The EBT Scam Just Went From Bad To Worse

I have to admit that I’ve genuinely become interested in seeing how Democrats plan to defend the food stamp program, which is about to run out of money because of the government shutdown. American taxpayers are being forced to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on subsidizing other people’s groceries, which substantially raises the prices of groceries for everyone. And we the massive number of people who receive these subsidies — 45 million people, or 1 in 8 Americans — clearly don’t need them, for the most part.

According to the Wall Street Journal — and I promise I’m not making this statistic up — roughly three-quarters of adult food-stamp beneficiaries are overweight or obese. Three quarters of them. And these people are not particularly sympathetic, either. Half of them are on TikTok at the moment — BMI north of 40, smoke detector ringing off the hook, sass off the charts — and they’re threatening to rob their local grocery store the moment food stamps are cut off.

So if you’re the Democratic Party, how do you defend any of this?

How do you argue, with a straight face, that Americans should be forced to continue paying for other people’s food stamps?

Well, it took a few weeks, but we finally have our answer, straight from Tim Walz himself.

Here’s what Tim wrote on social media the other day:

Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity. It’s not about the money, Trump just wants Americans to go hungry.

This is the argument. This is the best Democrats could come up with. So let’s give Tim Walz the benefit of the doubt. Let’s really, really think about this. “Every $1 invested in SNAP generates $1.80 in economic activity.” What does that mean, exactly? How would that even be possible? How can you turn $1.00 into $1.80, just by taking it from one person, and giving it to someone else? And if this trick actually works, then why don’t we invest 100% of the U.S. budget into food stamps? We’d double our money, overnight! Seems like a fantastic idea.

The trick, of course, is that you have to parse what Tim Walz is saying very carefully. He’s not saying he can turn $1.00 into $1.80 with the SNAP program. Instead, he’s saying that every $1.00 in SNAP generates $1.80 in “economic activity.”

So here’s one way to explain what this term means. I saw this analogy making the rounds on social media, and it describes the sleight of hand very well. It was posted by a guy named Lee, though I think it’s been circulating around on the internet for a while. Here’s how it goes: Let’s say you have two economists walking in the woods. The first economist says to the second economist, “I’ll pay you $100 to eat this pile of manure.” And the second economist says, sure. And he eats the manure and takes the $100. Then, a few minutes later, the second economist makes the same offer. He says to the first economist, “I’ll give you the $100 back, if you eat this new pile of manure.” And then the first economist accepts, and gets his $100 back. In this scenario, of course, the economists have not created any new value. Each of them has eaten manure, in exchange for nothing. They’ve completely wasted their time, in addition to contracting E-Coli. And yet — these two economists have also increased the GDP by $200. They’ve engaged in $200 worth of “economic activity,” because “economic activity” is simply a measure of how often money changes hands. It’s not a measure of value creation.

Democrats are pushing this absurd talking point about how SNAP creates “economic activity” because they want to confuse people about the reality of what’s happening, which is that we’re being defrauded on a massive scale.

And it doesn’t require any kind of deep investigative reporting to realize this. You can just go on Amazon.com. Look for items that are SNAP/EBT eligible.

You can get Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pies using your EBT card. You can get giant bags of M&M’s, Snickers, and Twix candy bars.

You can pick up family-size packs of Gushers and double-stuff Oreos and various other cookies, including Chip’s Ahoy.

You can even get a massive $80 vat of “double chocolate” Whey protein powder on SNAP, along with your Nespresso capsules.

Grey Poupon is also on the table, of course. That goes without saying. Without your Grey Poupon, you might as well starve to death. I’ll never forget the story of the guy who was stranded in the desert and starved to death in agony. He had a whole cooler of food with him, but he ran out of Dijon mustard. What good is the food without the mustard? So lives are really at stake here.

But don’t stop there. Don’t stop with the mustard. You can also get a $110 “California Ultimate Meat and Cheese Gift Crate” with your SNAP benefits.

Here’s the product description on that one.

