The Real Welfare Queens
The Gist
70% of SNAP recipients work full-time. The real welfare queens are the corporations whose payrolls you’re subsidizing.
Last month, as 42 million Americans faced losing their food assistance in a government shutdown, Louisiana Congressman Clay Higgins had some advice for them.
His full post: “There are 22 million American households receiving SNAP benefits for groceries, at $4,200 per year on average. Try to get your head wrapped around how many pantries you can stock with $4,200 dollars in properly shopped groceries. Any American who has been receiving $4,200 dollars per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack.”
Let me help the Congressman with some math.
That $4,200 he’s throwing around? That’s not per person. That’s per household. USDA data shows the average SNAP household has more than one mouth to feed.
A family of four splitting $4,200 a year gets $20 per person per week. That’s $2.88 a day — per person — to cover every meal.
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner for less than three bucks. Try that math at your local grocery store, Congressman.
His own administration says it costs $1,000 a month to feed a family of four. That’s $12,000 a year. SNAP covers about a third of it.
Meanwhile, Higgins — like most members of Congress — gets up to $79 per day in meal money. That’s $28,835 a year just for food. He spends more on lunch than a family of four gets for a week.
Now here’s the part that should end his career.
In Higgins’ own district — Louisiana’s 3rd — 280,566 people are eligible for SNAP. That’s nearly as many as the 226,279 who voted for him. Sixteen percent of his constituents are food insecure — a rate his own state’s food bank network calls “critical.” One in four of the children in his district lives below the poverty line.
Those are his people. His voters. His neighbors.
And he thinks they’re crackheads.
I’ve been listening to this garbage for forty years. And I’m done being polite about it.
Seventy percent of adults on SNAP and Medicaid work full-time. Full. Time. They’re not lounging on the couch watching daytime TV. They’re stocking your shelves at 5 AM. They’re wiping your grandmother’s ass in a nursing home for $12 an hour. They’re delivering your packages in the rain so you don’t have to leave your house.
They work. They just don’t get paid enough to eat.
And what are these “lavish benefits” we keep hearing about? SNAP pays just over six bucks a day per person. A loaf of bread and a package of lunch meat runs you seven to ten dollars. You can’t even make sandwiches for the kids’ school lunches for the week on what they call a handout.
So who are the real welfare queens? Walmart. McDonald’s. Amazon.
The Government Accountability Office looked at eleven states and found Walmart was one of the top four employers of SNAP and Medicaid recipients in every single one. McDonald’s made the top five in nine states. Dollar General. Burger King. FedEx. All on the list.
These aren’t mom-and-pop shops scraping by. Walmart posted $5.1 billion in profit in one quarter. McDonald’s cleared $1.76 billion. Billion. With a B.
Meanwhile, their workers are applying for food stamps so their kids can eat dinner.
The UC Berkeley Labor Center did the math: low wages cost American taxpayers $153 billion a year in public assistance programs. That’s your tax dollars and mine subsidizing the payroll of some of the most profitable corporations on the planet.
Let me say that again so it sinks in.
You are paying taxes so that Walmart doesn’t have to pay a living wage.
That’s not a safety net. That’s corporate welfare. Exposed profit margins, socialized labor costs.
Those are your welfare queens. Not the cashier trying to feed her kids on six bucks a day.
The federal minimum wage is $7.25. It’s been $7.25 since 2009.
Sixteen years. Longest stretch without an increase since we created it in 1938. Adjusted for inflation, it buys less now than it did in 1949. Harry Truman was president in 1949.
A full-time minimum wage job pays $15,080 a year. That’s now below the federal poverty line for a single person. You can work forty hours a week, every week, all year — and still be officially poor.
But here’s the part that really burns my ass.
Whether you can survive on your paycheck depends on what state you live in. Thirty states have raised their minimum wage. Washington pays $16.66 an hour. California and New York are over $15. But twenty states — mostly the South, mostly red — are still sitting at $7.25. Mississippi. Alabama. Texas. Tennessee. Georgia.
A cashier in Seattle and a cashier in Jackson, Mississippi do the same job. Same work. Same hours. One makes more than double.
The Mississippi cashier isn’t lazy. She’s trapped. She’s working just as hard, but she had the bad luck to be born in a state run by people who think $7.25 is plenty.
And guess what? Those same low-wage states have the highest SNAP enrollment. The same politicians who refuse to raise the minimum wage then point at workers and say, “Look at all these people on government assistance. Must be lazy.”
It’s not economics. It’s a con job.
We used to know better.
When FDR built the New Deal, the federal work programs didn’t just hand out jobs. They set wages that competed with private employers. If the government was paying a real wage to build roads and schools, the factory down the street couldn’t get away with paying dirt.
The floor lifted everybody.
We threw that out. Now we subsidize poverty wages with public benefits instead of making employers pay what work is worth. We’ve socialized the cost of cheap labor and privatized the profit.
