Free Republic

Immigrants in the United States and their families are forgoing essential welfare benefits like public housing, food stamps and Medicare over fear of persecution, a new study has found. One in seven immigrants avoided public benefit programs in 2018 out of concern they would risk their future green card status, the Urban Institute found in a report out Wednesday morning. Last week, President Donald Trump proposed changing the nation’s legal immigration system to limit green cards given to migrants who rely on welfare benefits or who are not financially independent. Instead, the president said he would prioritize well-off citizen-seekers with...

The case underscores what experts say is a growing cost to taxpayers from the surge of Central American families and unaccompanied minors. "We're talking about billions of dollars in taxpayer benefits over the next few years," said Dan Stein, director of the right-leaning think tank, Federation for American Immigration Reform. "The payout for the taxpayer is enormous and income to the Treasury is miniscule." A FAIR study in 2017 found illegal immigrants are a net consumer of taxpayer benefits worth more than $100 billion a year, not including the cost of enforcing the border. While federal benefits are supposed to...

Amazon and Walmart on Thursday kicked off a two-year government pilot program allowing low-income shoppers on government food assistance in New York to shop and pay for their groceries online for the first time. ShopRite will join the two retailers on the program early next week, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. The USDA has long required customers using electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, pay for their purchases at the actual time and place of sale. So the move marks the first time SNAP customers can pay for their groceries online....

President Trump said Monday that he's opposed to allowing immigrants into the U.S. who are dependent on welfare, citing the country's already extensive financial commitments. "I don’t want to have anyone coming in that’s on welfare,” Trump told Breitbart News in an Oval Office interview. “We have a problem, because we have politicians that are not strong, or they have bad intentions, or they want to get votes, because they think if they come in they’re going to vote Democrat, you know, for the most part," he added.

Future federal funding for a key nutritional program helping thousands of Alaskans in need remains in doubt due to the partial government shutdown, according to state authorities. The state doesn’t have any funds awaiting distribution under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program according to Shawnda O’Brien, director of Alaska's Division of Public Assistance. SNAP’s latest disbursement, $12 million sent to about 33,000 Alaska households, was originally scheduled to be available by Feb. 1 – but federal officials told the state to issue it prematurely, with the funds released Jan. 20. “They had to get the money out before the end of...

Philadelphia’s outlandish soda tax is what Democratic-party politics looks like when it lets its freak flag fly. So many classic elements are there: (failed) social engineering and “think of the children!” on one side, paid for with a punitive tax on poor people and destroyed businesses, which means destroyed jobs, which in turn means lives upended. What lives? Greedy capitalists with monocles, maybe? No, they’ll be fine. Think of ex-cons trying to regain their footing in society. To review this debacle, in 2017 Philadelphia, seeking to fund a universal pre-K program, slapped mammoth sin taxes on Coke and Pepsi (and...

The Trump administration pledged Tuesday that Americans will receive food stamps through February despite the partial government shutdown, but officials could not promise those benefits will continue if the shutdown lasts until March. Congress has only approved funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program through January, fueling concern food benefits used by 38 million Americans would expire amid the budget stalemate in Washington. In a call with reporters on Tuesday, Agriculture Department officials said that they will give states the money for February’s food stamps ahead of time – by Jan. 20 – to circumvent the expiration of federal appropriations....

We weren’t expecting to see a loss of food stamp benefits until the end of January, but a grocery store in Indiana reported they are unable to process EBT payments. In Clay City, Indiana, the local IGA discovered the problem last week. Initially, they thought it was a technical glitch. “Our machines weren’t taking any EBT cards and we didn’t really know what was going on. We didn’t know if it was a technical issue. And then we found out it was due to the government shutting down,” Tristen Malone said. (source) UPDATE: Officials at the Indiana Family and Social...

More than 20 years ago, Democrats and Republicans came together to reform our welfare programs to restore the system to what it was meant to be: “a second chance, not a way of life,” in the words of then-President Bill Clinton. Over time, without any changes in the underlying welfare reform legislation of 1996, that ideal has been watered down by out-of-control administrative flexibility in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Today, at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, we are taking steps to restore integrity to SNAP and move people toward self-sufficiency. As we approach the mid-point of...

The Trump administration wants to push more food stamp recipients to find jobs, after this year's farm bill failed to include work requirements for the federal food assistance program. The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Thursday proposed a rule that would limit the ability of states to exempt work-eligible adults from having to obtain steady employment to receive food stamps. Critics called the proposal "draconian" and said it would hurt workers and families who are already struggling. The move comes just weeks after lawmakers passed a $400 billion farm bill that reauthorized agriculture and conservation programs while leaving the Supplemental...

