Last week, USDA released a report about trafficking in SNAP benefits. Trafficking is when people sell their SNAP credits, rather than use them to buy food. And apparently it's on the rise, as the conservative Weekly Standard reported with the headline, "Food Stamp Trafficking Up 30% From 2008 to 2011." A 30% increase—that sounds bad! But look a little more closely. Thanks to that increase in the fraud rate, trafficking is all the way up to 1.3%. And while that’s higher than a few years ago, when the rate was just 1.0%, it’s still significantly lower than it was in the 1990s, when the rate peaked at 3.8%.
Source: New Republic, 8/16/13, SNAP Fraud
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