On Sunday, the third party processor for the national EBT/SNAP benefits cards (aka food stamps) experienced an outage, leaving thousands of people without the ability to purchase food for their families.
As of this morning, the South Carolina Social Services account on Twitter says that benefits have been restored and that cards issued to clients should be operational statewide at approved EBT providers.
However, Down Detector is still reporting thousands of outages across the country.
When I was young, my father was laid off and out of work for a short time, and we had to rely on food stamps for a few months. It was life-saving as a safety net, but we never had to worry about whether they would work or not because they were printed on paper.
If anything this present debacle showcases the dangers of the idea of a digital dollar, which was first introduced by Congresswomen Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters when they tried to slip it into the Take Responsibility Act in 2021.
The bill included government-directed "debit cards, online account access, automatic bill-pay, mobile banking and automatic teller machines maintained in conjunction with the United States Postal Services at its physical locations."
Essentially a government run banking system. Sound familiar?
Ultimately the idea of communist banking was heavily opposed and the digital dollar was removed from the final legislation.
Since then, the Federal Reserve has taken up the charge for the digital dollar, calling it a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
Honestly, we're probably in a lot of trouble if we don't create a digital dollar. Per the Federal Reserve, there's only $2 trillion of physical currency in circulation. Our nation's GDP is $22 trillion. That's about $20 trillion in floating digital transactions, and every new financial crisis brings us one step closer to a bank run, which would pull the rug on the whole illusion.
But then we run into situations like this EBT/Snap debacle. What happens when the system goes down, and you can't spend your money? What happens when the government decides you're a domestic terrorist and freezes your accounts like Canada did to the Freedom Convoy truckers?
These are things that we need to be thinking about and voting for politicians that oppose these sorts of policies, while we still can.
In the meantime, if you know anyone receiving EBT/Snap benefits, please check in on them to see if their cards are working and make sure they've got food until this current mess is sorted out.
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