The Washington Post Editorial Page Is Clueless About Food Stamp Fraud

SNAP beneficiaries are likelier to be victims rather than perpetrators of fraud. Trump doesn't give a shit about that, and neither, I guess, does Jeff Bezos.

On New Year’s Eve the newly conservative Washington Post editorial page got its knickers in a twist once more over food stamp fraud, saying SNAP fraud involving improper payments cost taxpayers $10.5 billion per year. That’s certainly a problem. But the Post editorial page has been silent about the larger food stamp fraud problem, which is organized crime’s theft of an estimated $12 billion per year from SNAP beneficiaries. Last time I checked, $12 billion was a larger sum than $10.5 billion, and when professional criminals steal from SNAP recipients they rip off taxpayers and leave those recipients to go hungry, because the federal government won’t reimburse them (as your credit card company would if somebody swiped your card information), and only a couple of states do.

The Post editorial page has been inveighing against food stamps a lot in recent months, but it hasn’t inveighed against the bigger SNAP fraud problem because fixing it would cost money; because the conservative brain can’t process that a SNAP beneficiary is likelier to be a victim rather than a perpetrator of fraud; and because, in the unlikely event the conservative brain could absorb that information, it wouldn’t care. The unspoken rationale would I think be something along the lines of Fuck ‘em, they shouldn’t be on the dole in the first place.

All this pisses me off sufficiently that I made this larger food stamp fraud the subject of my latest print New Republic piece. You can read it here.