Huffington Post: Voter Fraud and Food Stamps Fraud — Two Favorite Conservative Myths, by Joel Berg

While American conservatives are busy abandoning one principle after another, they are sticking to their guns on one tried and true unifying concern: shafting poor people.

Keeping to their mantra that poor people are always to blame for whatever ails the nation, conservatives won’t let go of their obsessive fear that low-income Americans are somehow so adept at scamming society, they are secretly taking charge of the nation, despite having less money and power than everyone else. Ignoring rampant misconduct by the rich, conservatives whip the nation into anti-poor person frenzy with overblown charges of fraud, and use those charges as a pretext to further deny basic rights to low-income Americans, ranging from the right to vote to the right to obtain food stamp benefits.

Given all the massive Right-wing fear-mongering over supposed liberal schemes to rig the election by enabling large numbers of low-income (read: non-white) people to illegally vote, you’d never know that actual voter fraud is virtually non-existent in America.

According to a recent analysis by Lorraine Minnite, an expert on voting crime at Barnard College, (as quoted in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast), federal courts found only 24 voters guilty of fraud from 2002 to 2005, out of hundreds of millions of votes cast. “The claim of widespread voter fraud,” Minnite says, “is itself a fraud.”

Conversely, the conservative establishment has gone to great lengths to make it difficult for low-income Americans to register and cast votes. That is why the miniscule number of people who illegally vote is dwarfed by the tens of millions eligible people prevented or discouraged from voting.

Likewise, conservative howls about supposed widespread food stamps fraud mask a much more pervasive problem, namely that social service laws and bureaucracies are so punitive and Byzantine that they prevent and discourage tens of millions of low-income Americans from getting the food stamp benefits (recently re-named Supplemental Nutrition Assistance — SNAP — benefits) to which they are legally entitled.

Despite the soaring lines at food pantries and soup kitchens nationwide — and despite the reality that more than 35 million Americans (many of whom work or recently lost work) can’t afford enough food, nearly one in three people eligible for USDA-funded food stamp benefits fail to receive them. In comparison, I have never heard of so much as one person eligible for Social Security retirement benefits who did not start receiving them after turning 65. While both Social Security and food stamp benefits are funded by taxpayers, the government acts on the assumption that every Social Security applicant is virtuous and deserving (and therefore makes it easy for folks to get benefits) while assuming that every food stamp applicant is a potential crook (and makes it min-numbingly hard to receive and keep benefits).

Federal law, as well as extra rules piled on by states, counties, and cities, often make the process of applying for foods stamps a Kafka-esque nightmare. New York State’s handbook for administering the Food Stamp Program is 391 pages long. While the State has bragged that it recently reduced the application form from 16 to five pages, in New York City, even people who fill out the shorter form are still required to verbally provide caseworkers the answers to up to hundreds of questions. People are even asked if they owned funeral plots; In New York, if you owned one, that would not count against food stamps eligibility, but if you owned two, it could count against your eligibility. An information sheet printed by USDA used to encourage potential applications to apply for food stamps lists 27 different categories for the types of documents that an applicant might need to physically bring to a food stamps office to prove their eligibility. And that handout is an outreach tool that is supposed to encourage participation.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, food stamp applicants are required to provide finger images (electronic fingerprints) in four of the nation’s largest states (California, Texas, New York, and Arizona), further treating them like criminals. It is not coincidental that people never have to be finger-printed to obtain other types of USDA aid that goes to less poor (and often rich) people, such as farm subsidies, money to ranchers for conservation programs, and payments to rural business owners.

There are a lot of bad governmental policies out there, but few rise to the level of sheer stupidity as this one does. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, which has resisted the State’s attempt to roll back finger-imaging for working families, claims that the practice deters fraud and that it has no negative impact upon legitimate applicants. Neither claim is true. Even under the Bush administration, the USDA has found no proof that finger-printing significantly reduces fraud and has expressed worries that it may deter people from applying. The four states that do require finger-images have higher rates of payment error and lower rates of participation than those that don’t. It’s a lose-lose situation. For all those reasons, 46 of the nation’s 50 states don’t waste their tax dollars on such an inefficient and degrading system.

The Urban Institute found that, in one out of 23 cases, otherwise eligible people don’t apply solely due to finger-imaging requirements. New York City detected only 31 cases of suspected fraud thanks to fingerprinting in 2006. Given that about 1.1 million people in the city received food stamps, that meant that only one in 34,991 Food Stamp Program applicants were caught in the act of potentially committing fraud by finger-imaging. Thus, to seize possible fraud by only one in nearly 35,000 people, the City denied benefits to one in 23 actual hungry people.

There are a number of effective methods to fight fraud already in use, other than finger-
Imaging — such as computer matching. Fraud detection is important, but it is crucial to point out that, when large-scale fraud does occur in the Food Stamp Program (an occurrence far less common than 10 years ago), the perpetrators are usually food retailers (who fraudulently bill the government for non-existent customers) or government employees (who fabricate non-existent households). Duplicate cases created by individual food stamps recipients — the only type of fraud potentially detected by finger-imaging — comprises a relatively small percentage of government money lost due to fraud.

Still, Mayor Bloomberg — trying to get political credit for opposing so-called fraud — goes to absurd lengths to catch those 31 potential cases of fraud, spending $800,000 of scarce City tax dollars each year on finger-imaging. That’s right, the City spends $800,000 of its own money on a system that may prevent 31 people from getting benefits for which they are not entitled, even though it prevents 21,500 people from getting $31 million in federal benefits for which they are entitled.

Yet just like with fake warnings of voter fraud, trumped-up claims of food stamps fraud let conservatives change the subject. Let’s turn the subject back to voting rights and the need to ensure that all families have enough to eat.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joel-berg/voter-fraud-and-food-stam_b_139225.html

Who Decides What Poor People Eat?

