Cracking down on thieving retailers is of course a good idea, but, really? Going after SNAP beneficiaries who try to convert their meager benefits to an even more meager amount of cash? I imagine some people who do this are using the money for Things We Officially Frown Upon, but some are probably trying to pay their damn bills.
My guess is that this crackdown is hardly a huge program, so it’s not as if loads of resources are being diverted to make life more difficult for the poor. Beyond that, though, Obama seems to instinctively get something that the rest of us lefties probably ought to appreciate more: like it or not, if you want the public to support government programs, you need to make sure they’re administered effectively. That’s doubly or triply true of social welfare programs, which are easily demagogued even in the best of times. If anything, liberals who support these programs ought to be more concerned about rooting out fraud and improving efficiency than conservatives, who’d be just as happy to see them simply go away.
This is fundamentally a Charlie Peters-ish neoliberal insight, and neoliberalism has obviously taken a lot of lumps over the past decade. Some of them were deserved, some weren’t. Either way, this particular insight is one worth holding onto.