Food stamp recipients in Louisiana on Monday flooded Walmart stores, emptying entire shelves of food, using benefit cards that mistakenly had no limits.
There is plenty of responsibility to spread around after this fiasco.
But one thing is for sure-taxpayers should not have to pay anything extra.
According to the police, some people had eight shopping carts full of food. The Walmart store should have stopped such purchases, knowing that the benefit cards do not allow for such large purchases. That would just be common sense.
Indeed some stores did stop accepting the cards, but Walmart didn’t.
They have an obligation to pay for some of this mess and the Walmart store manager should have implemented documented secondary procedures where clerks actually call a phone number to authorize the amount.
Xerox said that its systems suffered an outage stemming from routine testing of backup generators. In other words, it was probably human error. They have responsibility and should pay something for rectifying this mess.
Most likely, however, it will result in a lawsuit.
Finally, food stamp recipients should pay for taking advantage of the system. If they are authorized to receive $100 a month, and they spent $800, then they should not receive benefits for eight months.
They were working the system, and they knew that going in on that day. However, children would suffer from the bad judgment of parents and technically, the stamp recipients did nothing wrong.
Undoubtedly, a family with eight carts of food either sold it or the food might spoil, depending on what was purchased.
All of those responsible should take responsibility.
Again, it definitely should not be taxpayers who pay.