More than half of Americans receive more money in various types of government transfer payments (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Social Security) than they pay in federal taxes.1 According to a report released this year by the Congressional Budget Office, only the top two income quintiles in the United States pay more in taxes than they receive in government transfers. Not surprisingly, the lowest income quintiles receive far more in transfers than they pay in taxes:

Millions of taxpayers dollars trafficked through food stamp fraud went to terrorists who funded their activities at home and abroad, according to an explosive report from the Government Accountability Institute (GAI). The report from GAI, where Breitbart News Senior-Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer serves as president, highlighted several instances where money obtained through Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits fraud went to fund acts of terrorism, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombings and the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Although this method of using food stamp fraud money for terrorism has been around since the 1980s, it gained notoriety when New York...

The House and Senate are negotiating a farm bill, and for once the stakes are more important than subsidies for wealthy sugar farmers. Republicans are debating reforms to a food stamp program that is divorced from work and economic advancement. Allow us to illustrate how a current waiver process has corroded even minimal requirements. The House farm bill includes a requirement that adults aged 18 and 59 work or train for 80 hours a month (20 hours a week, or part time). Seniors, the disabled, pregnant women and anyone caring for a child under 6 is exempt. The Senate’s bill...

WASHINGTON -- The Trump administration may have declared it over, but a new War on Poverty is coming anyways. It will be fought largely over the "work requirement" -- should the government require welfare recipients either to get a job or to train for one? It's a philosophical as much as a practical question. A work requirement addresses a dilemma of all welfare programs. If you make eligibility and benefits too generous, you destroy the incentive to work. People will just collect their welfare checks. But if the program is too stingy and strict, many genuinely needy people may lack...

Food stamp participation dropped below 40 million for the first time in eight years, according to the latest numbers on food stamp enrollment from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The most recent USDA data reveals that 39,604,428 people were enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the program that administers food stamps—as of April 2018. The last time enrollment dipped below 40 million was in February 2010, when 39,588,993 people received SNAP benefits. The latest data on enrollment shows that overall enrollment in the food stamp program has reached historic lows, reaching its lowest point in eight years. But...

( Full Title )While Everyone Was Focused on SCOTUS Pick, US Judge ELIMINATED Work Requirements for Welfare Programs Over the last month or so, people have been wondering who Trump would appoint to replace Justice Kennedy on the Supreme Court. Obviously, that’s an incredibly important news story to follow and it’s nice to know that Trump ultimately picked a solid conservative in Brett Kavanaugh. However, there’s still a lot of other stuff going on that Americans should be paying attention to. For example, an Obama appointed judge recently ruled against work requirements for welfare programs. Here’s more on that. From...

Overall enrollment in the nation’s food stamp program has dipped to its lowest level in eight years, according to the latest statistics released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The latest USDA data reveals that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the federal government program that administers food stamps—dropped to 40,083,954 in March 2018. The last time enrollment in the food stamp program reached that level was February 2010, when 39,588,993 people participated in the nation’s food stamp program. Although overall enrollment has reached its lowest point in eight years, food stamp enrollment has been declining steadily since...

Food companies have embraced a controversial tactic in their quest to sell more soda, a new study says: timing advertisements for sugary drinks to the days states distribute food stamp benefits. On any given day, grocery shoppers are likely to see soda displays in stores, researchers found. But they are two to four times as likely to come across them when food stamps go out. The study, which relied on 2011 data from the New York State Department of Health and which will appear later this year in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, is the latest to suggest there's...

Republicans and members of the Trump administration must keep up the pressure and focus on achieving welfare reform. When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, many believed that the law would indeed “end welfare as we know it.” It’s what we intended when Congress created the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and implemented work requirements to restore welfare to its original intent as a springboard to self-sufficiency. These policies were intended to be the beginning of welfare reform – the beginning of a nationwide policy focused on ending dependency. Instead, President...

President Trump’s new executive order on welfare reform has laid the groundwork to get more Americans get back to work while protecting and strengthening the safety net for the truly needy. Federal agencies must take advantage of this opportunity to roll back harmful Obama-era policies that have trapped families in dependency and cost taxpayers billions. Right now, America combines near-record-low unemployment with near-record-high welfare dependency — the result of state-level eligibility exemptions, federal loopholes and policies that put work on the back burner. Many of these policies created incentives for able-bodied adults to sit on the sidelines — even though...