5 questions SNAP skeptics should actually be asking

I don’t judge people who are skeptical of the government. We should be able to question, in good faith, what the government is doing with our tax dollars. We should evaluate the programs and initiatives they fund against their stated goals, assessing them on a quantitative and qualitative basis.

My first instinct when someone questioning SNAP brings up anything along the lines of fraud or “deservedness” is to listen. I want to learn about why and how someone has formed their opinion.

This was my approach a few months back when discussing SNAP with one of my representatives in the North Carolina legislature. I heard a familiar second-hand story: a constituent had shared seeing a person use a combination of EBT cards to buy a grocery cart full of food, much of which was more costly.

I can understand how hearing stories like this would shape a person’s opinion that SNAP is riddled with fraud being committed by recipients. What I try to do in that case is present a counterpoint: that SNAP is audited thoroughly every year and the data shows recipient fraud is incredibly rare.

Last month, the Government Accountability Office released a report that directly undermines another common critique of social safety nets more broadly: that they enable adults who would otherwise be working to sit at home and leech off of taxpayers.

The GAO report analyzed data from 15 agencies in 11 states. It found that more than 71 percent of nondisabled, nonelderly SNAP recipients work full-time. In fact, many of them work more than 50 hours per week.

What’s more interesting is where these people work. Most are in the private sector. There were 46 companies, representing about a third of all companies in the analysis, appearing in the top-25 employers of SNAP and Medicaid recipients in at least two of the 11 states analyzed. Of those 46 companies, 17 were among the 50 largest Fortune 500 companies as measured by total number of employees.

We know from previous GAO and market-research firm studies that Walmart is one of the worst offenders when it comes to relying on social safety programs to sustain its workforce. Compounding the issue is that Walmart is also one of the largest beneficiaries of SNAP funds spent, meaning there’s a closed loop of corporate welfare in which taxpayers subsidize both Walmart’s low wages and its revenue.

If corporations like Walmart or Amazon are profiting billions of dollars, why are taxpayers helping subsidize their employees’ wages?

There are many corporations experiencing significant windfalls at the same time their employees are increasingly relying on SNAP to feed themselves or Medicaid for basic healthcare. There is a point where sub-living wages cease to be market rates and act as a government-underwritten business model.

Why are individuals relying on social safety nets penalized while corporations are not?

A person needing a small sum from SNAP monthly to keep food on the table needs to clear a host of bureaucratic hurdles to get and retain benefits. Fast-food chains, nationwide retailers, and other large corporations with pay structures such that their employees can’t meet their basic needs are not faced with that same face no such bureaucratic friction.

If safety net programs like SNAP exist to catch people as they fall during market failures, why are they permanently propping up the business models of thriving industries?

These numbers are not blips or temporary anomalies. The GAO has been reporting on SNAP’s incidental corporate welfare functions for years. Data shows that retail, food prep, and logistics have locked in these exact occupational concentrations for decades. Skeptics should be questioning an economic equilibrium in which highly profitable sectors rely on taxpayer-funded programs as a permanent part of their strategy.

How did unpredictable scheduling become an acceptable loophole for corporate labor budgeting?

Hours can fluctuate significantly week-to-week on gig platforms or even in retail or food service. Companies that maintain a revolving door of schedules under 35 hours, actively preventing workers from clearing the economic self-sufficiency threshold, force taxpayer programs to absorb the negative externalities of this volatile labor management.

Why is exponentially more time spent auditing the grocery carts of SNAP recipients than auditing the compensation packages of executives running companies who pay them poverty wages?

The political rhetoric of “waste, fraud, and abuse” is exclusively applied in the hyper-fixated policing of the behavior of poor individuals. Rarely do we direct similar scrutiny at large employers whose payrolls need taxpayer intervention to keep their workers fed.

For skepticism to be healthy, a skeptic needs to be open-minded. They need to be able to take new information and adjust their opinions accordingly.

If we truly care about fiscal responsibility, taxpayer efficiency, and the integrity of public programs, our skepticism can no longer punch down. It’s time we turned our gaze upward — from the checkout lane to the boardroom — and asked ourselves why we are spending so much energy policing the grocery carts of the working poor while writing a blank check to the corporations keeping them there.

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