S4 E37 - SNAP Scammers: How the Shutdown Exposed America’s Fake Famine

The government shutdown didn’t starve America — it exposed our addiction to dependency.

In this episode, The Tenth Man unpacks the SNAP panic: forty-two million people “losing benefits,” the myth of American hunger, and the reality of how many safety nets already exist. From WIC to TANF to SSI, TEFAP, school lunches, and the Earned Income Tax Credit, we explore how a nation that calls its poor “starving” can also call them obese.

Our host shows how media misrepresentation turns welfare into a moral virtue, and how the very people who fund the system are treated as villains for asking where their money goes. Compassion for the truly needy is noble — but robbing the middle class to feed the lazy is theft.

When a nation treats the consumer of taxes as holier than the producer, it’s not feeding the poor — it’s starving freedom.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

The Tenth Man: 0:11

The SNAP program shuts down and America's poor go from obese to starving overnight. Suggestions for the idle poor on how to maintain their 4,000 daily calories today, on The Tenth Man. It is come as a bit of a surprise that the government shutdown down has gone on this long, because we started saying originally that, well, people should stop complaining because they haven't lost a paycheck yet. And they didn't lose one for a couple, maybe even three weeks. But now it's gone on, and so now even the people on SNAP are gonna stop getting their paychecks, which is what they are. They get paid for doing nothing, but they are getting paid. And we don't wanna discount the fact that there are a few deserving, needy, poor. It can only be a few in the richest country in the world. But we're not talking about those. So if you want to criticize and say, we lack compassion for the truly needy, nope, not the case. Not talking about the needy, we're talking about the scammers, which is most of the people on SNAP. Scammers might not be the completely accurate word. How about deadbeats? People who get paid for doing nothing when they could be doing something. So lack of compassion is not the issue. Whenever Washington has a hiccup like this, suddenly people act like the only way you can get food is from Washington. Hmm. You know, Washington is only a couple hundred years old. How did people get food before that? And then the headlines will say, there are 42 million people who"rely" on food stamps for something to eat. Huh? That's actually factually incorrect because SNAP stands for, well, the last three letters are Nutritional Assistance Program. You know what the first letter is? The S? Supplemental. Supplemental something that Democrats and deadbeats don't understand. SNAP is supposed to help you buy food. It's not supposed to buy all your food for you. There's just the possibility that there's other things you could do rather than rely on the government. So let's talk about them. And let's talk about the fact that they say how many families there are on food stamps. Yeah, but then with the pictures, always a single mother. The hero of today, the single mom who can't get formula for her baby. Actually, you know, she could, she could breastfeed. I know some people can't, but maybe she could. She could try because all the feminist groups say that breastfeeding is superior. But you see, feminist groups are liberal, so they all get real quiet as soon as you talk about giving away free stuff. And there's plenty of free formula available. There are food banks that dedicate themselves to nothing other than giving away formula, which might make sense. I mean, there are people who use formula that you, you know, there's the ones who can't breastfeed, as I said, and then you might want to have some around for when you go to work. But the people on SNAP, they're not the ones going to work, are they? Are they? But before you go anywhere to look for free food, maybe you should just first look in the refrigerator and look in the cupboard. And I'm saying that kind of sarcastically because we talk about the poor in America. The poor in the world are the ones whom the UN defines as living on some number less than$3 a day, not$20 an hour minimum wage,$3 a day. And those people, those poor people, they don't have a refrigerator or a cupboard to look in. And that's to say if your paycheck didn't come on Tuesday, are you out of food on Wednesday? Does anybody live that way? Is anybody's house empty? Because they haven't gone shopping or because they went shopping the day after payday. What's going on here? Because we're told there are people who will say, if you wanna find somebody who really knows how to manage his money, look for a poor person. Because they have to manage, they have to scratch and scrabble. So where is the scratching and scrambling here? Where is there any hint of adaptation. But they are adapting. People have said that, well, if my food stamps don't come, I'm just gonna go out and steal food. Well, frankly, I don't care if you do because as far as I'm concerned, most of the people on food stamps, they're stealing already. And even if we don't want to call it stealing, they're getting something for nothing. So whether they're getting it legitimately from forcing a taxpayer who on and, and we're forced to pay, it's not charity. Charity would be, if they asked us charity would be if they put a checkbox on the tax form for the people paying taxes to