Want a vacation - get a California EBT card
LOL - Kiss $70,000,000.00 of California tax payer money away allocated for food and bare essentials as the EBT cards have been used on multiple cruises, trips to Hawaii, Guam, the Venetian Hotel and other high end properties, and as far as China! California welfare is goooooooood!
Re: Want a vacation - get a California EBT card
^^^ the UK press was a bit more specific ...
(snip)"Millions of dollars of California welfare handouts have been frittered away on gambling sprees in Las Vegas, expensive sunshine holidays in Hawaii and at Disney World in Florida.
More than $69million in benefits meant to clothe and feed needy families was spent outside California in recent years, making a mockery of the state’s attempts to help the poor.
The scale of the scandal revealed in today’s Los Angeles Times has stunned state officials who are fighting to preserve vital services in the face of drastic budget cuts."(snip)
(snip)"According to data obtained by the Times from the California Department of Social Services, state-issued aid cards have been used at hotels, shops, restaurants, ATM machines and other places in 49 other states, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam.
By far the most popular destination for benefit spenders was Las Vegas, where nearly $12million of cash was accessed from the aid cards over the past three years.
To qualify for welfare, recipients must prove they are desperate for help to pay for necessities like food and shelter.
A single parent with two children must usually earn less than $14,436 a year to qualify for assistance, said a social services official.
‘How they can go somewhere like Hawaii and be legit on aid - they can’t. This is money for basic subsistence needs,’ said Robert Hollenbeck, a fraud investigator for the Fresno County district attorney’s office."(snip)
(snip)"California taxpayers who are struggling to keep their own jobs are subsidizing other people’s vacations. That’s absurd,’ Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association, told the Times."(snip)
Read more:
The obvious take-away from this revalation is that there are a whole lot of Californians who are 'cashing in' on social welfare benefits by limiting their 'official' income below the eligibility threshold ... and at the same time generating a fair amount of additional income from 'unofficial' sources.
This must be particularly irritating to UK readers, who are now facing ...
(snip)"LONDON (AP) -- Britain will cap payments to jobless families and scrap child benefits for high earners in a sweeping overhaul of the country's welfare system, Treasury chief George Osborne said Monday.
Osborne, who is seeking to save about 86 billion pounds ($135 billion) in government spending over the next five years, said the cost of welfare payments was out of control -- and rewarding some people for staying out of work.
At an annual rally of his Conservative Party, Osborne said Britain's coalition government would introduce a new welfare cap to make sure families in which both parents are unemployed do not receive more in benefits than an average family earn in wages.
Osborne also announced parents who earn more than 44,000 pounds ($70,000) per year will lose child benefit payments from 2013. Currently, all families are paid 20 pounds ($32) a week for their eldest child and about 13 pounds ($20) for other children. The benefits continue until the children are 19, if they stay in full-time education.
There would be welfare payments "to families who need it -- but not more money than families who go out to work," Osborne told activists at the rally in Birmingham, central England.
"That is what the British people mean by fair -- and we will be the first Government in history to bring it about," he said."(snip)
Indeed UK pol Osborne has boldly stated the 'dirty little secret' of most social welfare programs as they exist in the real world ... that it's possible to achieve an equal standard of living by choosing not to work ( or more precisely, by choosing to limit 'official' income levels to slightly below the benefit eligibility threshold ) than it is by working full time at an 'unskilled' or even 'semi-skilled' job.
Re: Want a vacation - get a California EBT card
Poor monitoring and EBT transaction limit design are the culprits here. Many people feel no moral obligation to keep their assistance ethical. So that has to be designed into the system. One way perhaps would be to not allow transactions outside of CA. I hope my state of NY has a better limit system.
Re: Want a vacation - get a California EBT card
Speaking from someone in Illinois, there is so much corruption here. I've seen people use their Link Cards (the same thing as a EBT card) for things like cigarettes, alcohol and electroics! Yes, last Christmas I was shopping with my mom at the store and this women in front of us was using a Link Card to attempt to buy several electronics. Luckily it was declined but it made me livid. I had a friend on welfare who was abusing the system to buy a car and I turned her in. She later thanked me for getting her life back on track.