
Originally Posted by
Static_Martyr
So, no true scotsman fallacy? According to your original statement, I'm a bum because I was on food stamps and I "chose to be poor" by doing so.
The magnitude alone isn't an indicator of cause. If the economy is bad (which it is), then it's actually not unreasonable for large numbers of people to need temporary assistance. Anyway, I'm slightly curious what hard data you were basing these numbers of "the VAST majority" on.
Also, you mention a story of one time when you allegedly caught someone committing fraud. Okay. How many times did that happen? Let me guess: "a lot?" No specific numbers? No hard data?
That's actually not true at all. I was required to present documentation to support every claim I made when I applied for food stamps; not only that, we were required to do a job search wherein we had to apply for so many jobs within a 1-month period or be rejected (or, if employed, get our employer to sign a verification of employment form to exempt us from the search), which we did. We were also required to check back in for regular appointments to verify the continuation of our policy or face termination.
If by "easy to defraud" you mean, "easy to lie about," then yes, I'm sure it's easy to tell a lie. However, "easy to lie" and "easy to get away with" are two entirely different concepts. You could easily misrepresent yourself at any one step along the process, but you will almost certainly be caught, given the sheer amount of checks and documentation you have to go through. Most cases of food stamp and welfare fraud are prosecuted. Where do you think the statistics of welfare and FS fraud come from?
[citation needed]
Good. The stigma should be gone; because the stigma exists solely because people are super fucking judgmental of others because they make sweeping assumptions about their past or present employment/efforts based on whether or not they currently receive benefits.
For example; one of my (former) friends works in a bank; she called out one of her customers, publicly, for being on welfare, and asked her where she worked/if she was looking for a job. The woman was curt with her and didn't answer her question, so she assumed that this was because the woman was lazy and didn't have any plans to apply for work. She presented this to me as evidence of this person's laziness and unwillingness to work; I asked her how she knew that the lady had not been recently employed, and she said, "I don't know, I just assumed because she didn't answer me." Never once did she consider that the person might not have answered because she didn't want to be judged by someone with a giant ego who didn't know her.
In other words, 99% of these judgments people make about others are completely unevidenced. They could be right, or they could be wrong, but you can't make a sound judgment about a person's entire life based on the fact that they are on benefits and you don't personally agree with the way they spend their money.
So I guess we should shaft people who need SNAP to feed their children, just to make sure we get those bad bad drug dealers.