‘Paperwork’ Is Driving People Away From Food Stamps. Good
The article criticizes the current welfare system, especially focusing on food assistance programs like SNAP. It highlights how recent policies have made it increasingly difficult for recipients to obtain benefits, citing examples such as requiring written household declarations and documentation of income, which manny find burdensome and discouraging. The piece argues that these hurdles are driven by a desire to reduce welfare enrollment, but ultimately hinder vulnerable populations from accessing necessary aid. It also alleges that the program’s generous payouts contribute to inflation and economic issues, estimating over $100 billion spent annually on food stamps. Additionally, the article mentions claims by the Trump management of notable welfare fraud, but emphasizes that the core issue lies in the welfare system’s design and its entitlement mentality, which the author views as problematic and counterproductive. eddie Scarry, a columnist for the Federalist, is noted as the author.
Just as this administration cannot afford to let up on mass deportations, it can’t do enough to choke every bit of oxygen out of this country’s obscene welfare problem — starting with food stamps.
For proof, look no further than a New York Times article from late July, which was the basis of an episode for the paper’s The Daily podcast this week. The article was headlined — if you can even believe it — “Faced With Piles of New Paperwork, People Are Losing Food Stamps.” Imagine supposedly relying on food stamps to feed yourself or your family but choosing to starve because of “piles of new paperwork.”
Well, of course, nobody is starving. At worst, they’re drinking water instead of bottles of soda. (“Sweetened beverages” are the second-most purchased category of items using food stamps, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.) The entire program is a racket, and the degree of entitlement oozes through the Times like an infected pimple way past its due date.
“It can take months to reach besieged caseworkers, and offices have gone as far as asking people with panhandling income for verification from strangers dropping cash in their jar,” the Times reported, using the steep drop in Arizona’s “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (SNAP) enrollment as a case study. “Arizonans losing SNAP say they are skipping meals, quarreling over food, and missing rent payments to restock pantry shelves. For the first time, monthly visits to the state’s food banks — private charities — have exceeded enrollment in SNAP, the government’s main nutrition safety net.”
If reading that didn’t fill you with a molten rage, you’re either too rich to care or you’re stupid. The fact that it’s treated as a tragedy or even a controversy that anyone might be inconvenienced the slightest to get free groceries tells you how desperately wrong things are going. Try reaching a human when there’s a problem with your AT&T service and then complain to me about how long it took to get food stamps.
This is from an actual segment of that episode of The Daily regarding new food stamp “paperwork requirements” imposed by President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed last year: “It used to be that applicants could just walk in the office and tell a caseworker how many people lived in [their] household and who they were. Now applicants had to go to neighbors or friends and get a written declaration of who lived in the household. And if the neighbor or friend failed to sign the letter or failed to put their phone number on the letter, you’d have to start all over again.”
God forbid a person supposedly on the verge of starvation get a — are you ready for it? — “written declaration” attesting to the validity of their household size, lest they have to “start all over again.” It must be hell on earth.
Here’s more from The Daily episode: “It used to be if you had panhandling income, you gave the [welfare] office your best guess of how much you made. Now they asked applicants with panhandling income to go back and get written documentation of the money people had dropped in the jars. … And in the end, if they can’t get the written documentation, [the government will] take their word for it. But [government officials] have to make them go out and try. And of course if you make people go out and try, a lot of them just don’t come back.”
In short, people who are asked to account for their income, even if it’s through begging, are declining to do even that, thus foregoing free groceries, paid for by other Americans. This, according to the Times, is an outrage.
What everyone should take away from this is that far too many people are getting free groceries. And the sense of entitlement is so extreme that these people don’t even want to file paperwork for their free meals. Don’t tell me this isn’t a primary driver of our current inflation problems. It is. Free money and limited supply are what drive up prices, and food stamps account for more than $100 billion in free money — every year.
The Trump administration said this week it has identified $230 billion in welfare fraud. That’s all fine and good, but the real problem, unquestionably, isn’t fraud. It’s the welfare itself.
Eddie Scarry is the D.C. columnist at The Federalist and author of “Traitors: The Democrat Party’s Collapse into Anti-American Filth.”
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