Sloppy Voter Thinking Makes Political Manipulation Easier — an Example from the House of Representatives’ $40 Billion Food Stamp Funding Cut — and a Comment regarding the Difficulty of Fact Finding in Politicized Situations

23 September 2013

It is easy to get politically wound up, even when we don’t know what the facts or substantive issues are

Last week, one of my Republican friends said she was glad that the House had slashed $40 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) because so many of those who benefit are slackers:

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted Thursday to slash $40 billion from the federal food stamp program.

GOP lawmakers cited what they said was widespread abuse of the program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which is intended to help poor individuals and families buy groceries.

The vote to cut food stamps came on a party line vote of 217-200.

"It's wrong for working, middle-class people to pay" for abuse of the program, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor said.

Democrats cited Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would deprive 4 million needy people of SNAP benefits in 2014. The $40 billion cut — $4 billion a year over the next decade — amounts to about 5 percent of the total program cost.

The comment put my friend in Eric Cantor’s corner. But were they factually correct?

When I asked my friend how she knew about rates of food stamp slacking and fraud, she didn’t. Her silence indicated that “everyone knows that” — to the apparent degree that makes researching the facts unnecessary. A favored Republican intellectual position, evidently shared by the majority of Americans.

What are the facts regarding fraud/abuse in regard to food stamps?

Very probably not what the often smarmy Eric Cantor and his Tribe of the Plundering Plutocrats pretend.

Although the Office of the Inspector General (more familiarly known as the OIG) has criticized the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s methods of reporting fraud and abuse — for often being late and subject to too-lenient criteria — the USDA’s own findings indicate that food stamp abuse noticeably trails other farm subsidy fraud and overpayments, many of which go to financially well off people. See page 10 of the OIG’s audit report, here.

In thinking about this, it is important to recognize that there are two issues in assessing amounts of government program abuse:

First is the rate of abuse — which we can designate as a percentage of the total funds allotted to a government program.

Second is the absolute amount of dollars fraudulently taken from the dollar amount allocated to the program.

Rudimentary math indicates that a low rate of abuse in a massively large subsidy program is going to cost taxpayers significant dollars. On the other hand, a very high rate of abuse in a much smaller program may not be so noticeable on an absolute scale.

Which would you attack first — low rates of abuse on high dollar programs, or high rates of abuse on lesser money programs?

A New York Times article on the food stamp debate indirectly addresses the difference:

Government audits and court records show hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to fraud in a variety of farm programs, including crop insurance and subsidies that help agribusinesses promote their products abroad.

The rate of food stamp fraud, on the other hand, has declined sharply in recent years, federal data shows, and now accounts for 1 percent of the $75 billion program, or about $750 million a year.

“There is the overemphasis on abuses in the food stamp program, which is bigger and more spread out among the population,” said Joshua Sewell, a senior policy analyst with Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group in Washington.

“In contrast the crop insurance program is much more concentrated. It’s not as much money over all, but on a per person basis it’s a much bigger program and ripe for fraud.”

Where Republicans come in for legitimate ethical criticism — is their hypocritical unwillingness to target high rates of subsidy abuse by “rich guys” — in preference to going after low rates of fraud (via arbitrary slashes) in large programs that benefit the poor

This is so clear a point of Republican philosophy that it is (rationally) inarguable.

One need only recall (for example) how vehemently the Party reacts against cleaning up Wall Street financial abuses that led to the lingering global economic recession that began in 2008.

Consequently, the argument over food stamps isn’t really about saving money in places where it “should” be saved. Instead, House Republicans have made it about cutting programs that benefit people, who cannot affect government policy via making the monetary donations that get our money-grubbing politicians elected.

If we keep in mind that food stamps exist for a valid social reason, it should be clear that any cut to the program needs to be justified in relationship to other programs that have less arguably necessary social and economic underpinnings.

Think here of crop subsidies and subsidized crop insurance, both of which now predominantly favor already well-off people:

Farmers receive government subsidies averaging 70 percent of their premiums to purchase insurance that protects them against declining crop value.

The vast majority of this taxpayer money goes to farmers who make in excess of $250,000 a year.

The insurance policies are sold by private companies, and the government also pays those firms about 20 percent of the premium cost to cover their expenses.

The companies get to keep the profits from the policies, so taxpayer money makes crop insurance a largely risk-free investment for insurance companies.

Thus, the government uses taxpayer money to pay rich farmers to buy insurance from wealthy insurance companies, whom the government also pays to sell the policies to the farmers. Talk about a “free” market.

Every problem conservatives complain about in food stamps is even worse in crop insurance. As you might expect when a program essentially offers intelligent, entrepreneurial people free money, they take it, and costs have exploded.

Crop insurance is perhaps the best example of a loosely structured government program tempting people who don’t need help to live at someone else’s expense.

But instead, Heritage [Foundation] and its allies in this fight have chosen to focus on food stamps.

Consider also, mandated and subsidized corn ethanol production. The ethanol subsidy program makes no sense. It costs more to produce ethanol this way, and the process does more environmental harm, than continuing to use more conventional fuel sources.

But with respect to these plutocrat-favoring subsidies, we hear not a noticeable peep from House Republicans.

In defense of the “everybody knows” crowd

Most people do not have time (or the skills necessary) to research the BS that our political leaders build their empires on.

In researching the food stamp issue, I soon noticed how vacuously partisan most writing about it is and how little of this is founded on designated and context-specific fact. For example, not one pro or con food stamp article attempted to see the issue through the lens of the entire 2013 Farm Bill, which sprinkles a lot of money around in wildly differing portions.

I was curious how large the SNAP segment was compared to other sources of free farm-related money. But neither side to the food stamp controversy bothered to dissect numbers in the way that a reliable accountant would want to — before giving her client advice on where one might rationally cut (or move) funds.

After a few hours of keyword searching, I finally came across a WonkBlog article that gracefully fielded the question:

Brad Plumer, The House just voted down its $940 billion farm bill — Here’s what’s in it, Washington Post (20 June 2013)

If you scroll down through his article, you will come to a Brad Plumer’s helpful pie chart summarization of the Congressional Research Services’ description of the 2013 Farm Bill’s monetary allocations:

Food stamps and nutrition, $743.9 billion

Crop insurance, $93 billion

Commodity Programs, $40.1 billion

Conservation, $56.7 billion

Everything else, $5.8 billion

You can see why “absolute” dollar savers might focus on food stamps and nutrition, rather than rates of abuse.

Despite the Left’s excoriation of Republican motives for cutting the food stamp program, it was not complete insanity to initially incline that way.

It is only after one considers the supplementary evidence that food stamp abuse is zero — according to the USDA’s imperfect monitoring techniques — and not-zero for the rest of the Farm Program that Republicans can be ethically shamed.

Note — you can read more about the food stamp side of this

Here and here.

The moral? — Finding facts and thinking is hard work, and most of us are not inclined to do it

Getting irrationally angry and moralistically self-righteous is easier and (arguably) even more fun than eating Twinkies.

No wonder politicians lie and manipulate as they do.

What you can be sure of is that, unless you’re already rich, these politicians are stealing your money and your hopes for elevating your socioeconomic condition.

PeteFree.com

Sloppy Voter Thinking Makes Political Manipulation Easier — an Example from the House of Representatives’ $40 Billion Food Stamp Funding Cut — and a Comment regarding the Difficulty of Fact Finding in Politicized Situations