Fox News Demonizes Food Stamps for Poor, Says Nothing About Unearned Income of Billionaires

Fox News Demonizes Food Stamps for Poor, Says Nothing About Unearned Income of Billionaires

Fox News reported on House Republicans' removal of the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) from an agriculture bill by parroting Republican falsehoods about the program. The report hyped Republicans' false accusations that SNAP, commonly known as food stamps, is rife with fraud and has no vetting process without challenging the claims. The segment also ignored what others in the media have reported -- that separating SNAP funding from the farm bill could lead to major cuts in the program.

Last week, House Republicans passed an agriculture bill, commonly known as the farm bill, without including funding for the SNAP program. The move stripped SNAP from the farm bill, where it has been since 1973, according to the New York Times.

During the July 15 edition of Fox News' America Live, correspondent Shannon Bream reported on the removal of SNAP, claiming the vote would not end SNAP and that no one would be cut off due to the House-version of the farm bill. Bream highlighted Republicans' purported opinions on the program: "Republicans say the system is filled with fraud and that claims made by applicants aren't vetted or verified in any way."

In fact, SNAP has a very low instance of fraud. The trafficking rate, when a SNAP benefit is exchanged for cash, is only one cent per dollar, and that's down from 1993 when it was four cents. The chief economist of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Chad Stone, wrote:

    [SNAP] has one of the most rigorous quality control systems of any public benefit program. SNAP error rates (benefit overpayments and underpayments) are at an all-time low; just 3 percent of benefits went to ineligible households or exceeded the allowable benefit for eligible households. Moreover, honest mistakes by recipients, eligibility workers, data entry clerks or computer programmers - not fraud - account for an overwhelming majority of such overpayments.

Rules for SNAP eligibility vary by state, but applicants must verify household income is below a certain standard and that assets do not exceed a given amount.

Ironically, according to the Times, non-SNAP programs contained the farm bill suffer higher fraud and abuse rates than SNAP.

While Bream's claim that the House-passed farm bill does not cut SNAP is technically correct, she ignored what many others in the media have acknowledged -- that, as the Washington Post wrote, "The vote made clear that Republicans intend to make significant reductions in food stamp money." Fox's Trace Gallagher even introduced the segment by referring to a "food fight ... where lawmakers are taking aim at the exploding cost of food stamps."

Fox News has routinely attacked SNAP and other programs in an effort to shame the poor.

Some people are on food assistance for a couple of reasons. One, many of them have jobs at places like McDonalds ( who admit they do not pay a living wage) or Wal-Mart - who does not pay a living wage, so the public actually subsidizes those businesses. Fox and the conservative propaganda machine never complains about the millions and billions of unearned income by the very wealthy. Mitt Romney for example has never worked an honest day in his life - he made hundreds of millions by rent seeking. Some people do not have jobs - there are still more unemployed than there are job openings. Where are many of those jobs/ They're in Asia because of the kind of anything-goes free trade policy that conservatives have been ramming down the country's throat for the last fifty years.

Real Patriots Do Not Lie About Food Stamps

Real Patriots Do Not Lie About Food Stamps

As you probably know, complaints about the size and cost of the food stamp program (now known as SNAP, for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) has become an ever-more-prominent part of the conservative argument that America is awash in redistributive "welfare" spending (they can't much make that case about cash assistance any more). It was no accident that during his 2012 presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich called Barack Obama the "food stamp president." That's now a quasi-racial appeal along the lines of the old "welfare queen" smear.

Just today, the Wall Street Journal had a report [2] on rising SNAP costs, with the provocative title, "Use of Food Stamps Swells Even as Economy Improves," with the planted axiom being that there should be an inverse relationship between food stamps and the unemployment rate.

But as Jordan Weissmann points out [3] at The Atlantic, that's a false premise:

    [R]epeat after me: There are record numbers of Americans on food stamps today because there are record numbers of Americans in poverty (records begin in 1959.)

    As of 2011, there were 46.2 million men, women, and children living below the U.S. poverty line. There isn't much reason to believe that the last year of mediocre job growth has dented that number. And until it plunges, the food stamp rolls are going to stay full -- plain and simple.

One might add that it's more than a bit hypocritical for Republicans to deride reductions in the unemployment rate as meaningless while simultaneously complaining that counter-cyclical assistance programs should be shedding beneficiaries. But it's all kinda beside the point:

    Of all the social welfare programs the U.S. has, we should probably be worrying about food stamps the least. Its beneficiaries are overwhelmingly needy. In 2010, about 87 percent were at or below the poverty line and almost half were children. Only 3.5 percent had incomes higher than 130 percent of the poverty line. Meanwhile, the program arguably encourages more work by letting unemployed parents take the first job they can find, even if it won't pay enough to feed their family on its own. It's also hyper-efficient stimulus. The money has to be spent instead of saved, meaning it cycles quickly back into the economy.

    Our food stamp rolls are eye popping, but they're not the problem. Poverty is.

This won't be much of an answer to those conservatives who claim that helping poor people is why they are poor in the first place. But that's another issue.

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ed-kilgore-0
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323699704578328601204933288.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read
[3] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/the-most-important-thing-to-remember-about-americas-food-stamp-boom/274443/
[4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/food-stamps
[5] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

Conservatives live in a bubble of lies. It is the only way they can win an argument. That bubble is the world of fake patriotism they must keep going by lying to America and to themselves. It is beyond pathetic. One of the fastest ways to get people off food stamps is to pay them a living wage. Yet the plastic patriots fight increase in wages. America is subsidizing Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, grocery store chains with millionaire owners - because they pay their workers so little for an honest day's work, the workers have to get food stamps or Medicaid to eck out an existence. America needs to stand up and tell these blood sucking conservative leeches to start paying back the American workers who made their wealth possible.