Apr 27, 2015 3 min read

Government bureaucracy get your dander up? Feel like your tax dollars are being frittered away on endeavors that don’t add up to much? Then you should be happy with the following news: As of Monday, Pennsylvanians who apply for food stamps will no longer be subject to an asset test to determine their eligibility for the program.

And it will actually save taxpayers money.

Instituted in 2012 during the administration of Gov. Tom Corbett, the asset test was designed to root out waste and fraud, but did little more than burden caseworkers, deprive people of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to which they were entitled, and cost the commonwealth $3.5 million per year.

Fulfilling a campaign pledge to do away with the asset test, Gov. Tom Wolf was able to make the change without legislative approval. His spokesman, Jeffrey Sheridan, said last week that when the program was in effect, fewer than 1 percent of food stamp applicants were denied because they had assets greater than the meager total allowed, and the asset test ended up booting people out of the program who had small amounts of money in savings accounts or even owned burial plots. It’s also estimated that 111,000 households in Pennsylvania were denied food stamps over the last three years because they didn’t have documents at hand to verify their assets, and that included senior citizens and individuals encumbered by disabilities.

The dollar amount of SNAP benefits that could have gone to residents who were denied them totaled $1.5 million, Acting Human Services Secretary Ted Dallas said last week. “That is not an efficient practice, and that is not something that ultimately helps folks make that transition to self-sufficiency.”

Even if they are not among the 1.8 million residents who receive food stamps, Pennsylvanians should be relieved that this wasteful, time-consuming requirement has been eliminated. It all too closely echoed initiatives undertaken in many states to have recipients of public benefits take drug tests, even though they have nabbed precious few drug users and the tests cost more to administer than any possible savings that could be realized by denying benefits to drug users. But these efforts weren’t launched based on solid research or evidence – they were put in motion on the assumption that many people who receive public benefits are lazy and trying to defraud the system, or that they would be motivated to find employment if they were forced to fly through more hoops and subjected to additional humiliation.

In other words, they’re designed to denigrate and stigmatize the poor.

At the same time Pennsylvania has dropped the asset test, legislators in Missouri considered a bill that would have barred those receiving SNAP benefits from purchasing steak or seafood, and their counterparts in neighboring Kansas sent a bill to the desk of Gov. Sam Brownback barring food-stamp recipients from using their benefits on cruise ships, psychics or at casinos, as if someone scraping by with three jobs is going to book a discount trip to the Turks and Caicos Islands because Mercury is in Retrograde. As Liz Scott of the Center on Policy and Budget Policies told Daily Beast columnist Eleanor Clift, “This is not about a real problem, this is not a public policy decision. This is all about politics and creating a wrong impression that public welfare recipients can’t spend their money wisely.”

These laws also create the impression – though it wouldn’t be an incorrect one – that some lawmakers cannot craft policy wisely.