Tags:agriculture, farmers markets, food pantries, food stamp benefits, hunger, President, rising obesity, soup kitchens.

In the October 9, 2008 New York Times Magazine, author Michael Pollan called on the next President to dramatically overhaul U.S. agriculture and food policy.

While I agree with many of Pollan’s continuing criticisms of a world food system dominated by just a handful of corporate agribusinesses, I am troubled by his continuing insensitivity to the realities faced by low-income Americans. My reply, to be printed in the October 26, 2008 magazine, speaks for itself:

Even though 35.5 million Americans live in households that can’t afford enough food and 25 million are forced to use food pantries and soup kitchens, Michael Pollan insists that food scarcity is no longer a problem in America and that rising food prices can be a positive development. He glosses over the reality that the nation’s rising obesity is directly tied to the inability of low-income Americans to physically obtain and economically afford less fattening, more nutritious foods.

Pollan’s suggestion that the federal government start preventing low-income families from using food-stamp benefits to purchase what he deems to be junk food is as class-biased as it is unworkable. In his book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” he admits that he and his son occasionally enjoy junk food and supersize Cokes. Who is he to decide that low-income American families could never again enjoy that same guilty pleasure?

I, too, would like to live in a nation in which everyone is able to buy nourishing food year-round at “four-season farmers’ markets.” But just as the reality is that most Americans don’t live in regions with year-round growing seasons, tens of millions of people on limited incomes simply can’t afford to buy the healthiest foods.

The answer is not, as Pollan suggests, to reduce their already meager choices but rather to ensure that they have wages high enough and a government safety net robust enough to give them the real-life ability to eat more nutritious foods.”

You can see my published letter, as well as an excellent letter from a previous boss of mine, former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman, here.

A few other related points:

• Pollan is wrong to claim that the WIC and School Lunch Programs value raw calorie counts over nutritional content. The foods purchased through the WIC program were recently re-calibrated to conform with nutritional guidelines established by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, offering fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, soymilk, and tofu as options for the first time.
• Under federal law, school lunches must be served in accordance with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, ensuring that less than 10 percent of calories come from saturated fat and requiring that each lunch provides at least one-third of the recommended levels of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, iron, and calcium. Yes, school lunches are still far from perfect, and yes parents and activists need to be vigilant in continuing to improve their nutritional quality, but we should at least acknowledge the nutritional advances. And we should remember how much worse off low-income children were before they had access to school lunches at all.
• With billions of dollars at stake, the battle to define junk food in the Food Stamp Program would be epic, with nutrition experts pitted against food-industry lobbyists, slugging it out one food item at a time. Are Raisinets junk food or fruit? Junk food, you say? Then how about a caramel apple? What about a Fig Newton? Wouldn’t it be better to let parents decide for themselves?
• It is also wrong to imply that the Food Stamp Program increases obesity. A major USDA study published in 2007 found no significant difference between the body mass index of people who received food stamps and people who were equally poor who did not.
• Micromanaging the lives of poor people—or anybody, for that matter—is patronizing and usually backfires. A far better strategy than limiting food choice with food stamps, banning fast food, or passing a “fat tax” is to increase the average benefit amount of food stamps so people can afford to buy the healthiest foods—which most food stamp recipients desperately want to do.

I discusss all these issues in greater detail in my book.

Homeless Numbers ‘Alarming’

USA Today reports: “Local authorities say the number of families seeking help has risen in Atlanta, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, New York, Phoenix, Portland, Seattle and Washington.”

See: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-21-homeless_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip&POE=click-refer

Presidential Candidates Discuss Domestic Hunger

Tags:2008 elections, Barack Obama, campaigns, hunger, John McCain, poverty, President.

The Obama/Biden campaign issued a detailed (two and a half page) statement this week on how they would end child hunger in the U.S. by 2005. Given that 35.5 million Americans – including more than 12 million children – live in homes that can’t afford enough food, this is a huge issue.

On May 4, 2008, Obama said on Meet the Press: “We’ve got rising food prices here in the United States. My top priority is making sure that people are able to get enough to eat.”

Some highlights of the Obama plan:

• Focusing first on the most vulnerable populations by ensuring that low-income senior citizens, infants, and toddlers have more access to federal nutrition assistance benefits;
• Enacting a serious, multi-pronged plan to slash U.S. poverty, which has soared under the Bush Administration;
• Eliminating child hunger by 2015 by providing all poor children with free school meals and expanding summer meals for low-income children; and
• Increasing support to community-based providers, such as food banks, soup kitchens, and food pantries, both faith-based and secular.

On the same day that Obama issued his statement on domestic hunger, the McCain campaign also issued the following statement: “John McCain supports fully funding food and nutrition programs and carrying out a robust Emergency Food Assistance Program. He supports indexing food stamps to reflect the current cost of living and he would fill shortfalls in the Emergency Food Assistance Program. John McCain also supports providing marketing tools for the fruit and vegetable industry focused on promoting healthier American diets.”

The McCain statement raises a few questions:

1. What does McCain mean by “fully funding?”
2. If McCain is for a “robust Emergency Food Assistance Program” (which aids food banks, soup kitchens and food pantries) why did he vote in 2005 (as part of GOP-sponsored across-the-board cuts) to cut that very program?  Why, in the same 2005 vote, did cut the WIC Program, which provides specially-targeted nutrition assistance and health advice to pregnant women and infants?
3. How in the world does McCain square his position that he is for across-the-board cuts in all non-homeland security domestic spending with his call for “fully funding” nutrition programs and indexing food stamps to inflation? (As an anti-hunger advocate, I certainly support increases in these programs but that could cost billions of dollars extra per year, which would seem to be at odds with “across-the-board cuts”)

I just report. You decide.

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