Here is one more case* of a Middle Easterner running a convenience store and ripping off the US taxpayer, but to hear Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture say food stamp transactions stimulate the economy, maybe we should be thanking this guy for helping pour more cash into the economy!
Providence (AP) – A former 7-Eleven franchisee in Rhode Island has been accused of taking food stamp benefits for cash at his Providence convenience store.
A complaint unsealed on Friday in U.S. District Court in Providence says 43-year-old Syed Shah [not named Mohammed this time!] charged an undercover investigator $60 in food stamps for $40 in cash. The complaint does not disclose how much investigators believe Shah fraudulently pocketed in food stamp benefits. Investigators say food stamp redemptions at his store skyrocketed from $228,000 in 2008 to nearly $1 million last year.
[….]
Authorities say the average monthly food stamp redemption at Shah’s store was $69,025, compared with a combined monthly redemption average of $8,770 at the other five 7-Eleven franchises in the area.
Now here is Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture telling us how Food Stamps stimulate the economy through the redistribution of wealth—your wealth!
I should point out, when you talk about the SNAP program or the foot stamp program, you have to recognize that it’s also an economic stimulus. Every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy in terms of economic activity. If people are able to buy a little more in the grocery store, someone has to stock it, package it, shelve it, process it, ship it. All of those are jobs. It’s the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.”
Of course it’s entirely possible that Shah was redistributing your wealth and stimulating the economy of some Middle Eastern country.
* For new readers, we have written dozens of stories about ‘food stamp fraud’—simply type those three words into our search function for our archive on the subject. I continue to wait for a real live investigative reporter to pull all this fraud together into a comprehensive investigation.