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.
Starvation killing the people that fail to generate wealth trims expenses. Fear of losing your livelihood makes the rest more pliable. In the short term, it absolutely is what a capitalist would want: to increase their own profit.
However, in the long term, a smaller workforce eventually blunts the threat of firing and replacing unruly workers. But the long term doesn’t matter as much to the individual capitalists: their allegiance is not to sustaining the system, but to their own enrichment. They just need it to work long enough for them to make as much money as they can.
That’s also why they jump so eagerly on the promise of AI replacing workers: If it turns out true, it would be an immense boon both for profit and control. It would offset the long-term downsides while exaggerating the short-term gains. And if it fails, we’re back to the status quo ante, the long-term damage being borne by someone else.
Namely, cancer.