New York food stamps recipients are using welfare funds to ship food to relatives in Caribbean countries.
Jamaica, Dominican Republic and Haiti are enjoying groceries from food stamps of relatives living in the United States, according to the New York Post. The article reported welfare recipients are using taxpayers funded benefits to buy groceries and package them in giant barrels and ship them overseas.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Calo Institute, called it just another example of welfare abuse.
"I don't want food stamp police to see what people do with their rice and beans, but it's wrong," Tanner told the Post. "The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don't have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid."
The practice is common of those that hold Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards but it's against the $66 billion welfare program for impoverished Americans. The United States spent $552.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean last fiscal year, according to the Post.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food and Nutrition Service told the Post that states should intervene if people are caught shipping nonperishable's aboard.
"Everybody does it," a worker at an Associated Supermarket in Prospect Leffests, Gardens, Brooklyn told the Post. "They pay for it any way they can. A lot of people pay with EBT.
Customers pay for their barrels with cash and filled with $500 to $2,000 worth of rice, beans, pasta, canned milked and sausages. According to the Post, Workers at the Pioneer Supermarket on Parkside Avenue and the Key Food on Flatbush Avenue confirmed the practice.
