Justice For Looters And Moochers

Every once in a while it is nice to see justice served where justice is overdue. Such is the case with the looters and moochers who robbed the grocery shelves in Louisiana back in October when there was a computer outage which keeps track of the Electronic Benefits Transfer accounts. That is also known affectionately as the SNAP program or food stamps. I'm sure that the perpetrators who committed the outright theft are the low information voter types who didn't realize that technology will still keep track of such attempts to purchase and record the actual purchases. Whoops!

There is no excuse for people who are being provided assistance to abuse, steal and commit robbery from the merchants who are kind enough to accept EBT. We do know though that our society has a subset of low life individuals who are like cock roaches after anything they think is free. The other thing that was glaring in this instance is how fast news travels that there is an opportunity to be dishonest. Something to think about.

Officials in Louisiana, including Governor Jindal, have decided to make an example out of the low life types who looted and pillaged the stores involved in their state.

We're not talking small scale insufficient funds here. There were over 12,000 in Louisiana alone that lacked sufficient funds on their cards to purchase what they bought. Maybe a better word would be "stole." When the system came back on line retailers were able to process the purchases and BINGO. Louisiana wasn't by their little lonesome either. There were a minimum of 17 other states who were affected by the outage. They need to take action too and not allow such abusive behavior to occur on our tax dollars. So down the system went and shopping carts were filled to overflowing when the word spread and it spread like wild fire.

Governor Jindal's directive seems fair enough. Abusers will lose their benefits for either one or two years and others will be penalized permanently. The punishments will be meted out by how many violations they have on record. The worst offenders will be dealt with first and so on down the line. The state's Department of Children and Family Services will administer the justice. It is unfortunate that many children may be caught up in the net of adult stupidity but theft and fraud is inexcusable.

The secretary of the department had this to say, "“We must protect the program for those who receive and use their benefits appropriately according to the law. We are looking at each case individually, addressing those recipients who are suspected of misrepresenting their eligibility for benefits or defrauding the system.” Nice to see a call for action be acted upon rather than swept under the carpet as usual.

The message needs to be sent to those who abuse the rest of us. It isn't reasonable for those retailers who were victimized to suffer the loss. The losses get passed onto the rest of us who are paying customers. There is NO free lunch and that message needs to be hammered home if need be. The pillagers took advantage of the situation and their greed was a shining example of some of the flaws in our welfare system.

Here's what appeared in one article by The Advocate:

"When the system goes down, retailers are supposed to limit food stamp recipients to $50 in groceries. Some retailers simply turned away food stamp recipients. Others allowed them to buy as much as they wanted and stored the transactions to process when the system rebooted. The retailers that ignored the emergency protocol lost countless dollars.

In Springhill, police detained a woman who pushed a cart with $700 in groceries up to a cash register despite having less than 50 cents on her food stamp card. Wal-Mart instructed police to release the woman without citing her."

Hopefully officials in the other states where the abuse took place will follow the lead of Governor Jindal and the state of Louisiana. It's time to start raising the bar on welfare recipients instead of lowering it as Obama has seen fit to do.

We, as a nation, need to start holding people accountable for their actions. The time to look the other way and permissiveness needs to cease to be. How do you teach personal responsibility without walking the walk? I believe that you teach a man how to fish, not to endlessly give him the fish. Many have now come to expect just that throughout our society.

We seem to have drifted to becoming a nation of moochers electing looters to steal from the producers. When moochers and looters are running any country that country is in dire straits indeed.

Vote It," "Like" It, "Tweet" It, "Pin " It, "Share It" With Your Followers. Time to let em read it and keep reading it.

As Always,

The Frog Prince