Maybe you were innocent enough to be shocked upon learning that the terrorist Tsarnaev family had EBT cards?
Well, meet Edwin Alemany of Boston, another gratitude-challenged recipient of largess from the taxpayer.
Mr. Alemany, who has racked up ten convictions at the ripe old age of 28,has an EBT card.
Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr isn’t even shocked. The story is so delicious that I can't resist quoting at length. Carr writes:
Edwin Alemany is a career criminal and he had an EBT card.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The Mass. Republican Party got it right in a tweet yesterday. Not everyone with an EBT card is a criminal, but it appears that every criminal has an EBT card.
Of course Gov. Deval Patrick would dismiss this as just another “anecdote.”
Please don’t ask why the state is supporting a guy who has 10 convictions at age 28, not to mention 52 citations on his CORI record. His welfare records are sealed, you understand. Alemany has his rights, after all. If you work for the state or the city, your salary is public record. If you live off the state, nobody can find out how much you’re collecting, unless you get lugged selling your EBT card.
This happened last October. Drug cops were patrolling the person-of-interest’s home, the Old Colony projects, when they spotted him leaning into a car and handing something to the driver. The cops moved in.
“The operator stated that the transaction was not a drug deal,” the cops wrote, “and further volunteered that he had purchased an EBT card from the white Hispanic male for $100.”
Another one of those white Hispanic males! That day he was selling a SNAP card — food stamps. The cops said “the EBT card was seized pending further investigation.”
How dare the cops relieve him of his EBT card? Now that was a hate crime.
We’ve already blogged this week on the AARP’s campaign to get more people on food stamps and on the food stamps black market that has developed in New York. The New York food fraudsters sell EBT-bought food in Latin America.
Stories such as these indicate that too many of the 47 million food stamp recipients in the U.S. aren't—not to put too fine a point on it—hungry.
The food stamp program must be either drastically reformed or abolished. Of course, the Democrats would cry bloody murder and accuse the reformers of trying to starve poor people.
Democrats in Congress are largely interested in making food stamps more attractive to people. Congress and celebrities have been taking the Food Stamp Challenge, designed to show how stingy we taxayers are. The idea is to eat on $4.50 a day. The monthly benefit for one person on food stamps is $133, which breaks down to $4.50 a day. The monthly benefits for an entire family, however, can be significantly more. A family of four, for example, would receive $688 a month.
Aren't we mean expecting somebody to eat on $4.50 a day?
If you were really hungry, however, you’d be glad to have that $4.50. .
If you were really hungry, you’d be able to buy lentils or some other healthy but inexpensive foodstuffs.
If you were really hungry, you might think twice about sneering at what Congress says is too paltry amount.
If you were really hungry.
Being hungry should be the sine qua non for receiving food stamps.
Yes, I am just that mean.