Inside the shadowy think tank pushing to kick 3.1 million people off food stamps

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

In December, the Foundation for Government Accountability hosted public officials from across the country in Orlando, Florida. The scene: Walt Disney World’s Swan and Dolphin Resort, an ocean-themed oasis with palatial fountains next to a lake lined with palm trees.

The FGA, a right-leaning think tank based in Naples, Florida, paid travel and lodging expenses for many of the conservative leaders in attendance, including Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin and three White House aides.

Guests heard presentations such as “Stop the Scam: The Reality of Food Stamp Fraud.” Between sessions, the foundation treated attendees to catered desserts and a fireworks display from a terrace featuring a faux Eiffel Tower overlooking the Epcot World Showcase Lagoon, according to invitations obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through open-records requests.

The FGA aimed to send decision-makers back to their respective states, or the nation’s capital, with fresh zeal to restrict access to public assistance programs designed for low-income people, including Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program. The association even provided road maps for achieving this goal in the form of model legislation — suggested wording for laws and regulations that could serve as a template for like-minded policymakers.

While the public officials were being pampered in Florida, hundreds of thousands of people on the SNAP rolls in West Virginia were wondering how they would feed their families. A month after the FGA’s Disney gala, dozens of them gathered in a hallway at the First Presbyterian Church in Charleston, the state capital, to wait in line for their allotment at the food pantry hosted there so they could supplement their SNAP budgets — at most $192 per month for a single person.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/inside-the-shadowy-think-tank-pushing-to-kick-31-million-people-off-food-stamps/ar-AAGNuhN?li=BBnbfcN

They sound like a bunch of bloated pigs as far as I'm concerned.

[snowybirdie]

1. Naples Florida

Is one of the wealthiest areas in the USA. Seaside mansions regularly sell in the Tens of Millions. Of course these folks want to make sure the little people don't cheat them.

[virgogal]

2. Aaaargh,I am waiting to see if I'm accepted..applied 3 weeks ago.

[Ohiogal]

3. The nerve of those poor people

Trying to scam those billionaires out of their money so they can receive the pittance that food stamps provide.

Do they not realize that the majority of food stamp recipients are children and the elderly?

[Newest Reality]

4. Obviously

you could sum up the paradigm with:

Those that have too much should and will get more. Those that don't have enough deserve to have less of everything and/or nothing at all.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the sucking sound of inequity, and if you look, you can see a hideous beast of disproportional wealth rising up as it feasts upon what we have left. It's becoming a real monster.

In contrast to that shit-tank's, (thinking, really?) let's remember that there is socialism for the certain class and group here. The biggest recipients of welfare in America, are major corporations, not to mention their propensity to pay little or no taxes to contribute to this society and the infrastructure we paid for and provide.

Oh, but wait, there's more. What are corporations to do when we subsidize their underpaid workers and a livable wage is becoming a rare thing? Since a large proportion of SNAP recipients are the working poor and roughly half of them are children of said and people in poverty, will physically weak and starving workers be just collateral damage to this idiotic idea? Will the outcome of children who are literally starving to death in growing numbers be acceptable then?

Then, let's keep in mind that money is no object for our Offense Department, considering the size of the budget that goes to that one aspect of our country.

Then, hey, let's drag out the huge deficit and wag that in people's faces as an incentive to cut, cut, cut what more and more Americans desperately require to continue to survive.

Watch for more, well paid for power tools for gross inequity from the minions of the elite in their bastions of incredible luxury and be ready to surrender what you might have.

In other words, that campaign is a total scam. Stop that scam!

[bigbrother05]

5. They neglect to mention that SNAP is a farm commodities support program

The Gov't used to buy directly from the farmers to support crop prices, then distributed the food to the poor.

Started as a Depression era program and operated that way for decades until the wholesale/retail chain complained that the Gov't was competing with their business model. Thus Food Stamps and WIC were born to channel those customers into the commercial sector.

Now, SNAP and WIC recipients make a handy target for the White Wing and if this happens along with the Trump Tariffs, the American Farmer is well and truly screwn.

[Tanuki]

6. FGA CEO Bragdon is a Paul LePage protege, originally from Maine, and FGA is heavily subsidized by

the usual libertarian U.S.oligarchs. More about the organization here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/05/18/theyre-the-think-tank-pushing-for-welfare-work-requirements-republicans-say-theyre-experts-economists-call-it-junk-science/?noredirect

..."Over a decade in and around the Maine statehouse, Bragdon and a cohort of young conservatives gained a reputation for outraging the other side of the aisle. Under LePage, Maine placed a five-year time limit on cash welfare benefits and reinstated full SNAP work requirements for able-bodied adults.

“I remember them as a pack of inexperienced, activist right-wingers that went crazy on welfare reform,” said Cynthia Dill, a former liberal state senator who clashed with Bragdon and other future FGA staffers. “It galled me that they had no expertise whatsoever in health and human services but were appointed to places of power by the LePage administration.”

Since leaving Maine, Bragdon has sought to export many of the state’s policies. The FGA developed model state legislation, dubbed the HOPE Act, which bars states from seeking federal waivers from SNAP’s work rules. The bill has been introduced in 16 states since 2016 and passed in Kansas, Mississippi and Wisconsin. The FGA says elements of the bill have been adopted in 28 states.
......
The group has also circulated polling numbers suggesting that almost all Americans support stricter work requirements, but those figures have been faulted by observers like Peter Germanis, a conservative economist who served in the Reagan and Bush administrations, for oversimplifying public opinion and the available evidence.

“Work requirements should be based on credible evidence and attention to policy details — the exact opposite of what FGA produces,” Germanis tweeted May 17. “Sad that so many politicians fall for their ‘junk science.’ ”....(more)

[blogslut]

9. Here's the Sourcewatch page

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_Government_Accountability

[Champp]

7. Republicans feed their faces with gourmet desserts,

while pissing on hungry Americans who need food stamps.

There's your Republican party. Now to dig deeper into taxpayer pockets for more tax breaks for the wealthy, and to throw more of our tax dollars at more luxury golf excursions for their billionaire Republican President.

[TheRealNorth]

10. The Republicans have to con the middle class

That the poor is stealing their lollipop, and not the 1%.

[spanone]

8. An administration that vows to promote cruelty wherever possible.

[CrispyQ]

11. Our government has been hijacked by people who want it to serve only them.

Mean-spirited, hateful people full of themselves.