Since Mike Johnson’s recent ascent to House speaker, food insecurity advocates have been sounding the alarm. As Politico reported last week, Johnson is a proponent of more hard-line efforts to overhaul America’s largest anti-hunger program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which currently serves over 40 million people.
In 2018, per the publication, he referred to SNAP as “our nation’s most broken and bloated welfare program.”
[I]t was during the controversial War on Poverty that conservatives really began to focus their attention on food stamps as a political instrument that needed to be either managed or mitigated. Many argued that the program, as well as associated welfare initiatives, would discourage self-reliance and personal responsibility and breed a generation of Americans who were always seeking a handout. This nasty stereotype about people in poverty, especially people of color, was infamously cemented into our nation’s broader consciousness during Ronald Reagan’s 1976 presidential campaign with his popularization of the phrase “welfare queen.”
"There's a woman in Chicago,” he said during a campaign speech. “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000.”
Since then, food insecurity advocates have been attempting to undo the tremendous amount of damage done by that rhetoric. Meanwhile, catalyzed by Reagan’s unflattering stereotype — and perhaps their already-held beliefs that most welfare recipients are fraudulent and undeserving, rather than fellow citizens genuinely in need of government assistance — generations of conservative politicians have attempted to decrease the program’s reach.
In the 1990s, then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was a vocal critic of the welfare system, including SNAP, referring to it as a “culture of poverty.” This attitude was heavily reflected in the Trump administration’s plans to tighten eligibility for SNAP (which were ultimately largely unfulfilled), as well as Republicans’ more successful efforts this year, which come at a critical time for hunger in the United States.
Why do I doubt this? Politicians love to trot out examples like this, but they are often made up out of thin air or gross exaggerations. Like maybe they looked up a common name, found 12 people with that name listed, and just assumed it's all the same woman scamming the system. (Like how they assumed that dead people voted because people voted that had the same names as dead people. Because nobody has the same name as anyone else!)
If this is actually true I imagine the FBI or whatever federal agency deals with fraud would love to build a case so why not forward that information on to them?
Oh, right, because this is made up bullshit.
How dare you light their strawman on fire!
Reagan made up a bunch of shit. He had Alzheimer's, and people would tell him things. Either he willfully misrepresented or was beginning to lose the ability to sift fact from fiction.
He also claimed that vets were spit on when they came back, but they didn't come back from Vietnam through normal commercial airports, and there was a vibrant internal military protest movement, which everyone knew about. No one was spitting on random soldiers, and in the event that it happened once, it wasn't an organized zeitgeist like they tried to make it out to be.
Regressives are liars.
Wow, even with all that scanning, she's still not as much of a leech as billionaires and executives. You could scam the government for a million a day, and you still won't get close to the money the government freely gives away to rich people.
Yes. Exactly. You can always tell when they all use the same examples or if the story sounds too perfect.
I'm sure there ARE people that have found ways to take advantage of the system. But are those outliers enough of a reason to dismantle the whole system? It sounds like we have ways of finding those individuals if we found them in order to parade those cases around.
I'm happy to pay into a safety net that works to end domestic hunger. Who the fuck cares if .005% goes to some assholes.
Pretty sure the asshole to charity ratio is a lot higher in corporate bailouts, the state taxes that go to "crisis pregnancy" centers, public tax school vouchers for private schools, rich dickbag tax loopholes, wage theft, etc. etc. Let's go find those wankers instead of harassing a bunch of hungry people and making them jump through hoops. The administration of those hoops probably costs more than the scammers.
Because Reagan said it.
Because Reagan completely fabricated this.