What A Beach-Bumming, Couch-Surfing Dudebro Can Teach Us About Food Stamps (Upworthy)
Bill O’Reilly Says Food Stamps Allow “Parasites” to “Take As Much As They Can Without Remorse” (opposingviews.com)

There is always a danger in using the example of one person to comment on something that affects tens or hundreds of millions of people, because any group that size is going to have large variances and atypical cases. Sometimes it’s an effective tactic that proves a good point, but other times it creates such an obviously fallacious argument that the tactic becomes nothing short of despicable. In the case of Jason Greenslate, the Fox News “surfer dude who gets food stamps so he can buy sushi and not have to work,” it’s downright infuriating on its own, and taken in context with the havoc that Fox News’ supporters have wreaked on this country in the past dozen years, it’s a contemptible outrage.

First of all, because I teach at a community college, I have lots of students who get benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, aka “food stamps.” From what they’ve told me, if you were looking to game some kind of system in order to get lots of money without having to work, SNAP would be just about the last system you’d want to try, simply because the paperwork involved in enrolling in the system, and then continuing to receive benefits, is a huge hassle for the relatively meagre benefits — often just a few dollars a day — you can get out of the system. I’m fairly certain you can make more money per hour by filling out surveys online, or participating in some of those “blog for cash” schemes out there. For those who need that additional money to put the true basics like milk and bread on their families’ tables, though, that money is nothing short of a lifeline.

Having said that, let’s face some realities: Yes, there is fraud in the system, and no one wants to pay for able-bodied people, who simply choose not to work, to get free food at taxpayer expense, at least not in the way SNAP is currently set up. As a taxpayer, I only want my money for these social services to go to people who actually need it. The way some conservative pundits talk, though, you’d think that liberals/Democrats/anyone to the left of Rand Paul actually condones, if not celebrates, this kind of fraud, which is simply not the case. I think there are good cases to be made for expanding food assistance to all Americans, but that’s a subject for another blog; I want to focus on SNAP right now.

We should look at the extent to which fraud in the SNAP programme affects America in contrast to other things. This is where conservatives’ arguments against SNAP, and this whole “moral panic” the far-right has been stoking around Jason Greenslate (and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, rest his soul), gets exposed for the fraud it really is.

Let’s start with how much money is spent on SNAP every year. Government expenditures on SNAP for Fiscal Year 2012 were approximately $81 billion. Not exactly a small chunk of change, even by American budgetary standards. However, efforts to combat abuse of SNAP have significantlycut down on the amount of fraud in the system, to the point where only one percent of SNAP funding is considered “lost” to fraud. Doing the math, that would mean that last year we lost $810 million to SNAP fraud. Again, that is a substantial number, and I don’t like my tax money going towards this fraud any more conservatives do.

If Fox News and other conservative outlets are going to make this huge example out of Jason Greenslate, though, then I think I’m entitled to my own one-person example of other kinds of fraud the government could, and should, be targeting. For my example I’m going to choose Ken Lay. Remember Ken Lay? He was in charge of Enron when the company collapsed under a blanket of lies and fraud that didn’t get that much news because the initial collapse took place mere weeks after the 09.11 attacks. Once audio tapes of Enron traders literally laughing about stealing money from “those poor grandmothers in California” came out, though, there was a good deal of scandal, although less than it deserved. Of the $74 billion in investments lost by Enron in the four years prior to its collapse, $40 to $45 billion has been attributed to fraud losses alone. Let’s be kind and use the lower figure of $40 billion in fraud. Adjusting that for inflation, that’s a little more than $47 billion in 2012 dollars, but we’ll round down to $47 billion.

Calling up the calculator app on my tablet, then, it turns out that it would take over fifty-eight years of SNAP fraud at current rates to total the amount of money lost to fraud just from Enron alone. Over fifty-eight years. This isn’t to try to diminish SNAP fraud, but is it wiser for the government to go after hundreds of thousands of people who each defraud the government out of a few hundred dollars every year, or one company that defrauds us out of billions of dollars? Even if Enron was a larger-than-usual example, stopping one malicious corporation a tenth the size of Enron from committing a similar fraud would still mean saving as much money as over five-and-a-half years of SNAP fraud at current rates. Stopping just one of those companies every year would be over five times more efficient than trying to root every instance of SNAP fraud out of the system.

Here, have a graphic that illustrates this perfectly. Graphics are easier to share on social media than long articles like this, anyway.

Again, this isn’t to condone or excuse SNAP fraud. If it’s so much more cost-effective to stop corporate fraud than to go after those who abuse SNAP, though — especially when cuts to SNAP are bound to negatively affect those who most desperately need it — then why all this focus on Jason Greenslate and SNAP? It’s the same reason why there’s this huge push to drug-test people who get SNAP or other government assistance, but no one ever dares question if a rich white man got his money through drugs or other illegal means. CEOs like Ken Lay gets lots of face time on television — especially on Fox News and other right-wing media, but far from exclusively — to bemoan “stifling” regulations that make sure their products don’t kill or maim so many people, while those who require temporary social assistance because of lost jobs (often thanks to those same CEOs) don’t get to explain their struggles to the nation because they aren’t “telegenic” enough (or, in the case of right-wing media, they either don’t want you to know those people even exist, or they say their plights are deserved because they don’t pray to “the right God” or voted for Obama or what have you).

After all, if Republicans and conservatives actually cared about getting this country out of the economic doldrums, they’d be all for expanding SNAP. SNAP stimulates the economy more than any other government programme, because the benefits get spent right away, in the local community, and often go right back to the same low-wage workers at food stores who then have to spend the money right away themselves to put food on their tables as well. The problem is, to admit that SNAP is stimulative is basically to admit that you need to grow the economy from the bottom-up, which is the exact antithesis of trickle-down economics/Reaganomics/voodoo economics/the great big lie Republicans have been feeding us for over thirty years  to justify gutting social services for the most needy Americans in order to give CEOs like Ken Lay huge tax breaks that they just horde in banks or use to buy luxury goods from foreign countries.

Hence, Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media has been feeding their fanbase a steady diet of Jason Greenslate for several weeks now to try to drum up public support to take the equivalent of an atom bomb to a molehill of a problem, never mind all the collateral damage to innocents it would cause. SNAP abuse is a problem, but as long as we keep recklessly gutting social service programmes in the name of reducing fraud, while turning a blind eye to the corporations that defraud Americans exponentially more than abuse of social service programmes does, we’re only setting ourselves up for more inequality, more suffering, and most importantly of all, more money lost to fraud.