Political Quotes

“from the numbers that I have, I have four States that would be eligible for block grant under the EBT provision, seven States would be under the error rate of under 6 percent. That is out of 53 jurisdictions that are eligible for the program. So I have 11 jurisdictions of 53 that would be eligible today, not 40. Now, I will say that all 53 jurisdictions are eligible, if the States are willing to pay down the error rate. That would be unlikely, we suspect, for any jurisdiction that would want to put up money, State money in advance to get a Federal block grant. So what we are looking at here is 11 States today. Now, the Senator from North Dakota may be anticipating a lot more States going on with electronic benefits transfer, and I know that is being worked on in several States, but as we speak right now we are looking at 11 jurisdictions. So this is not opening the floodgates by any stretch of the imagination. What the Senator also has talked about is the State of Florida being stuck if, in fact, they get hit with a bad economy and on top of that, in the case of Florida, a natural disaster. I suggest that if the Senator from North Dakota looks at his chart, he will see several--I cannot tell the months or years, but an extended period of time where the rate did not go up, the number of people on food stamps did not go up.”