I generally agree with Tyler Cowen that the food stamp program or SNAP as it’s now called is a particularly dumb target for House Republicans to go after. If they really wanted to go after a welfare state-type program for waste, fraud, and abuse SSDI is a much better target. SNAP fraud is less than a half billion dollars out of an $80 billion program. SSDI fraud is estimated at about $1.5 billion of a $50 billion program.
They’re both small potatoes in the total scheme of things. Our real problem is that there are too many Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. Fix that and waste, fraud, or abuse in federal assistance programs becomes a rounding error.
