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.
The Tax Evasion and Avoidance of billionaires is many times the entire budget of this kind of thing.
You could literally make up for 100% fraud in things like food stamp by making somebody like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos pay the same effective tax rate as everybody else.
Even if these claims from the far-right of widespread fraud and abuses in social security were true, they would still be like distracting people from a raging forest fire by waving a sparkler.
We just need to implement something like a 1% wealth tax for any entity (people or businesses) with net assets over say $5M. Having more than that has minimal justified purpose