The US Department of Agriculture has spent the past week notifying people that the country is (allegedly) overrun by individuals who are fraudulently claiming SNAP benefits, while (allegedly) driving luxury vehicles.
“In just ONE state, 14,000 individuals receiving SNAP benefits were driving LUXURY VEHICLES!” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins posted on X last week. The official USDA account made similar claims, which were then amplified by figures like Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul.
Those numbers are questionable at best. For one thing, the report they come from doesn’t name the state where thousands of people are allegedly buying Ferraris while using government money to buy food. For another, that report doesn’t include any explanation of its methodology.
I know someone on SNAP benefits. She drives a 25 year old Buick Lesabre with over 200,000 miles on it . Technically it’s a “luxury car,” which she got for $800.
Their stats are bullshit, spun in such a way as to churn up resentment towards the poorest , so the wealthiest can bilk more money from the middle.
I drove a '98 Lasabre for most of the 2010s. Absolutely loved it: parts were ready to find, could repair it myself at home, and the dashboard had so many weird sliders and knobs that it felt like piloting a TARDIS.
Anyone enjoying that kind of luxury should be starving to death. It’s just not fair for someone to have both a beautiful, faux-wood paneled dashboard and three meals per day.
A Buick LeSabre was my first car. It was the 1989 model. Red “velvet” interior. That thing was sexy af
Same, we called it the boat and referred to the backseat as the couch. It was defeated by a young sapling in a low-speed head-on collision unfortunately. I wish theyd make something like that again but its probably past its time.
Go after the real welfare queens. The Walton family, Elon Musk, the oil and gas industry. Big corporate farming. Ending subsidies for oil and gas alone would pay for Medicare for all
Businesses not paying workers fair wages like Walmart forcing 1.6 million by themselves to take public assistance like food support is going to effect a ton of people and be a huge draw on the system compared to any other fraud on the system.
26.8% of 41.7 million is 11 million people. How much do you want to bet they can’t find 11 hundred people committing fraud against the system like employers are.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/14/what-the-data-says-about-food-stamps-in-the-us/
Tax payers subsidizing corporations to further exploit tax payers
Ah of course it’s the poor that are ruining your country - that makes sense 🙄
Someone tell these people to shut the fuck up already.
Dude, it seems everything the GOP claims lacks evidence.
Have you seen what the MAGAtards do when confronted by evidence? They say it’s all either fake news or AI. They’re a cult and cults don’t require evidence to maintain their beliefs.
It’s so depressing
My favorite term for this is “a post-truth society”.
Feels like a new dark age.
especially coming from the mouth of the most infamous one, cruz.
The Gang of Pedos has never let something as trivial as evidence guide their world view. Also not big fans of consent.
The Tax Evasion and Avoidance of billionaires is many times the entire budget of this kind of thing.
You could literally make up for 100% fraud in things like food stamp by making somebody like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos pay the same effective tax rate as everybody else.
Even if these claims from the far-right of widespread fraud and abuses in social security were true, they would still be like distracting people from a raging forest fire by waving a sparkler.
We just need to implement something like a 1% wealth tax for any entity (people or businesses) with net assets over say $5M. Having more than that has minimal justified purpose
When I lived in a poor area I saw a ton of luxury vehicles but they were a decade older than most non-luxury cars and were beat to shit. I’d believe the numbers but I don’t think they say what this idiot is implying.
Its demoralizing that this type of messaging resonates with such a large portion of Americans, honestly.
Watch they are going to fight to increase restrictions on SNAP benefit “handouts”, but a ton of rich people fraudulently took out COVID loans, actually bought cars, never paid them back, and there is legit evidence but they were never prosecuted.
The new slogan for America should be: Protect the fellow rich, beat the poor down into dust.
They don’t need fraud, they just change the laws or get courts to approve it.
plus all the TAX breaks they get from hiring people.
I feel like “luxury vehicles” is the same buzzword as “assault weapons.” A meaningless buzzword to evoke emotion.
What’s a “luxury vehicle?” What’s the cutoff? Are they in a nicer Honda or a Lotus? Seeing as how this country’s citizens are famously one illness or ouchie away from financial ruin, did they purchase this vehicle before or after needing assistance? Are they still making payments or is it paid off?
