NY Food Stamp Recipients Shipping Welfare Funded Groceries to Relatives in Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Haiti

Yup, no fraud here (NOT!!!) … What would you expect from a welfare entitlement program?

More of your hard earned tax dollars going up in smoke in welfare entitlement fraud. s reported at the NY Post, welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels and shipping them overseas. Isn’t that special. It is bad enough that food stamps are at record highs under President Barack Obama, but now we learn that the welfare program is full of welfare abuse and fraud. Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute told The Post, “I don’t want food-stamp police to see what people do with their rice and beans, but it’s wrong.” Why not? The over-intrusive, big government seems to care about everything else we do from what we eat, the size of the drink we have and with the revelations of the NSA spying, pretty much every call, email and letter we send. So why not crack down on welfare fraud? Are these people some how special? Last time I checked, fraud was fraud. This is a crime folks, now its just a matter of whether any one is willing to enforce it.

Food stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout — with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.

The practice is so common that hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels line the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.

The feds say the moveable feasts go against the intent of the $86 billion welfare program for impoverished Americans.

A spokeswoman for the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service said welfare benefits are reserved for households that buy and prepare food together. She said states should intervene if people are caught shipping nonperishables abroad.

Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, called it just another example of welfare abuse.

“I don’t want food-stamp police to see what people do with their rice and beans, but it’s wrong,” Tanner told The Post. “The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don’t have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid.”

Well at least the food stamp cards are not being used at strip clubs, liquor stores or porn shops. Oh wait, they were.