taxpayer gets scammed...

And what did Eliot Spitzer do with his taxpayer salary?

Oh, that´s right. $5000 hookers.

At least they´re bargain hunting.

Let´s not pretend that left to their own devices, that´s what men, of all income levels, have traditionally done with their money. This is why a country in South America (Brazil? Can´t remember) only gives the welfare check to the mother - because she´ll buy milk for the baby, the guy will spend it on alcohol, gambling, etc.

Your tax dollars at work. John Galt anyone?

We just keep decrying it. When will some one decide to DO something and who will that be? We keep hearing that it is the LAW to pass a buget and yet one has not been passed since Obama came to rule. Who is paying for that law breaking? If there is no consequences for breaking the law, then guess what........

Where have all you people beed, this "welfare " so called system has beengoing non at least sice was a second yea medical student. I asked the social worker about making a limit on the payments to the women who kept having babies Now knowen as single mothers,her answer " you cant punishthe childrenfor the mothers "mistakes". Now they get every thing including the kthcen sink.

All of their benefits should be revoked permanently! Unbelievable, but the Nazis did say that the bigger the lie, the less people would believe it! They keep yip yapping about gun control, how about some entitlement control? After all the money that these clowns squander is the money that the Real Clowns in DC rob from we the People!!!

There´s absolutely no way this crop of people should be considered living in poverty with the total cost of what they get in benefits.If they have all this excess cash to squander on booze,drugs,gambling etc. they can´t be considered poor.

What tick me off is this ad that runs on the radio that says in in 4 kids go to bed hungry every night.The whole food bank industry has become a grandiose scheme.

I´ve always said you can´t solve poverty by giving people free money.Poverty is a designed lifestyle to milk other people of their money.

I´m afraid to spend a dime because I don´t know how my business will hold up in this economy,yet these lazy,nonproductive people party year round without a worry in the world.

Any plastic card tied to a cash value and a pin will work on an ATM Machine. The EBT cards that operate ATM machines have cash value and a pin, that is why ATM machines accept them. Not all EBT cards come with cash value.

This is a little misleading. While there is a lot of abuse, not everyone abuses the money. And this is not new. They used to send a check for a certain amount for people to spend as they felt they needed. Now they just add it to a card. Some cards only let you buy groceries (food). Some don´t let you buy just any food either. I don´t have a problem with people buying junk food. It is still food and while some people don´t eat anything healthy, a lot of people are just getting some goodies for a treat.

The is not so much that we should be controlling how the money is spent--but that we should only be giving aid as temporary help. No welfare should be long term or permanent (unless a person is physically unable to work and has no family to help them). Because we set up such a stupid long term system, a lot of people who really do need help don´t get it while tens of thousands who don´t need it have learned to milk the system for everything it has.

#18, "immigrants" get government EBT cards easier than citizens do. In fact, they get more benefits than citizens...the social worker said it is because they are less likely to have family here to help them (Are they kidding?? They have more family than 10 Americans put together!) And they often work multiple jobs (sometimes under the table and sometimes using fake social security numbers). They really know how to make money and use us!!

What, no libraries or church collection boxes?

Above poster is correct. It´s going to get very ugly before long. The fuse is lit, and it´s getting shorter by the day.

The liberal Democrats consider all this to be the equivalent to the old time "walking around money" that was doled out before elections to ensure votes. Since all those low income places now have school breakfast, lunch, and dinner programs to feed the kids, the adult food stamp recipients no longer have to use the money on their food stamp cards to purchase food for their kids and spend time preparing store bought food, so they can use the money on their food stamp cards for "adult" purposes. The liberal Democrats will never stop that, the food stamp recipients know that, and will always vote accordingly. This is just part of transforming America.

Tommy Libous had proposed legislation to put a stop to this but NO! Shelly Silver refused to bring it to the floor....Busted.

The real problem is nobody has any shame. This is out and out theft. The real reason the dems in NY don´t address the issue is they want the votes from these crooks. When do they run out of other peoples money?

And people are surprised by this? What did they think would happen? We need to do away with welfare, most of the people on it, don´t need it.

In Maryland, there are two types of "Welfare."

There is a cash assistance card, which can be used like a credit card. There is also a food card, which can only be used to purchase eligible food items.

Obamaville , staff . Just think Back To The Future . Nothing more than a burned out ghetto with Zero up on the neon banner instead of Biff .

Just plain ungrateful with the president´s inaugural team fretting over low turn-out and all.
They could have put off their porno flicks, a few lap dances, and abstained from liquor long enough to save for a ticket to see the president´s inauguration./s

#59 you are on to something. The inaugruation committee should put up some ATM machines around DC and Independence Mall. Then get the necessary side shows (dancers, liquor, etc) around the Mall and the Balls. Heck, BHO can even highlight some of these attractions during his speech. All the drunks and deadbeats will certainly be pleased.

The only way for the moocher class to get their hands on any actual cash is to have to work for it.

34- The Takers are lazy, don´t want to work, sleep half the day away, they are drinking liquor, going to X-rated video shops, hookah parlors and strip clubs.

Remember that if there is a day of reckoning, these people are pathetically unfit for battle.

Not sure how they get cash on the EBT card because it´s suppose to be emergency cash for families (and immigrants) ie temporary assistance.
The WIC recipients can only buy certain foods and you will see WIC approved signs on the shelf.
The ones that receive food assistance can buy bakery items like Sesame Street cakes and wedding cakes, but not cooked shrimp or crab legs.
What really ticks me off is the immigrants who work for cash and live with the unwed mothers who collect on everything. They are the ones in front of you that cannot speak a word of English, but whip out $100 bills for items not covered by the EBT card.
They get into brand new pickup trucks in the parking lot.
In the meantime, seniors in this country live in poverty.

#41: Thanks for the words. My audience [and appeal, for that matter] is small, but elite!