The New Deal had problems. Racial exclusion. Women shut out of most programs. I’m not pretending it was perfect. But they understood one thing we’ve forgotten: work should pay enough to live on, and when it doesn’t, that’s a policy failure, not a character flaw.
And if you think this is just about burger flippers and retail workers, let me introduce you to someone else who can’t afford groceries: the United States military.
One in four active-duty service members is food insecure. Not veterans. Active duty. Currently serving. Wearing the uniform right now.
About 15 percent of them rely on food stamps or food banks to feed their families. There are food pantries on military bases serving hundreds of families a month. Nearly half the kids at Department of Defense schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
These are E-3s and E-4s with families. Junior enlisted. The people who actually do the work of defending the country. They deploy. They train. They move every few years because the military tells them to — which wrecks their spouses’ careers and makes childcare a nightmare. And at the end of the month, they’re standing in line at a food bank on base.
Here’s the kicker: most of them don’t even qualify for SNAP. The military’s housing allowance gets counted as income. So they make too much on paper to get food help, but not enough in reality to buy groceries.
Full-time work. Defending the nation. Can’t feed the kids.
Tell me again how the problem is lazy people who won’t get a job.
Now let’s talk about veterans.
1.2 million veterans live in households receiving SNAP. Let that number sit with you for a second.
Eleven percent of working-age veterans experienced food insecurity between 2015 and 2019. That’s higher than the civilian rate. We come home, we try to build a life, and a lot of us end up choosing between the electric bill and groceries.
I spent eight years in the Navy. I’ve watched politicians wrap themselves in the flag, shake hands at VFW halls, pose for pictures on Veterans Day. Then they go back to Washington and vote to cut the programs keeping veterans fed.
You don’t get to call me a hero in November and a freeloader in December.
Pick one.
They made their choice. Here’s what it looks like.
On July 4, 2025, while you were grilling hot dogs, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law. It cuts $186 billion from food assistance over the next decade. Nearly 3 million young adults are now at risk of losing help. The Congressional Budget Office says some states may drop out of the program entirely.
The One Big Beautiful Bill expands work requirements to everyone 18-64 — including older workers, former foster youth, and veterans who were previously exempt. Starting November 2025, all existing state waivers get terminated. By 2028, states will have to pay up to 15% of SNAP benefit costs — costs the federal government used to cover entirely. Federal funding for state admin costs drops from 50% to 25%.
That age change — from 54 to 64 — tells you everything. A 60-year-old with a bad back and thirty years of warehouse work behind her now has to prove she’s working 80 hours a month or lose her groceries. Try getting hired at 62. Try explaining the gap in your resume when you spent two years caring for your mother with dementia. They don’t want you to ever stop working. Not until you’re dead or on Medicare — whichever comes first.
And about that Medicare.
The same bill triggers $490 billion in Medicare cuts between 2027 and 2034. It bans improvements to Medicare Savings Programs for nine years — the programs that help low-income seniors afford their premiums and copays. Medicare premiums broke $200 a month for the first time this year, eating into Social Security cost-of-living adjustments. It’s the biggest erosion of the COLA in nearly a decade.
They’ll tell you they’re not touching Social Security benefits. Here’s what they’re doing instead: cutting 12% of the workforce — 7,000 workers gone — leaving the agency at its lowest staffing level in 60 years while baby boomers push the number of beneficiaries to an all-time high. One staffer now serves 1,480 people. That’s three times what it was in 1967. They’re closing field offices, forcing people to travel over a hundred miles for in-person appointments. They’re proposing to end phone verification so you have to show up in person at an office that’s already drowning.
They won’t cut your check. They’ll just make it impossible to get it.
Work until 64 to keep your groceries. Then fight through a gutted bureaucracy to get the retirement benefits you paid into your whole life. Then watch Medicare premiums eat what’s left.
That’s the plan. That’s always been the plan.
The people who wrote this bill aren’t stupid.
They know the numbers. They know most people on SNAP work. They know the benefits are barely enough to survive on. They know who profits when wages stay low.
They just don’t care.
Because it’s easier to punch down. Easier to blame the cashier than the corporation. Easier to cut benefits than to raise wages. Easier to tell people to work harder than to ask why hard work doesn’t pay anymore.
This isn’t about saving money. The same bill that cuts SNAP and guts Medicare is handing trillion-dollar tax breaks to people who already have more than they could spend in ten lifetimes.
It’s not fiscal responsibility. It’s class warfare with good PR.
And I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
Sources:
U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)
U.S. Department of Labor (DOL)
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA/FNS)
Congressional Budget Office (via Brookings analysis)
UC Berkeley Labor Center
RAND Corporation
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP)
Center for American Progress
Center for Medicare Advocacy
Bipartisan Policy Center
Urban Institute
Economic Policy Institute (EPI)
Feeding Louisiana
Military Times
Feeding America Action
Medicare Rights Center
The New Republic
Newsweek
Washington Post
Fox News
Axios
MSNBC
Marketplace (APM