Still, welfare fraud and foodstamp fraud are real. So let's look at some examples of this abuse.
The original welfare queen that Ronald Reagan made famous actually existed. Her name (at least one of her names) was Linda Taylor. She was not the typical black woman that everyone pictured when Reagan blew the racist dogwhistle. She was listed officially as white, though she could pass for pretty much any race with all the wigs and makeup she used. She also committed a huge number of other crimes including various frauds, kidnapings and possibly murder.
Welfare fraud was basically the only crime they could pin on her, in much the same way that Al Capone was finally jailed for tax evasion. So Taylor is not representative of welfare or food stamp recipients.
But she is typical of welfare and food stamp cheats. We have a few recent examples here in Minnesota.
Run-of-the-mill food stamp fraud consists of store owners letting recipients use food stamps to buy non-food items, or "entrepreneurs" buying food stamp cards for 50% of face value. Three people were arrested earlier this month in St. Paul for buying food with such cards and exporting it to Liberia. Who would do such a weird thing?
Noni Snider, Walter Cooper, and Nyla Newbergh: they ran an export business. They were caught because their purchases of mass quantities of soda and noodles at Walmart and Sam's Club raised suspicions. Yes, these small businessmen -- otherwise referred to as job creators and makers by Republican -- are committing food stamp fraud. And based on their names and the suburbs where they live, my guess is that they are white and middle class (my search fu has sadly failed to uncover any perp photos).
In fact, most food stamp fraud is committed or enabled by small business owners, typically store owners: see here in Washington, here in Baltimore, here in Buffalo, here is Texas (and that's just the last couple of weeks -- it seems like store owners commit food stamp fraud more frequently than gun owners shoot themselves).
The real problem here isn't the poor people committing the fraud, it's richer people ripping off poorer people by giving them only 50 cents on the dollar for their food stamp cards and tempting them with things food stamps aren't supposed to buy.
Now my dad would chime in here and say, "See, food stamps are bad because they encourage waste and fraud. We shouldn't have these programs." Yes, it appears that since small businessmen are so easily tempted into committing fraud we should stop helping poor people.
Food stamps and welfare, the right would say, create a moral hazard by encouraging fraud. But the exact same thing can be said about any number of Defense Department programs, which have cost the American taxpayers hundreds of billions -- if not trillions -- of dollars in waste and fraud, especially during times of war. Remember the planeloads of cash flown into Iraq that just disappeared? That alone was $6.6 billion -- more than twice the food stamp fraud that Fox News abhors, most of it going to corrupt American contractors rather than buying off Iraqi terrorists. Or the infamous Joint Strike Fighter program, seven years late and $163 billion over budget. Or the $2.7 billion dollars wasted on an Army intelligence program that just doesn't work. Or Reagan's Star Wars program. Or any of hundreds of other weapons and software programs that cost billions but never saw the light of day, all billed to the Defense Department not by lazy welfare recipients, but by highly paid CEOs working for Fortune 500 defense contractors.
In this way the Defense Department creates a moral hazard, by tempting wealthy industrialists into conning the government into weapons programs that will never work. Avoiding war profiteers was one of the main reasons the founding fathers opposed a standing army. The Iraq War was fought in large part because the defense industry -- represented by Don Rumsfeld, Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle on the Defense Policy Board -- wanted the war. The DoD moral hazard is far worse than the food stamp moral hazard, because American troops are inevitably killed and maimed when we start foolhardy wars. And because there is so much more money at stake.
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| The Chisholms: Typical Welfare Fraudsters |
This time, however, I have a photo of these welfare cheats. They're upstanding white folks who dress in suits and drive expensive cars. The right's narrative about all welfare fraud being committed by despicable, lazy, poor black people just isn't adding up.
The fact is, rich people like the Chisholms are in a far better position to commit fraud of any sort. They own property and claim residency in multiple states, making it easy to commit all kinds of frauds, including voter fraud by using absentee ballots (that's how real voter fraud occurs -- no one in their right mind would try impersonating someone else; too easy to get caught). They have the money and the wherewithal to get the necessary documents to commit the fraud. And they can skip the country when the law catches on.
The worst poor people can do is sell their food stamp cards at half face value to some rich white woman at the homeless shelter or an exploitative store owner to buy a bottle of Ripple
And most importantly, the wealthy have the motivation: the envy and the greed that seems to drive so many of them to squeeze every penny out of the system by any means possible. According to the right, poor people just don't have the intelligence, gumption, energy or drive to commit real fraud. You need to think like an entrepreneurial small businessman to rip off the government.
Could it be that conservatives always think everyone else is gaming the system and committing fraud because they are?
