It's funny that SNAP (food stamps) and WIC (Women Infants and Children) grow and shrink differently over time. SNAP responds to the economy, growing during recessions when it's needed most and then falling when the economy improves and it's needed less. It declined during the expansion of the aughts but then increased by nearly 20% during the pandemic.
WIC, by contrast, doesn't respond to the economy at all. It grew steadily through 2009 and has declined ever since. It didn't grow during the Great Recession and didn't even grow during the pandemic years. It's now 30% smaller than it was in 2010.
Any explanations for this? Does it have something to do with the way these two programs are funded?
One is mostly connected to the birth rate while the other is everyone else?
Also, is this thousands? Households? What?
Almost certainly thousands. Kevin really needs to label his y-axes…
Email and ye shall find correction 🙂
SNAP has a lower income cutoff than WIC (125% FPL vs. 185%). SNAP also is cut off if your bank account is above a certain level. SNAP also takes into account housing costs. All those combined probably help explain the small differences in change in slope you're honing in on.
Births have dropped about 15% since 2007, so there is less WIC, which is for families with kids under 5.
Specifically, WIC is for "people who are pregnant, people who have recently been pregnant, infants, and children up to their 5th birthday" - https://myfamily.wic.ca.gov/Content/Documents/WelcomeToWIC.pdf . So yes, demographics are a huge factor regarding the total payments under the program.
Have their been substantial changes in how fraud is committed (and then suppressed) in these programs?
We know that Medicare fraud has at times been utterly immense, like 30% of the program. (At least that's the number I remember from _Lying for Money_.)
If similar numbers swelled into WIC, then were suppressed as the fraud mechanisms were disabled, that would explain much of the discrepancy.
Most of the fraud in WIC comes from stores charging more to WIC recipients for the item than it retails for to the general public. (Actually, most of the Medicare fraud is also on the provider side: providers billing the government for services not performed.)
There are people who allege their families are bigger and/or their incomes are lower than they really are and then sell their WIC vouchers, but seriously, who the fck wants to buy a WIC voucher? You have to buy specific items, limited generally to dairy products, eggs, breads, cereals, pasta, tortillas, beans, canned fish, produce, juice, and baby formula. Literally, only the last item on that list has any sort of resale value to anybody else, so large scale fraud by which a buyer of lots of WIC vouchers would amass vast quantities of, say, beans, vegetables and canned fish just sounds ridiculous on its face.
People do defraud WIC, but jeez... it's usually a real family buying a fake family's WIC vouchers at a discount so they can feed their kids. And given all the restrictions on their use, including having to check out WIC items out separately so that everyone else in line can judge you, it just isn't attractive to all but the most desperate grocery shoppers. Worrying about people defrauding WIC is like worrying about kids defrauding the lunch lady: just give them the damn food and worry about cutting some other part of the government's budget like perhaps all those hundred-million dollar tax breaks for "job creators" that we seem to always have money for in the Treasury.
The reason WIC is decreasing is that BABIES are decreasing. How hard is that to understand? Chill with the insane conspiracy theories. There are intelligent people who read this blog.
You are lost. Faux News is at https://www.foxnews.com/
SNAP fraud rates were at about 7% in the 90s, and have dropped to about 2%.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/snap-error-rates-remain-near-all-time-lows
That probably explains some of the issue that I found most striking, the flatness from the 70s till 2010; fake participants were being removed at the same rate that real participants (growing population) were being added?
I can't find a similar graph for WIC, but various articles in the 90s talk about fraud problems associated with the paper handling, and how upcoming EBT and cards should help with that.
BTW nothing says "We have nothing to be ashamed of" like immediately attacking anyone who even asks about the issue of fraud - we see the same response in, eg, military contractors accused of padding the numbers, an immediate leap to "how dare you question my patriotism".
Never a good look, never an adult look.
The reason it was on my mind was having recently read Dan Davies new book _Lying for Money_ where he talks about this in a large variety of contexts. Feel free to attack Dan as not being socialist enough for your tastes, I'm sure he will appreciate it.
I guess that goes with the territory of aggressively assuming you know what's in the minds of other people – I was primarily interested in striking features of the curves in the distant past, how one is so flat while the other grows so rapidly then flattens; not anything related to modern politics.
I still don't have a good feel for this. There are claims that SNAP administrators see (or at least used to, up to 20 years ago) their job as "how can we say no", whereas WIC administrators saw their job at the time as "how can we say yes". (Interestingly, the very same features that make the WIC administrators so willing to help have been criticized by feminists as "paternalistic" so...)
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/723365
Real on the web home based work to make more than $14k. Last month I made $15738 from this home job. Very simple and easy to do and procuring from this are just awesome.
For more detail visit the given interface.. http://incomebyus.blogspot.com
WIC also sucks and a lot of stores don't accept it. You can only use WIC for a very specific set of food items and the cashier has to help you fill out a form. I can't remember the last time I was behind someone in a store who was using WIC.
We should replace both WIC and SNAP with money and trust people to make reasonable decisions. /rant
At least in California, WIC doesn't require a form - those in the program use a debit card and a PIN - http://www.wichealth.org/Member/Resource/Index/6090
You do have to separate out items that can be purchased with a WIC card from those that can't. There is an app for phones that can scan grocery store item barcodes to tell if the item is covered by the WIC program, or not. (See URL above.)
And do what when some don’t make reasonable decisions?
Nothing. The same thing we do when we give "job creators" hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives and Paycheck Protection "loans" and whatever to do something and then usually fail to claw it back when they don't do it.
It costs a lot to hire an army of enforcers to make sure everyone on assistance is using their money "wisely"... and, most of the time, the amount you need to spend on enforcement to guarantee less than 1% waste or fraud exceeds the amount you're spending on the actual waste or fraud anyway.
Just say fck it, and give people money if they need it (or don't)... but the whole "we have to make sure it's being spent wisely" argument is bullshit. We don't require that argument to be satisfied when we're shoveling money out the door to rich people... and whatever we're doing for rich people, we can do for everyone else too.
I was thinks more along the lines of when someone takes say the money from WIC and then doesn’t use it for their infants or children. Rather than someone with neither defrauding the system.
At the same time, “just give them money” seems to require a willingness to be willing to see the recipient “fail” and perhaps fail with extreme prejudice as it were.
s/thinks/thinking/ …
This is yet another example of Americans being unwilling to learn from other countries. In Canada, for instance, government does, in fact, just give poor people money. There are also special programs to help people who simply can't handle money, but only a small number of people need those programs. It works quite well.
It has everything to do with the way the programs are administered.
SNAP is mandatory, WIC is discretionary. WIC, like TANF, has its outlays limited by annual appropriations; SNAP has to pay out to all eligible and approved beneficiaries. So WIC tends to see spending grow with inflation or thereabouts while SNAP is countercyclical.
My guesses: Declining birth rate and the shift in childbearing age, fewer teenagers giving birth, more older women who possibly have more resources: