On My Soapbox

     You may have encountered a meme going around Facebook that basically states-- If you can afford various small luxuries, then you don’t need food assistance. If you are one of the many people that has shared or “liked” this nonsense, I would ask you to consider a few things. First, let’s counter the myth that food stamp recipients are just lazy. Most of the people receiving food assistance that can work are working. Roughly 60% of recipients hold a job while receiving benefits and almost 90% of recipients worked in the previous year or in the next year. You might be thinking that the 60% figure is too low, but the remaining 40% is overwhelmingly made up of the elderly and the disabled. So basically what you are saying when you decide that food stamp recipients shouldn’t have things like televisions, or tattoos, or a flashy pair of shoes, or even an occasional beer (not covered by the food stamp program, by the way) is that hard-working Americans should not have anything nice. That you think they should just barely subsist, and that anything more offends you. I hear lots of people say that those people (and it’s always those people) need to get an education and get a better job. So let’s say for the sake of argument that everyone in America went out tomorrow and got a college degree. We would still need people to deliver pizza, to run the cash registers, and clean our hotel rooms. Don’t those people deserve a decent standard of living too?

      Some of you may counter with the argument that, “you’re fine with people that need it getting help, but you know someone that is abusing the system, and we need to put a stop to that.” I won’t sit here and tell you that there isn’t anyone in America that isn’t gaming the system, but what I will tell you, is that the SNAP program (Food Stamps) has one of the lowest rates of fraud of all federal benefit programs. In any benefit program (public or private) there is a concept known as the fraud/red tape dilemma. It basically states that there is a tradeoff between stopping fraud and introducing so much red tape that you not only undermine the effectiveness of your program, but that the red tape results in spending more money stopping the potential fraud than what the fraud itself costs. I hope that I’ve given you something to think about.  During this holiday season, don’t you think that it’s long past time that we stop demonizing the poor?   To those that still insist on giving the less fortunate a hard time, I heartily invite you to do something obscene to yourself with a rusty pitchfork.    

Links Cited:
 
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3894 

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1183