Obama Administration Promotes Dependence On Welfare And Food Stamps: A Bigger Priority Than Public Safety?

While the Obama administration left the Mexican government completely in the dark about Operation Fast and Furious (which sent guns to Mexican drug cartels), provoking outrage in Mexico, it did have time for at least 30 meetings with the Mexican government in its efforts to promote food-stamp use among previously self-reliant Mexican immigrants. The Obama administration has illegally paid out billions of dollars in tax credits to undocumented immigrants for relatives back in Mexico, promoting rampant tax fraud, even as it has made it much harder for hard-working immigrants to work legally in this country.

Record numbers of Americans are now on food stamps, food stamp fraud has risen into the billions, and even wealthy people have become eligible for food stamps in some states as the government rewards states for expanding eligibility to people who don’t need them. (Meanwhile, as James Bovard noted in The Wall Street Journal, “The Obama Administration is . . . cracking down on state governments’ antifraud measures.”)

The Obama administration also claimed the authority to waive the legally-unwaivable work requirements in the 1996 welfare reform law, drawing criticism from welfare experts like Robert Rector, an architect of the 1996 welfare-reform law, and the editorial boards of the The Wall Street Journal (see here) and Richmond Times-Dispatch (see here, here, here, and here).