Worlds Apart

Trey Smith

Like millions upon millions of my fellow Americans, I receive Food Stamps each month to help our family meet its nutritional needs. Each month the Community Services office sends me notification of how much we will receive for the subsequent month. As part of the form letter, there is a section that warns Food Stamp recipients of the dangers of committing fraud.

What could happen if we are found to be defrauding the government of a few dollars here and there? It reads, in part,

Disqualified and lose your benefits for at least one year and up to a lifetime. The disqualification continues even If you move to another state.

Think about that for a minute. If I report that our income is $1400/month when it's genuinely $1600/month, at the very least, I will lose the chance to receive Food Stamps for a minimum of one year!

The same sort of protocol exists for my Supplementary Security Income (SSI). Last year -- due to a computation error BY the government itself -- I was overpaid by a few hundred dollars. While I didn't have to worry about losing my benefits for a specified period of time, I did have to repay every penny of the overpayment over the course of several months through sizable reductions in what I was to receive.

So, it would seem that government is very keen on not being defrauded AND not overpaying recipients. I have no problem with these aims; it's makes good business sense to combat such things.

My problem with this setup is that it generally seems to apply SOLELY to poor people, not major corporations. If you're a person barely scraping by, the government will come after you with guns a blazing IF they think you've cheated them out of a few dollars. Cheat them out of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars and they don't seem to have the same fervor!!

Over the last decade, it has been found that numerous defense contractors (like Halliburton, BlackWater, etc.) billed the government for services they didn't perform or overcharged by astronomical sums, yet they continue to be awarded new contracts as if everything is square. Sometimes these companies must pay a meager fine and sometimes they aren't penalized at all! I don't think I have ever heard of a case in which one of these corporations was forced to pay back the amount they overcharged.

This is an example of one of the issues the Occupy movement is so riled up about. There are two sets of rules in this nation: one for the 99 percent and another for the 1 percent.

And these two sets of rules are worlds apart.