The US Department of Agriculture has spent the past week notifying people that the country is (allegedly) overrun by individuals who are fraudulently claiming SNAP benefits, while (allegedly) driving luxury vehicles.
“In just ONE state, 14,000 individuals receiving SNAP benefits were driving LUXURY VEHICLES!” Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins posted on X last week. The official USDA account made similar claims, which were then amplified by figures like Senator Ted Cruz and Senator Rand Paul.
Those numbers are questionable at best. For one thing, the report they come from doesn’t name the state where thousands of people are allegedly buying Ferraris while using government money to buy food. For another, that report doesn’t include any explanation of its methodology.
There are lots of things that seem “obvious,” but are actually wrong. The idea that you have to means-test aid to avoid “abuse” (according to some presupposed definition of “abuse” that ought to itself be debatable, BTW) may or may not be one of them, but what is definitive is that you’d have to be a moron to not even be willing to think about it first.