Food Stamp Explosion

Arnold Ahlert / Canada Free Press

Another dose of reality has trumped the Obama administration’s economic happy talk. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), one-in-five Americans were on the food stamp program in 2013. A staggering 23,052,388 households needed supplemental food assistance in FY2013, an increase of 722,675 households compared to FY2012.

The cost of the program, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), has also reached an all-time high. For fiscal year 2013, the SNAP program cost American taxpayers $79.6 billion. That represents a 36.8 percent increase in expenditures over the last five years.

And it’s not just households that have seen a huge jump in the SNAP participation rate. The monthly average for individual users of the program has also increased dramatically, as an additional 1,027,012 participants pushed the total number of individual users from 46,609,072 to 47,636,084 over the same time period. Since 2009, the number of individuals using the SNAP program has increased by 42.2 percent.

Obviously the global financial crisis of 2007 contributed to the increased number of people who lost their jobs and/or savings, and were forced to turn to supplemental assistance as a result. But the biggest bump in both the number of households and individuals on the program occurred between FY2009 and FY2010, when America was ostensibly in the beginning of the so-called recovery. Furthermore, the next three years saw a steady increase in usage as well.

People gaming the system or no economic recovery

The increase leads to one of two conclusions. Either the number of people gaming the system is getting out of hand, or the economy isn’t in recovery for a vast number of Americans.

Certainly a certain percentage of fraud exists. In Florida’s Palm Beach County, warrants were issued in December for 60 people suspected of cheating the system out of $2.8 million. The scheme involved a market that allowed SNAP users to illegally swipe their cards for cash. In return, the market got a 50 percent kickback for lying to state and federal authorities and saying that that groceries were purchased. In two Louisiana counties, a failure at Xerox Corp., temporarily taking down the electronic benefit transfer system, resulted in an unknown number of customers stripping bare the shelves of two Wal-Mart stores and making purchases well beyond their EBT card limits.

Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) has introduced a bill, the “Food Stamp Fraud Prevention and Accountability Act” that would require SNAP users to show a photo ID when using their benefit cards. “Using a photo ID is standard in many day to day transactions, and most of those are not exclusively paid for by the taxpayer dollars,” Vitter said. “Food Stamps have more than doubled in cost since 2008 and continue to grow in an unsustainable way, and the events in Louisiana unfortunately highlight the fraud surrounding the taxpayer-funded program.”

Naturally those on the left resisted the idea. “Many poor people do not have photo IDs, and it costs money they do not have to get them,” said Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs. “Senator Vitter’s proposal will be especially tough on elderly and poor people who do not have the documents needed to get their photo ID, and who will struggle even to get to the necessary offices. They will wind up going without food.”

A recent inspector general audit estimated that $222 million per year could be saved by cracking down on fraud. The audit found some of the more obvious scams, such as recipients using “erroneous” Social Security numbers, or receiving duplicate benefits in the same state. Others fraudsters were getting benefits from more than one state at the same time, or using a dead person’s Social Security number to collect benefits.

Yet if that number is accurate, fraud is not a large problem, since it comprises only .28 percent of the $79 billion spent on the program. That is not to say cheating shouldn’t be addressed. But it leads one to believe that a non-recovering economy is the more likely culprit.

Furthermore, there is far more evidence to support that scenario. Despite the president touting an unemployment rate of 6.7 percent, a record-shattering 91.8 million Americans are no longer in the workforce, and the labor participation rate has reached its lowest level since 1978. That lack of labor force participation includes a record number of women (55 million), and the lowest workforce participation rate for black Americans ever recorded.

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