Recently I was shocked and disappointed to hear that Food Stamps were being used to pay membership fees at health clubs and lottery tickets.
On top of that they are being used to buy seafood and other exotic foods.
We can thank the good people at Fix News – I mean, Fox News – for exposing this kind of abuse and fraud (you can see it online for yourself), except that it didn’t square with a recent experience Joy and I had.
We were in Arizona for a week and needed a couple of items from the grocery store. Joy said she would only be a minute so I waited in the car. She was gone a long time so I decided to go in to see if there was a problem. Turned out she was in line at the checkout counter behind a women who was using Food Stamps.
To my surprise the clerk who obviously took her work seriously was setting aside almost as many items as she was passing through. As ordinary as the set aside items seemed to be, they apparently didn’t meet Food Stamps guidelines.
Wow. I guess I had always figured Food Stamps guidelines were voluntary and/or unenforceable. Obviously I was wrong. Finally, after another ten or fifteen minutes the woman got checked out.
That experience led me to want to find out what you can and cannot actually buy with Food Stamps. Turns out it’s pretty basic stuff. Breads and cereals are in, as are fruits and vegetables, meats, fish and poultry, and dairy products. Junks foods, too, because they meet the basic standard of having some nutritional value.
Wine, liquor, cigarettes, other tobacco products, and nonfood items such as pet foods, soaps, paper products, diapers, and household supplies, vitamins and medicines, or anything hot prepared in the store are all excluded. Which was interesting because at one point the Fix News report focused on a woman buying high priced diapers. I wonder if they had followed her to the check out counter they would have seen what I saw?
Anyway, with the kind of guidelines that exist and the way they are enforced, I began to wonder if the Food Stamps program really was troubled by widespread abuse and fraud as the Fix News report suggested.
Well, not really. Abuse, fraud, and clerical errors amount to only about 4% of the yearly expenditures, which is less than almost any other government program, including Pentagon funding.
But what about the growth in the program over the last few years? Isn’t that a sign that the system is too easy to game and attracts people who don’t want to work?
Not an easy question to answer, but I did find out the average recipient gets only about $133 a month, and that 75% of the Food Stamps households have a child, someone elderly, or someone disabled, in them.
More significant, though, is the fact that there is an unequivocal direct correlation between rising unemployment and the increase in Food Stamps use. As people have been laid off the number of Food Stamp recipients has doubled to more than 47 million Americans.
So what’s up with Fix News making it sound as if their report on abuse and fraud represented the whole Food Stamps program?
It couldn’t be that this is just another example of facts getting in the way of opinions so the facts are simply ignored, could it?
And some people wonder why I call this network “Fix News.”
I think the Food Stamp program has acquired a lot of unjustified rumors over the years. Yes, there probably is some fraud, as I think there is an any government program, but I think it is miniscule in the Food Stamp program as compared with that in many other government programs, and in fact as compared to “legitimate” spending in many government programs.
I see this being used way too often to be a political justification for their party. I wish people would just look at why these programs are in use and the people who are being helped. This blog has been useful in correcting inaccuracies I hear in my social circles. Thanks Jann for helping me be more informed.
Louise