A recent letter catalogued waste and fraud in SNAP — the program many of us still call food stamps — anchored by the familiar image of someone buying groceries with food stamps while driving a Mercedes. As lawmakers continue to advance cuts to SNAP, it’s worth asking why that single anecdote carries so much weight when the fuller picture with facts tells a different story.
* Food stamp fraud is real, but small and shrinking. The USDA’s own figures put benefit trafficking at roughly one to two cents on the dollar, and verified recipient fraud at a fraction of 1%. The program’s “error rate” is mostly honest mistakes in a complicated system, not theft.
* We tolerate far larger dishonesty elsewhere without demanding the program be dismantled. Americans fail to pay roughly $600 billion in legally owed taxes every year — more than five times the entire SNAP budget — and most of it goes uncollected from higher earners whose income the IRS can’t easily verify.
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* The difference isn’t the amount of cheating. It’s who gets scrutinized. We shrug at unpaid taxes among the comfortable and fixate on one shopper in a parking lot.
* SNAP is easy to ridicule because the people it serves — many of them children — can’t defend themselves in print.
No program should excuse fraud. But before we judge an entire program by its worst anecdote, we ought to hold ourselves to the same standard. A hungry child in Lancaster County did nothing to earn our suspicion.
Vince Sutton, Lincoln
