SNAP: Too Much Of A Crappy Thing

There's really not much out there that's more annoying than the burgeoning genre of articles about food stamp recipients living high on the SNAP lifestyle or condescendingly informing people that they could be doing a better job of allocating their scarce SNAP dollars. So absolutely give Latoya Peterson's righteous indignation a good read before coming back here for some technocratic musings.

The basic problem with SNAP, as with much of American public policy, is that we're simultaneously trying to do public service delivery and income redistribution.

Food is really cheap in the United States of America. A family looking to sustain itself in a healthy manner can do so at extremely low cost through bulk purchases of dried beans, rolled oats, frozen vegetables, rice, and fruit juice. A program that was really narrowly aimed at preventing malnutrition among low-income Americans could be both extremely low cost and extremely prescriptive.

A separate issue is that being poor is a sucky experience as witnessed by, say, my proposed diet of bulk purchases of dried beans, rolled oats, frozen vegetables, rice, and fruit juice. By taking money away from people who have lots of money and giving it to people who have very little money, it is possible to effectuate large increases in the quality of life of poor people while doing extremely little to reduce the quality of life of the rich people. But when the point is to improve quality of life, a prescriptive attitude is pointless. Fun is often "bad for you" and different people's tastes differ. The correct thing to give people in order to make their loves more fun is money. People with more money in their pocket might want to spend it on Fritos or Perrier or a cell phone or beer or an Egg McMuffin or shoes or video games or movie tickets or whatever.

But American political culture is generally hostile to the idea of improving poor people's lives by giving them more money. So you wind up with a lot of things like SNAP. Viewed very narrowly as a nutrition program, it's not that well targeted and it costs more than it needs to. But viewed from the point of view of the overall quality of life of low-income Americans it's incredibly stingy.