say, yeah, I wanna give to food stamps. And then we would look around and say, huh, I think those food stamps, they're doing a good work. I wanna chip in for that and then we would. That would be charity. But this isn't charity, it's, it's actually slavery. They take away our money whether we like it or not. They've decided that this person over here is more deserving based on his skin, his circumstances. This person is more deserving than you are of the fruits of your own labor. When they say families, that's interesting too. They'll say, uh, X percent of the families have children. I'm fascinated. Tell me more. What percentage of the, of the families have two parents? What percentage of the families are a mother and a father, and what percentage are a grandmother and no one else? Because if there's a grandmother, if you get to the point where the grandmother is providing for the kids and that's good, family is stepping in. But now when you go from child to parent, that's two adults to take care of that child when you go to grandparents, that's four more total of six adults able to take responsibility, who are morally obligated to take responsibility and should. So before they're getting food stamps, where are all six of those adults? And they know the answer. There's a birth certificate, there's a father's name on it. Why can't the father take care of'em? The father should be taking care of'em, except another thing the feminists tell us is that women don't need a man. Well, they seem to need something. They seem to need some kind of help. They seem seem to need a lot of men because we are the ones paying the taxes that are supporting them. Not complaining about paying taxes. We'll talk more about that later. So they're really not doing all that well without a man. So once you find there's nothing in the cupboard and uh, and you've exhausted all the help your family can give you, then you have to go to SNAP as a supplement. You're not supposed to rely on it. If you do, you're a bad parent. You're a bad parent because you need to be the first one taking responsibility for your kids, and one of the things you can do is good budgeting. Because you know, SNAP benefits never expire. But SNAP benefits have stopped. You've gotta do something else. You, you need to try budgeting. You could have planned ahead. You saw that there was gonna be the potential for not getting SNAP, so you need, you could have been tightening your belt, going to the food banks, but what other federal aid is there? Well, there's a lot. There's WIC, Women Infants and Children Program. That's a program giving just baby formula, milk, cereal, and nutrition counseling to the poor women who can't find formula. Then there's TANF, T-A-N-F, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. This is what we used to call welfare and this program, hands out cash, hands out cash to the people who are needy. And we emphasize there it is for the needy, not the greedy. So if you are truly in need, you're also eligible for this in addition to food stamps. So, and that's cash. You can spend it anywhere. Another program is SSI and that gives monthly checks out to low income, elderly and disabled adults, the most vulnerable. Not everybody gets this program, and not everybody gets what it's all about. You see, this is for the most vulnerable. If you are not on SSI, you're not the most vulnerable. So we take care of the needy and people who are not on SSI and those who are not on TANF should be trying to do something else. Then there's TEFAP, the Emergency Food Assistance Program. This moves hundreds of millions of dollars worth of US farm commodities to the public through, through local agencies. Well, it used to actually, you see this is the old USDA program where you could go get, and uh, we actually did this when I was a kid, you'd go get powdered milk and cheese and powdered eggs and canned meat, and it was actual food items and it was designed to support farm markets while providing support for the poor, eliminating agricultural surpluses. But now there aren't any surpluses, so we just dump money into it. We just dump money into that so people can get that too. That's how the government works. You set up something to solve a need, and then you keep it going forever. And of course there's food banks and church pantries, and those operate even when Washington is on coffee break. These are wonderful because you actually get to choose whether or not to give to them. I support the one in, in, in our town and at our church along with my taxes, which I don't complain about. And uh, the thing is, those food banks, they really don't ask a lot of questions about your eligibility. Well, yeah. Yeah. Ho hum. You've heard all that. You know about all these, you know, there's a lot of government programs. Maybe you didn't know how many there were, but we're not done. And this one is huge. Every child from a low income family qualifies for free school breakfast and lunch. And many districts after have afterschool snacks as well. So the parents of school aged kids are actually double dipping. They're getting SNAP cards and they're getting their kids fed for free at school, at least two meals a day. That means all through the summer when they had to feed their kids at home, they had to spend more. But as soon as school started two months ago yeah, they had two months worth of not having to pay to feed their kids who were going to school. So that money just backed