No need to get into fresh produce, seafood, or drugs, the USDA is going to give the hawala brokers the USDA-Snap cards to get the money transfers going.
Such a deal!
My first reaction is disgust. But I actually see an upside to this.
The USDA will then have access to EXACTLY what each person has purchased. This would make it incredibly easy to spot a lot of scams (assuming that we had an honest government that was interested in doing so). Who is buying luxury grocery items? Why is the family that supposedly has infants not buying any baby food?
So many ways that the data can be sliced and diced. So much to learn from it.
The Big Brother companies use that data to spy on us. About time it’s used to track the gimmedats.
And for those who genuinely need and deserve assistance, it could be used to improve their situation and save taxpayer money, too.
The USDA FOOD STAMP program and all of the generations of descendant programs are black holes riddle with fraud and waste.
The CalAggie professors D. Barton DeLoach and Sam Logan wrote about this many decades ago.
Refer to Economic and Policy Weekly, December 30, 1995, page A-159. The article is published as follows: Logan, S H and DB DeLoach (1977): The Food Stamp Programme: Del Norte and Humboldt Counties, California Division of Agricultural Sciences, University of California, Davis, Bulletin 860