The Republicans are claiming that they are going to cut nutritional assistance, but make up for it, and find even MORE money, by cutting waste and fraud.This refers to the report that came out in August, relating to the issue of ‘food stamp trafficking’ problems. It showed that while food stamp trafficking – selling food stamps to a grocery store, which gets paid for them as if they were used, but instead of food providing cash – has been increasing with the steep increase in nutritional assistance.
The premise is that this is a form of fraud, yet we know that fraud in the program is incredibly low, around 1%. We also don’t know that the trafficking is not resulting in the purchases of other necessities (hygiene products, cough medicine, etc.) and therefore still benefiting in an essential way those in need. What the report has NOT indicated, and what Republicans have not addressed, is the use to which the money from this exchange is being put. We know that we have large gaps and cracks in our social safety net. What we do not know is if this is in fact a serious problem of fraud or not, in terms of how the money is used.
What the righties who want to cut food assistance, like every Republican in Congress from Minnesota, have not shown is how they plan to reduce fraud to below 1%. It is reasonable to assume that someone will find a way to succeed at least in fractional fraud.
Rather than deny nutritional assistance, as the report from the Ag Dept. noted, the vast majority – 85% – of the business which are engaging in food stamp trafficking are convenience stores:
Between 2009 and 2011, most of the food stamp trafficking (85%) occurred at smaller grocery and convenient stores, which accounted for only 15% of overall food stamp redemptions. More than 10% of all stores authorized to redeem food stamps participated in trafficking.
The department said it focused its “covert investigation” on stores that exhibited “suspicious activities.” Overall, food stamp trafficking is down from the 1990s, when about 4% of food stamp recipients sold the benefits back to stores.
I question if it is possible to significantly reduce this kind of misuse to even lower numbers, apart from questioning the desirability of doing so without establishing that this is in fact a genuine mis-use of the benefits. As usual, the Republicans are long on promises, but short on delivery.
The other claim you hear the right making is that there is abuse by lottery winners, and dead people. Well, no, not really. There have been a couple of people who won a modest amount of money, compared to the big wins, and who stayed on assistance while waiting to actually receive the money, and then through confusion, their benefits were extended, and subsequently repaid. Winning the lottery is, in any case, a less frequent occurrence than being struck by lightning TWICE. As for 'dead people' abusing the system - No, they can't. They are dead. What does happen though is that some EBT cards have been stolen from the effects of people who died, and because the states have cut their staffing and funding for the administration of SNAP, the cards were not changed to make them inactive, because the state admins were short handed.
Blame right wing cuts to public employees for this -- a problem which will not be fixed by cutting 40 billion in nutritional supplementation.
IF they really cared about government waste, there are much better targets the right could go after, notably in defense contractors, that involve much higher percentages of fraud and waste, that could pay for providing the necessary benefits to nutritional and related assistance many times over.
And/or they could just cut the waste in Big Ag subsidies to themselves, for starters, where there is little or no means testing required.
In point of fact, the representatives in Congress have no practical solutions to accomplish what they are promising, and show absolutely zero signs of any practical ways to accomplish reducing any abuse. They just love to take food out of the mouths of hungry people, so they can give more money back to the rich people who pay for their campaigns. There is nothing that cutting the federal funding will accomplish; the federal government pays 100% of the food funding, and they pay 50% of the administration funding, with the states paying the other 50% of admin costs, and providing the actual administration over the program in each state.
It is the state level administration where the fraud problem is occurring, and that is a function of the cuts in state spending to staffing and support for the administration. What is needed to end even the miniscule amount of fraud is better state level administration, not less funding of the program. This is once again, bad right wing governance.
The reality is that poverty is highly detrimental to this country, resulting in everything from poor educational outcomes to sick people. It will only take one good epidemic rippling through this nation to show how much worse it is when people are poor and hungry, lacking both food and adequate medical care, to demonstrate how penny wise / pound foolish this kind of thinking is. As we have seen from other epidemics, disease does not respect socio-economic boundaries. Disease spreads faster when people work while sick – as we see with the working poor; and when they have poor resources with which to fight off infection – like being malnourished.
And of course this is also yet another cut that hurts rather than helps the economy, because this is a use of tax dollars in supplemental nutrition that acts as a multiplier, leading to more economic growth than the cost.
Cutting food assistance = more right wing math failure, and more wrong-headed rationalization.