up onto the EBT card and they don't expire. So as many kids as you have in school, you've got that much extra money to spend. So what about it? Where'd that money go? You know, if in a truly fair world, when you, when you kids start school, they would take that money off your SNAP card because you don't need it. But people don't understand what that word need means. It doesn't mean you want it, it's, it's need not greed. If you want it, it's greed If you need it, that's something different. So, and and also you'll see somebody going to the store. You'll see the lady pushing the, the, the shopping cart with her six kids. Okay? She's got her six kids and saying she can't get baby formula. Well, if you got six kids just by math f only the bottom two to three kids can still be at home. The rest must be in school, getting free school lunch. Uh, but they don't expect us to do arithmetic like that. They expect us to just let the tax dollars go, spend them, waste them. So all the wise poor people who have to, who have to scratch and scrabble and plan, they don't actually plan at all. And then here's another huge one. Don't forget the Earned Income Tax Credit, and this one needs an explanation. We'll concentrate on this one because a lot of Americans don't understand it. And for our international listeners, you'll probably be floored. People on the lower end of the wage scale in America, do not pay federal income taxes at all. You have to make about$30,000 a year. Now how are you doing over there in Europe? What's your, what's your average middle class salary over there? Alright. It's not much above$30,000 a year, is it? Okay. So if they make$30,000 a year or so, they pay no federal income tax. So not only that. They don't pay any tax income taxes, but they still file an income tax return. So in April they get a refund check of other people's money. Yes, that's right. They didn't pay in, but they get cash back. Millions of dollars. So it's as if you never bought a raffle ticket, but you win anyway. So think about it. Wages tax free, getting tax back. And all your food is paid for too. Now, food in most of the world is a major expense, but in America, the lower middle class, any, in any other country don't have to buy their own food and they don't pay any taxes. So before we cry, famine, let's count how many safety nets we got. We got SNAP WIC, TANF, SSI, TEFAP, school meals, food banks, and Earned Income Tax Credit refund checks. It's a whole buffet line of public provisions. And funny, and again, for our overseas, overseas listeners, think about it. How many times have you been told that America is a cruel country? We don't have any social programs. Oh, we've got'em. We've got'em. We just don't have'em for the people who deserve'em. And you know there is one other option. Yeah, millions of Americans work two jobs when things get tight. I've worked two jobs, hasn't everybody. Well, that's just, but that's just what you do. That's called adulthood. See, charity has its place, if you can even call this charity, but you're still supposed to have a, have survival skills. Now there have been some huge misre misrepresentations of fact that the left keeps repeating and unfortunately the right keeps letting'em slide. It's only here on The Tenth Man that you get the plain truth explained from the ground up. And we don't just replay other people's videos and then say how horrified we are. It's original material. And if you value that kind of straight talk, subscribe to The Tenth Man and tell a friend who still believes only the headlines. Because you gotta read past the headlines and that's what we do here. All original stuff. So here's another huge misrepresentation. According to the networks, the minute a SNAP card freezes America becomes like Somalia or Yemen or Sudan. And yet government health data show that low income Americans are more likely to be obese than are the middle class. So it's all the people paying in who are the skinny ones, but of course they are actually working. And you wanna know how the rich get richer? By short selling Coke and Pepsi. You see the top food stamp purchase is pop. So Coke and Pepsi just lost 42 million customers. The smart money is selling short. Yeah.'cause the, all the top SNAP purchases are, are pop soda chips and candy. Now things like eggs and potatoes, things that are actually nutritious and cheap, those are at the bottom. Those rank, they're in the top 20, number 20. And so, the same crowd that's warning us about mass hunger and starving babies, they want us to fund the 64 ounce colas. That's two liters. I dunno why we even said 64 ounce. They're two liters, here. We are metric. And the contradiction doesn't bother'em because it serves both sides of their narrative. Remember, they're anything if not inconsistent.'Cause they can campaign against hunger, while also campaigning for free healthcare to treat the diabetes that comes with it. And that's no joke. That's no joke. The left is now demanding Ozempic for all the fat poor kids. And who pays for that? The same taxpayer they pay once at, we pay once at the checkout line and again at the hospital. So more free stuff, America is not Socialist? Oh, yes, we are. The 42 million people on food stamps, most of them 30 million are also on Medicaid, absolutely free medical care for the lower middle class who also pay no taxes. So does this sound like cruelty to you, a lack of compassion, or is it just arithmetic? Because you can't call a nation both starving and obese at the same time and, and, and, and be taken seriously. If you wanna be compassionate, it requires telling the truth. And the truth is, you could cut food stamps today a hundred percent, and people would still manage to get by and overall health would go up. Prove me wrong. And we know that based on the amount of fraud that goes on, the fraud proves that the money's not needed. A woman in the Detroit News, they profile her as a single mom. Then you actually read the article. This was uh, last Sunday, November 1st. Then you actually read the article and you find it's two adult kids, 18 and 20. So two adult kids and another adult in the house. That's not what most people think of when they hear about a poor family. It's three adults, but they're getting SNAP And then come the hustles. You know, one reason they buy so much soda, it's not because they are drinking it all. A lot of, a lot of states have a deposit. You have to pay 10 cents on each can. One one 10th of a dollar on each can of pop you bring home. They'll buy the pop, dump it out in the parking lot and then go turn it in and they're getting 10 cents on the dollar on the money that you spent. In cash. They can spend on anything. You can go to online forums like Quora and find people talking about it. Here's one of a man telling about how his mother took their SNAP cards, their food stamps, down to a store once a month and turned it in for 50 cents on the dollar. She fed the kids with something else and she used all that money to buy liquor. Another talks about a pricey brand of organic milk in refundable glass bottles. Well, the milk costs$8 but$3 is bottle deposit. So what is that? A 30% return 40, 40 cents on the dollar. Buy the milk and pour it out or drink it. Hm. But the left and the mainstream media say we are mean if we even ask where all that money, all our money is going. And it's a lot of money. I How big? Well, it's a whole lot of money. Because SNAP runs near a hundred billion dollars a year. TANF or Welfare? Another's 34 billion. WIC, 7 billion. TEFAP, the USDA food program, half a billion. In other child nutrition programs, I don't know what they are,$21 billion. Together$142 billion. To picture that. Well, let's just take the SNAP'cause that's what we're talking about. You take, Luxembourg is the wealthiest nation in Europe in terms of GDP per capita. Now they're kind of small, but everybody admires Luxembourg because they're so rich. Well, the food stamp alone, food stamp program alone, is more than the entire Gross Domestic Product of Luxembourg. Our budget for food stamps could buy Luxembourg and have change left over. Okay, well maybe the nation of Luxembourg is, is, uh, too, too vague a reference or, or not relative. So let's think about some things that the government actually is supposed to provide. The food stamp budget is enough to fund the Coast Guard 10 times over. We all know what the Coast Guard is. It's what we, we rely on to stop the Fentanyl coming in to poison us. Or the Marine Corps: the food stamp budget alone would fund the United States Marine Corps twice over. And so when we have people on the left, even now saying, talking about President Trump's new, extravagant White House ballroom. So remember the ballroom, the first major addition to the residence in over a century. And the$350 million that it cost that would fund the food stamp program for a little over two days. It's a lot of money. And you know, we have a lot of money because America's smart and knows how to spend smart, but you can't pay for everything. You have to fund what is essential and what it is the government's business to fund. But if everything is essential, then nothing is. And the government was built to build and defend a nation, not to finance people's snacks. And I don't know whether we need a ballroom or not. We're not gonna discuss that here, but if we do, it's not gonna build itself. It needs the government to do it. And yet you have to wonder why more than 10% of Americans in the richest country on Earth, more than 10% are supposedly incapable of providing for their own most basic needs. All Americans should be working hard, paying a taxes, and contributing to the welfare of the genuinely poor people in our country and in the world. Speaking of the world, let's talk about illegal immigration and the controversy over whether or not illegal aliens are receiving food stamps. Well, you don't have to debate this one at all. All you gotta do is look at the literature of the immigration agencies themselves, and they admit that the SNAP lapse is going to adversely affect illegal immigrant families. That's what they're saying. But it's interesting when I'm researching this, uh, in case you don't know it, AI is definitely Woke because, uh, go ahead and do this. Go ask Google and you've got the little AI box. You can ask, you can do a follow up on there. Go ask Google the question, are illegal aliens benefiting from SNAP? And then see what Google tells you. Okay.'Cause it'll say"No, because illegal aliens are not eligible". Hmm. Was that what I asked? So then go click that box at the bottom and say it. Say, I didn't ask if they were eligible. I asked if they were benefiting. And then that lying son of a gun that is Google will be forced to tell you this: Well, illegal aliens don't get food stamps, but their kids do. The parents might be illegal, but the kids are born here and the EBT card arrives