End food stamps, with a caveat

Abolish food stamps, on one condition: Congress would have to distribute the SNAP budget among other programs for the poor, for which many SNAP recipients also qualify.

The result would be a safety net as generous as today’s but considerably more efficient and transparent — and without the Faustian linkage to subsidies for agribusiness.

Supporters hail SNAP as a key income support for the working poor, seniors and the disabled, as well as an “automatic stabilizer” that bolsters demand during economic downturns and then recedes during recoveries.

That’s true — but the government already has programs, and bureaucracies, for each of those groups and policy goals. For example, a third of the seniors living on food stamps also get Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

And unlike food stamps, the other programs — SSI, the earned-income tax credit, unemployment insurance — deliver benefits in the form most poor people find most useful: cash.