Facts and hard criteria or GTFO with this nonsense.
It’s literally just trying to goad the struggling to pull the rug from the destitute, while the rich pop their champaign and laugh. It’s class warfare rhetoric to take the heat off the Epstein class, and anybody falling for it is a damned fool.
they were using “entitlements” before.
It also doesn’t define “LUXURY VEHICLE”
The banged up crossover SUV that came with CarPlay and OnStar so your insurance and the government can track your every move could be considered a LUXURY because CONNECTIVITY
Guys, poor people are forced to buy the only things we’ll sell to them. How come they never try not being poor? Lazy!
I have a 2008 Infiniti. It’s a luxury vehicle that I paid $5k for and runs like it’s been smoking cigarettes the past 20 years.
My uncle bought a Rolls Royce for $14k CDN. It’s a 1989 Rolls, but it’s still a “luxury” vehicle.
I’ve known several people with a habit of buying old Volvos. Probably a luxury car …… but like 20 years old
There’s also no knowing what folks had when the floor fell out from under them. That Escalade might have been half paid off when they lost their source of income. Conservatives’ve been on this same bullshit for decades.
“He obviously took advantage of the system or did something illegal like selling drugs. Everyone knows it’s systematically impossible for a minority to get ahead on their own”
Maybe a little too on the nose, but all their arguments are some variation of that.
Look over there at the guy stealing bread for his family, no mind the BILLIONS of dollars being stolen by this admin every week. God i hate the GOP.
A remix of the old welfare queen lie. smh. Some guy probably used his mom’s food stamps card to get fast food once and they’re going to make it seem like a billion dollars in theft.
The Welfare Queen was a real person best known by the name Linda Taylor but she was uniquely talented at defrauding the government and she went to prison in 1978 for welfare fraud.
I’m aware.
I’m also aware that she defrauded the government something like $10,000, was caught almost immediately, and as you said, punished. Reagan made her out to be a crime lord stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Real or not, the lie is the gross misrepresentation of who and what she was to the american people, used as a justification to cut social aid programs for millions in need.
source?
sure.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6eFBOBgRrdiSCrCwaxC25o
There you go. The dollop gives all their sources at the end each episode and posts a list for their audience. in fact…
Main
· Levin, Josh. “The Welfare Queen: In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan villainized a Chicago woman for bilking the government. Her other sins—including possible kidnappings and murders—were far worse. Slate. (Dec. 19 2013) http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2013/12/linda_taylor_welfare_queen_ronald_reagan_made_her_a_notorious_american_villain.html Josh Levin’s story has been expanded into a book, The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/031651330X/?tag=slatmaga-20 as well as a podcast miniseries: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/05/the-queen-linda-taylor-welfare-reagan-podcast.html
Other
· Black, Rachel, Aleta Sprague, and the New America Weekly. “The ‘Welfare Queen’ Is a Lie: Programs that should be crafted around people’s needs are instead designed to deal with a problem that doesn’t exist.” The Atlantic. (September 28, 2016) · https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/welfare-queen-myth/501470/
· Bazelon, Emily, John Dickerson, and David Plotz. “The ‘You’ll Drag Me Out of the Supreme Court in a Pine Box’ Gabfest” Gabfest. [podcast] (December 20, 2013) http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gabfest/2013/12/the_gabfest_on_judge_richard_leon_s_nsa_ruling_ruth_bader_ginsburg_s_refusal.html
All the sources used for a goofy little history podcast.
Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor
There’s her wiki too. Taylor was a spectacle even back then, with the tabloids reporting she stole anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000. It was actually about $8,000. She was a petty criminal who got caught pretty much every time and was arrested for her crimes. By the time Reagan was talking about her, that number had been further inflated (lied about) to be around $100,000, but regardless, she was cooked.
thanks for the sources and podcast link!
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You simply can’t it won’t work. POS systems cannot be configured to do this.
I haven’t had a food card for a bit. It was just a prepaid card. I don’t really know what small and insignificant way it’s used that these fucks would complain about but I just made an example off the top of my head.
It’s prepaid with a Visa logo or something like that but it won’t work on anything you are not supposed to buy.
I think some people get other money loaded on it that’s not for food. Like mothers buying school supplies or clothing.
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