addressed to the household and food is what they call fungible. It'll feed whoever's sitting at the table. And, and that that card, it's just like cash. And this same pattern repeats'cause almost everything. WIC, Medicaid, each one of those is available to houses with US-born children, and some of them the, uh, agriculture program, that one's probably taken advantage more by illegal aliens. So the Democrats will say, illegal aliens don't get benefits. Technically true, practically speaking, false because the children of illegal aliens get everything. And nationally, with the number of benefits that are already available to the native born, you can bet the illegals are gonna snap up anything left over wherever they are eligible, like the TEFAP Agriculture program. Some questions for the left, for the pundits. If America is so cruel, why do people keep coming? Illegals keep coming, even from Canada. Why would they come from Canada? And if illegal immigrants are not benefiting from these programs, why are the illegal advocates warning about SNAP affecting them? And why is every SNAP office bilingual? All the signs are in Spanish. They translate paperwork and signs. And why would they do that, unless they're expecting Spanish speaking clients. They don't even hide this it's printed right on the door. And yeah, I know a lot of Americans speak Spanish, happen to be one of them. It's called being bilingual, but Americans can all read English. You wanna be politically correct, print it in Chippewa, not Spanish. You know, if we wanted to end all the debate, all the arguing, we could just take politics out of it with one stroke of the pen. If you pay no federal income tax. You don't vote on how the tax is spent. No taxes, no vote. That's fair. That's just being responsible. The American Revolution was about taxation without representation because those two things go together. But now we live under representation without taxation. Tens of millions of people voting to expand programs that are funded entirely by other people. You know, having skin in the game changes everything. Free stuff is a lot different when it's not actually free anymore. And here's the thing that baffles me. Every creature on earth, whether you believe in God or nature, nature or God, created every living being capable of providing for both itself and its young. Food, clothing, shelter. Every bird gathers, every fox hunts, every fish finds food. But only humanity, and specifically only modern America accepts as a fact the widespread inability to care for oneself as being a normal condition. Heck, we praise it. We fund it, and we vote to make it bigger. At the same time, we're praising illegal immigrants for working hard on the job, we're rewarding the Native born for working the system. Charity is good, but it should be rare, it should be targeted, and it should be justified. You know, we say the government has shut down, but it sure doesn't look like it. The politicians are still on TV debating, but the only thing they're talking about is payments to the people making no contribution to society. Sure they matter, but, what about the functions that only government can perform? Defense, air traffic control, border security. These are the ones that we allow to grind to a halt or at least not get paid for. And why is it that a judge can order food stamps to be paid, but he can't order five Democrat senators to vote yes to reopen the government? And why does closing the government mean air traffic controllers don't get paid? People we actually need the government to provide, but people who are frankly a burden to society, those are the ones this so-called closed government is worried about. That's the great moral inversion of our time. We get called racist for opposing aid to freeloaders in America, most of whom are white, as we're pointing out the true famine and starvation in Africa and famine, the actual bloated bellies, eyes clogged with flies type of famine has moved from Ethiopia to Somalia to Yemen, and now, right now, today, Sudan, and yet we're here giving Coca-Cola away to illegals. The poor in America are rich by world standards. They live better than the middle class in much of Europe and pay no federal income tax for the privilege. They receive food, housing, phones, medical care, and utilities aid, and then they ignore the important issues of the day to vote on the single issue of getting themselves more money. Meanwhile, the working class pays both their own bills and the bills of those who won't become members of the working class. And if we ask any questions, we're not compassionate. We're not Christian. We get criticized for not taking care of someone else's kids, but they themselves are immune from all scrutiny. Above all, we are not angry about paying taxes. Nothing in this episode is about paying less taxes. We all like lower taxes, but that's not what this episode is about. We've seen all the memes where people who don't wanna pay food stamps are stingy. Far from it. I'm proud, blessed, and happy to be able to pay taxes, and I wish everyone the ability to pay as many as I do. I'm only angry about wasting them, about giving them to the undeserving. Compassion for the truly needy is noble, but robbing the middle class to feed the lazy is theft. When a nation treats the consumer of taxes as holier than the producer, it's not feeding the poor, it's starving freedom. So hold everyone accountable. Trust me, they can handle it.