Republican Governor Paul LePage dared to begin enforcing Maine's volunteer and work requirements for food stamp (SNAP) recipients to keep their benefits. The end result was more than 9,000 non-disabled adults getting dropped from the program.

As CNS News' Eric Schiener reports, a Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) spokesman tells the Associated Press that 12,000 non-disabled adults were in Maine’s SNAP program before Jan. 1 - a number that dropped to 2,680 by the end of March...

The rules prevent adults, who are not disabled and do not have dependents, from receiving food stamps for more than three months unless they work at least 20 hours a week, participate in a work-training program, or meet volunteer guidelines for 24 hours out of the month. Any one of those three minimums getting met will result in an individual to retain their SNAP food benefits. DHHS Commissioner Mary Mayhew said the goal of the requirements is to encourage people to find work. "If you're on these programs it means you are living in poverty and so the more that we can help incentive people on that pathway to employment and self-sufficiency the better off they're going to be," Mayhew told the Associated Press.

In Maine, once someone loses their benefits, they cannot regain assistance for three years.

Patriot Chronicle points out, in Maine, 9,000 able-bodied people who are supposedly too poor to feed themselves couldn’t seem to handle that. In addition, those who lose their benefits in such a manner can’t reapply for assistance for three years.

Liberals have sold government dependence so deliberately well, that even doing 24 hours of approved volunteer work a month for a capable adult became too much for more than 9,000 people. Either the Liberals have truly brain washed the voting masses into droning zombies, or they’re really not that needy for food. Either way, the taxpayers who work hard for their paychecks, can feel some satisfaction at knowing they won’t have to support as much mediocrity as they used to.

As we noted previoulsy, thanks to many years of accelerated growth in the program under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, 1 in 7 Americans now participate in the food stamp program. There are, however, very large differences from state to state in how much the food stamp program has expanded. If we look at growth in the program from the year 2000 to 2015, we find growth varying from 641 percent growth in Nevada, to 54 percent growth in Wyoming:

Regionally, the areas of the country with the most growth are the South and West: