Federal Government Tries to Stop Food Stamp 'Water Dumping' Fraud
The federal government is moving to crack down on a bizarre form of food-stamp fraud that's flushing away taxpayer dollars.
The scam is called "water dumping." It works as follows: Food stamp recipients use their benefits to purchase water bottles and from there promptly dump the water out and redeem the bottles for cash.
The stupid is piled three deep here. First off, looking at water bottles in general, they're redeemable in fewer states than soda, if they're redeemable at all. Massachusetts has a bottle bill, so I went to the refrigerator and checked on various bottles contained therein (it's a public fridge). Poland Spring bottles say right on them that they are non-returnable. Dasani water, OTOH, are returnable in CA, NY, OR, ME, and CT. There's a very limited area where this can occur.
Secondly, the mindset of someone who would willingly waste an entire case of water just escapes me. I mean, it's bad enough that food stamps even cover bottled water - a gallon of store-brand water is like 2/$1 - that's $2 for the equivalent of a case of 20 ounce bottles that would sell for $6-7. But for someone to actually go out, spend food stamp money on bottled water and then just dump it out in the parking lot? Unconscionable. But then again, that's what happens when you divorce actions from consequences. These people won't lose their free money, nor their food stamps, so they'll just do it again, consequence-free.
Lastly and most egregiously... The Federal government is in charge of doing something about this? Specifically the Department of Agriculture? I suppose, if the Dept. Ag. is in charge of food stamps this sort of makes sense, but only if offenders really are kicked off the program. What's disturbing, though, is the idea floated to go after these people for "trafficking" charges - much like the much-vaunted RICO statutes that we were told would only ever apply to organized crime - until they weren't - it seems like using a sledgehammer to kill a fly here...
But then again, government will never solve a problem that would put it out of business, so...
8 comments:
Don't forget, the Dept of Agie Culture has it's own SWAT Team, and there's only so many places that sell Un- Pasteurized Milk.
And, of course, while all this is happening, I'm hearing ads on the radio trying to recruit MORE people into the food stamp...err...SNAP program. "What if I have a job and a house?" "You might very well still be eligible!!" Here we are, with .gov spending at an all time high, and growing faster than kudzu in a Georgia summer, and they're not only spending money on radio ads, but these ads are trying to get more people sucking out the money even faster?
Why do food stamps even cover bottled water? Is there some reason they can't get it from the tap?
Oh. That's right. The government needs to waste our money somehow. I guess that's a pretty easy way to do it.
Let me see if I have this right. If you give someone something and require nothing from them other than be breathing, then that person might not be appreciative of the gift? Maybe if we just gave that person more, then they would understand it's value.
In Michigan we have people do the same thing for the 10 cent deposit on carbonated beverages.
How about publicizing the ease of buying bottled water and selling it near areas containing overheated people?
When in Vegas, I picked up a few bottles that way from street vendors ... I don't care if they bought the water with their handouts, they were at least out trying to do something beyone being parasites.
It's the big five gallon bottles, they have like a 5 buck deposit on them around here.
In Western Mass, the trick involves milk in glass bottles. At $2 deposit per bottle (and $3-4 for the milk!). WIC covers a lot of people around here. And a lot of people purchase milk a half-dozen quarts at a time.
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