Send a crate fully loaded with delicious flavors for a charcuterie night experience. Summer sausage and salami complement the savory variety of cheeses and mustard along with the crunch of two types of crackers and nuts. A drizzle of vinegar and olive oil help create a variety of delicious flavor combinations. They’ll finish on a sweet note with dried fruits.

To put this into perspective, I would not — with my current income — ever spend 110 dollars on a crate of meat and cheese. That would be outside of my budget, and you would think that my budget would be substantially larger than the budget of someone on EBT. Now, it doesn’t need to be said, but none of this should be legal. It probably isn’t legal, if we’re being honest. To the extent it should exist at all, SNAP should cover the basics — the cheap staples that are necessary to keep someone alive. I’m talking about rice, beans, potatoes, and that’s basically it. Each person needs something like $50 a month. SNAP should not cover bodybuilding supplements. It should not cover candy or coffee. But that’s exactly how many SNAP recipients are spending your money. Take a look at this chart from USDA — it’s one of the few pieces of data we have from the government, as it relates to food stamp spending.

The chart shows how SNAP recipients spend their money (in yellow) and how normal households spend their food budget (in blue), as a percent of their overall food budget. There are entire categories on this chart that shouldn’t exist for SNAP recipients. For example, 9.25% of food expenditures in SNAP households go to “sweetened beverages” (like Coke and Pepsi), compared to only 7% in normal households. Meanwhile, 6.9% of the budget in SNAP households goes to “prepared desserts,” compared to 6.41% in normal households. In other words, SNAP households are spending more money on non-essential food purchases, as compared to households that actually pay for their own groceries. Let me say that again in case you missed it: EBT recipients are spending *more money* on non-essential food purchases the households that pay for their own groceries. The people who are funding the food stamp program are living more modestly, when it comes to grocery purchases, than the people who are on the food stamp program. 

This is completely inverted and upside down and insane. And it’s exactly the result we should expect. When people are spending someone else’s money, and they don’t need it, they tend to spring for unnecessary purchases. In fact, they apparently tend to spring for purchases that are actively harmful to their health, like “prepared desserts.” 

And by the way, it’s not a remotely compelling argument to say that we need to spend a lot of money on SNAP for the benefit of children. If anything, SNAP benefits are hurting children.

Take a look at this chart:

 

It shows child obesity rates in the US by family income level. What do you notice? The demographic that receives the most food stamps just so happens to have the highest child obesity rate, by a significant margin. Who could’ve seen that coming? We’re not actually improving the lives of children.

Instead, we’re putting money into the very large pockets of women like this. Watch:

Unemployed mother of 7 and TikTok story time creator says “be mad, stay mad” over her collecting $3,000 a month in EBT.

“Does it make you mad that the government is feeding my children?” pic.twitter.com/Lv0Oh25w5r

— EBT of TikTok (@EBTofTikTok) October 28, 2025

Credit: @EBTofTikTok/X.com

So she’s making $3,000 a month — $36,000 a year — for doing nothing. And she’s mocking people for noticing how absurd this is. There are millions of people in this country who make $36,000 a year for a full-time job that they work 8 hours a day. And those people are being taxed on every paycheck, and their money is going to obese welfare queens like this. 

She’s obviously able to afford a modern phone and a car, so that she can shoot videos complaining about how oppressed she is. And of course, she’s obviously eating quite well. So why exactly are we allowing people like this to collect thousands of dollars a month? Why don’t we have regular weigh-ins, to make sure that food stamp recipients actually need food? Why don’t we drug test these people, and check their social media feeds to see if they’re gloating about their EBT balances? We do that in bankruptcy court. If you declare bankruptcy, and then you post a video where you’re on a yacht or something, they’re going to ask you to explain yourself. It happened to 50 Cent. And it should happen to every single one of these people.

But it hasn’t happened. And there’s a very simple reason why it hasn’t happened. Yes, many of these people vote Democrat, and it’s true that the Democrat Party wants to buy their votes by stealing your money and handing it to them. But the food stamp program isn’t simply a creation of the Democrat Party. Many Republican administrations have supported it as well. So there’s bipartisan support for wasting your money like this.

