Good news for Hawaii, Newt Gingrich says that people receiving food stamps -- or as they say in the government that Newt so desperately hopes to lead, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- are using their electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards to visit our nation's archipelago paradise.
Just for fun let's look at the impact the more than forty million SNAP recipients will have on Hawaii's tourism statistics. According to Hawaii's Department of Business, Economic Development & Tourism only about 350,000 to 500,000 tourists from the rest of the United States vacation there each month. More than forty million Americans get food stamps in the same time period.
Well maybe Newt's thinking that's how SNAP recipients got to Hawaii in the first place: tourism. But those numbers just don't add up either. The State of Hawaii Department of Human Services website says that there are only about a hundred and a half thousand SNAP recipients monthly.
The Huffington Post story which highlighted Newt's salacious, inflammatory and illogical claim that people use their food stamps to go to Hawaii details how wrong Newt was so we don't need to duplicate that information here.
What do food stamp sellers buy -- if not trips to the land of the lei?
I've worked with the homeless for about twenty years. Most recently as the VP of Cumberland County Pennsylvania's largest homeless shelter. I've lived with the homeless and written a book about my experiences. During that time I knew people who sold their food stamps.
It's all pretty tragic really. Seeing people so down on their luck that they're willing to risk welfare fraud to purchase necessities. The going rate for $200 worth of food stamps is about $70. And the easiest way to sell them is to find a merchant who will front you a small amount of cash and wait for the higher level of reimbursement that comes from the feds.
It's kind of startling that Newt floated the drastically preposterous notion that people use their food stamp money for travel rather than make the more believable claim that people were buying drugs.
But my experience -- and yeah, I know it's only anecdotal but it is real -- is that most folks who sold their SNAP benefits did so to buy necessities the food stamps would not provide. Necessities like tampons, diapers, prescription drugs, and -- in one of the saddest stories I've heard in a while --batteries.
Here's that story and I hope it serves to illustrate one undeniable truth about Newt Gingrich's repugnant lie asserting that SNAP sales increase Hawaiian tourism: Newt doesn't care how horrific the real stories are that make up the lives of our nation's poor. He seeks to vilify the impoverished for his own gain and that makes his lying about his would be constituents OK in his self serving world.
In February of this year, I traveled the 8 southeastern states with my good friend and fellow homeless advocate Diane Nilan. When we were in the Birmingham, Alabama public library conducting a forum about homeless youth, a couple of young men courageously told their stories of abandonment -- first by their families and later by the rest of us. And when I say us, I mean especially Newt Gingrich.
One young man told us about his own habit of selling food stamps for the going rate of about 35 cents on the dollar. He mentioned that he had lost nearly everything in his steady decline into isolation and despair but he still had a portable radio/disc player. With cash from his SNAP sale he could buy batteries and continue to listen to music. Music being his final remaining luxury.
The young man made the acquaintance of a medical intern who volunteered at the men's shelter in which he lived. The newly minted M.D. saw how important music was to a kid who lived in an environment that housed men who might be sexual predators or good guys and he realized how vulnerable the boys life had become. So the young doc reached into his pocket, pulled out his iPod and said, "There now you'll never need batteries, you just plug it in to recharge."
Shame on Newt Gingrich. Shame shame shame on him for telling lies about the desperate lives of SNAP recipients. That young intern knew something about the life of this poor boy that Newt could care less about: if he didn't have his food stamps to sell, that would make his body his only remaining valuable.
Rev. Chuck Currie: Would You Trust Newt Gingrich With Your Children?
Apparently anything that demonizes the poor is credible to the GOTP sheople. If they can be convinced that BHO is a marxist agent of the anti-Christ anything is possible.
Why not just be honest for once and admit that many Americans are simply not profitable enough to fit into your economic model? Oh, right honesty is the last thing your base will tolerate. Much more advantageous to blame hungry families than the greedy, fraudulent, predatory profiteers who fund your campaign.
Was this intended as some kind of test to see just how utterly ridiculous the cr@p they fill the base's trough with can be?
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/seattle-welfare-recipient-lives-million-dollar-home-161252749.html
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/seattle-welfare-recipient-lives-million-dollar-home-161252749.html
I trust that's why you posted this and not to defend Newt. Because a cheat like Newt is unworthy of defense.
Despite your partisan animus for Newt, why not just acknowledge the point that Newt was making, that fraud exists in food stamps, much like the government estimated $80-100l BILLION PER YEAR in Medicare fraud. Are you really so focused on making political points that you'd suggest ignoring such fraud?
Let us remember he is the favored candidate (at this moment in time) of the Christian Party.
How DARE THEY!!!
Someone even said they saw one wearing decent clothes and a watch!
Everyone knows they all buys drugs with the benefits, right? /sarcasm off
He also spreads the myth that children of poor people can be nothing more than welfare queens or drug dealers so hey lets get them to clean the floors of the schools they attend.
in poor areas so that the kids would be able to get into the work
force, but what he didn't explain was what the unemployed janitor
would do. I don't think abuse and fraud in the welfare system is
widespread but I think the system the way it's run tends to make
it easier. This is where reform is needed.
These guys are so out of touch, and so desperate, they can't even impune with lies that make sense!
Yes, I know some folks who sell some of their food stamps but it isn't to go on trips, or buy liquor, and other reasons that Gingrinch or his cohorts allege. Far from it. It's because they don't have enough money to buy the necessities. Trips are never included, just daily needs.
Denegrating the poor and those in need, which is a good majority of Americans at this time -- the 99%. I, myself am included as I receive a small S.S. check, am on M/Care and Mainecare and a small allotment of food stamps, a plight I never thought I'd be in. But remember, Gingrinch is going by the usual playbook which he and Repubs know how to do best -- lie and divide the electorate. They live in their own individual ivory tower where everything is "hunky-dorey." (sp?)
I still say that we need to send the Repubs/TPs off to a planet, of their own making of course so they don't complain...and where they can hear each other's echos. Oh and to which galaxy? Who'd want them but we can sing, "Far, far away" as a sendoff.
Mr. G. as president? President of no accounts, paper clips? Certainly not of the United States of America.
However, for Mr. Gingrinch to make such a blatant blanket statement is to show his ignorance, judge others, to attempt to pit the 99% against each other and to "cushion" the misdeeds of the 1%.
yes, you have to pay for your spending and the Repubs have yet to pay for any of it--the stimulus is almost all paid back
as far as GDP, a real measure, the Repubs like Reagan and W far outspent the O and the proposals by the clowns in the Repub circus currently far outspend the O now
so get the facts and get a grip on reality