That’s because some of the biggest business interests in this country — as well as several foreign governments — are essentially dependent on the food stamp program. Something like 25% of all food stamp spending — we’re talking about billions of dollars every month — goes to Walmart. Obviously, Amazon takes a large chunk too, which is why “SNAP-eligible” items are all over their website. As I mentioned earlier, roughly 10% of food stamp spending goes to “sweetened beverages” like Coke, which has launched a very aggressive lobbying campaign to keep this money. (You might remember that, last year, big soda companies were linked to a campaign to pay conservative influencers on X, in exchange for posts that said soda purchases should remain SNAP-eligible).

In other words, SNAP isn’t just a form of welfare that’s mainly intended for Democrat voters. It’s also a form of corporate welfare. If you pay taxes, you’re contributing to the profits of Walmart, Amazon and Coke, whether you want to or not. You’re also contributing to the GDP of several foreign nations, through remittances. Watch:

59% of illegal immigrants are receiving food stamps..

This is outrageous. pic.twitter.com/JMnfhxlAPL

— American AF 🇺🇸 (@iAnonPatriot) October 28, 2025

Credit: @iAnonPatriot/X.com

So well over half of illegal aliens are receiving food stamps, as well as cash for low-income households. As we just established, they don’t really need this money. Even if they did, they still shouldn’t receive it. They don’t belong in the country. But regardless, if they don’t need the money, what are they doing with it? They’re buying food to ship back home — either to family members, or to sell on the black market. This is from the New York Post.

Food-stamp fraud in New York has turned into foreign aid — to black-market profiteers in the Dominican Republic. … Last week, the Post found two people hawking barrels of American products for a profit on the streets of Santiago. ‘It’s a really easy way to make money, and it doesn’t cost me anything,’ a seller named Maria-Teresa said Friday. The 47-year-old Bronx native told The Post she scalps barrels of Frosted Flakes and baby formula bought with welfare money in the United States. … She even takes her customers’ requests for hot-ticket items. Her best-sellers include a 19-ounce box of Frosted Flakes, which goes for $6.50 at Dominican supermarkets. She sells it for $2 less — after her sister buys it on sale for $2.99. But because the sister uses her EBT card, she actually pays nothing — taxpayers foot the $2.99.

They run this scam with other items too, including baby formula and Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. But it actually gets worse, as you continue reading.

The food-stamp fraud doesn’t stop there. The woman said her sister has Bronx grocery stores ring up bogus $250 transactions with her EBT card. In exchange, the stores hand her $200 cash and pocket the rest. No goods are exchanged. Instead, Maria-Teresa’s sister sends the money to Santiago — when she’s not spending it on liquor or other nonfood items. “We do it all the time, and a lot of people do this,” Maria-Teresa said. “It’s a way of laundering money, but it’s easier because it’s free.”

Ask anyone who works in a grocery store, and you’ll hear dozens of stories like this. I saw a post from someone in Hawaii who says that, on the first day of the month, EBT recipients buy caseloads of SPAM. They sell the spam to street vendors at a 50% discount, then they use the proceeds for drugs and alcohol. So if you’re an actual customer, and you’re looking for spam on the shelves, you’re out of luck — because you’ve paid for criminals to clear out the shelves and buy drugs with it.

A system this easy to defraud — which was designed to be defrauded — should be scaled back drastically, not expanded. But the Biden administration expanded it.

Was SNAP / Food Stamps massively expanded during COVID and then never brought back down to where it was before that?

Seems like it could easily be cut by 1/3 or so. Probably more.

There were 17 million on food stamps in 2000, now there are 43 million. Reduce eligibility. pic.twitter.com/OQGBz2gWwT

— Wall Street Mav (@WallStreetMav) October 29, 2025

Credit: @WallStreetMav/X.com

In fact, as you can see, food stamp spending has doubled since 2019. And this isn’t just COVID-related. The numbers have remained high, long after the lockdowns ended. 

That’s because, in this same period, the Biden administration imported millions of illegal aliens. And it simply does not matter that, technically, these people shouldn’t receive food stamps under the law. They’re not even supposed to be inside this country, under the law. But they are. And once they get here, states like California give them food stamps. The feds give them food stamps. And their anchor babies get food stamps, too. They even get a nice little EBT card, so they don’t seem remotely conspicuous or shameful as they defraud the American taxpayer. Coke wins. Walmart wins. Democrats win. Meanwhile, you’re taxed more, and your groceries become more expensive.

After yesterday’s show, I saw some comments about legitimate instances where SNAP payments are reasonable. We’re talking about families where the breadwinner has suffered a horrible accident, or something like that. And it makes sense, in those very specific circumstances, to ensure that people don’t have to worry about their food budget. But the vast majority of the 45 million people on food stamps — yes, 45 million — are not in that boat. 

Yesterday, to make that point, I played a bunch of TikTok videos from SNAP recipients, in which they threatened to rob grocery stores and kill white people if their welfare is cut off. I’m not going to play another 20 videos like that, although I could easily do it. It’s just too depressing. But I did want to play one more, because this video summarizes the argument against food stamps better than I ever could. This is a woman who shows off all the items she stole, because her food stamps were cut off. And then, while she’s still in the parking lot of the store she robbed, she says her actions were justified because white people do the same thing. Watch:

Credit: EBTofTikTok/X.com (combined clips)

Of course, just from a purely statistical perspective, the odds are pretty low that “the white man” taught this woman how to steal from the grocery store so that she can make “stuffed salmon” and “short ribs.” We don’t need to bust out the per capita statistics on this one.

But there is some irony here. This horrible woman, who’s bragging about committing robbery on a livestream, is making the exact same argument that you’ll hear from Coke’s lobbyists. If you try to cut off SNAP benefits, they’ll call you racist. They’ll tell you that “racial equity” demands that you pay taxes that fund the SNAP program.

This is a post you may have seen from Calley Means, who used to work in this industry.

Early in my career, I consulted for Coke to ensure sugar taxes failed and soda was included in food stamp funding.

I say Coke’s policies are evil because I saw inside the room.

The first step in playbook was paying the NAACP + other civil rights groups to call opponents racist

— Calley Means (@calleymeans) January 2, 2023

Credit: @calleymeans/X.com

For many years in this country, this has been an effective strategy. To cover up vast fraud and abuse, just defame your critics as racist. It worked for BLM. It worked for Henry Rogers, aka “Ibram X Kendi.” Coke — and many food stamp recipients — are simply following the same script. And why wouldn’t they? It’s worked out pretty well for them, up to this point. Like a Netflix subscription that you forget to cancel, taxpayers have continued to pay into the SNAP program without noticing what’s going on.

The ongoing government shutdown has finally drawn attention to the scale of this fraud. It has exposed a vast network of criminal activity that needs to be shut down. Just for starters, as the attorney Mike Davis has pointed out, it’s illegal under federal law to provide financial assistance to illegal aliens. It’s also illegal to rob stores, and then brag about it on TikTok. At a minimum, we should start there. Arrest these criminals. Prosecute the state officials who are paying out benefits to illegal aliens — who, by the way, typically receive Medicaid funding, as well as other welfare benefits. And then, once we’re done with that, we need drug testing and weight testing for anyone receiving SNAP. We need a system that doesn’t subsidize the grocery bills of 45 million people, for the indefinite future, with no time limits or restrictions.

Beyond that point, if the food stamp program is going to continue to exist at all, it needs to have standards. It needs to have a reason to exist. Someone needs to be able to explain, in a coherent fashion, why this spending is necessary. Democrats have had several days to give us an explanation. They’ve failed. In fact, they’ve essentially admitted it’s a shell game that’s rife with fraud. They’ve admitted that they’re just redistributing money — or creating “economic activity,” as Tim Walz put it. For the benefit of every taxpayer — and the millions of obese, profoundly ungrateful people they’re feeding — we should end this particular “economic activity.” In its place, we should encourage food stamp recipients to engage in some *actual* activity, like going for a walk around the block. We should hold them to some standards. That will be a big adjustment, no doubt. But one TikTok video and Tim Walz tweet at a time, Democrats — of all people — are making a very compelling case that it’s a change we need to make.