If you are a poor person with roommates who splits the grocery bill or takes turns cooking meals, you’re basically not eligible for food stamps. That is, unless you lie.
Under federal law, a poor person and their equally poor roommates who do bulk grocery orders that they divide evenly is a single “household,” a term that includes people who live together and either split grocery bills or share cooking responsibilities — even if they are unrelated and even if they are not subsidizing each other. Therefore, eligibility for food stamps rests on the poverty of not only the applicant but also every roommate you may ever share food with. So if one of your roommates isn’t dirt poor — sorry, out of luck. (If you live in a “commercial boarding house,” you’re just disqualified entirely, never mind that this is also a smart thing to do to save money.)
This, believe it or not, is a huge improvement over the system we had in 1971, where Congress expressly forbade any household that wasn’t a family unit from being eligible for food stamps (the Supreme Court ultimately found that the requirement wasn’t justified). It’s now possible to get food stamps as a “household” of strangers if all of you are poor enough. Here’s the definition on the state application:
The intent is probably to block someone who is, say, living with a higher-income boyfriend or girlfriend who pays most of the bills. But the rules don’t consider whether the higher-income roommate is actually subsidizing the lower-income roommate in any way. Buy bulk rice and beans together and split the bill 50-50? You’re a household unit.
The government does not, to my knowledge, ever check whether you share food with your roommates. In my experience, the people administering these programs don’t want to deny food stamps to poor people with roommates.
In practice, the people this policy directly harms are those who are unwilling to lie or simply unaware that the application, the government, and everyone involved in producing this form are silently begging you to just not mention your roommates.
When I go on rants about this, which I do frequently, I sometimes encounter the perspective that because it’s not really enforced, this isn’t a big deal. Surely, people assume, anyone who is starving will just not mention their roommates?
But the roommate rule is just one slightly obscure example of a wider phenomenon deeply embedded in many parts of American life: we optimize public policy for people willing to lie, in ways both big and small. We load our systems with rules that are hardly enforced, taxing the honest and rewarding the fibbers.
Any overly complicated system for benefiting the underprivileged will instead, inevitably and without exception, benefit the people who know how to navigate it. Unwritten rules are vectors of inequality.
Blocking poor people from getting food stamps for the sin of having roommates is just one of many ways that unwritten rules serve as a tax on honesty.
In 2009, then-high school senior, Zohran Mamdani claimed to be “Black or African American,” on a college application. Mamdani, now the likely next mayor of New York City, is as African-American as Elon Musk. While he was born in Uganda, one wonders if this particular racial self-identification was because Mamdani expected to benefit from affirmative action programs and was willing to stretch the truth a bit to qualify for them.
Many of us who also participated in the elite-college-admissions rat race, interpreted his self labeling in a mendacious light because we know people who did the same thing. One survey found that 34% of white American college applicants admitted to lying1 about their ancestry on college applications; another survey of students of all backgrounds found that 61% lied on their college applications about something; of those, 39% lied about their ancestry.
Another example is mortgage fraud. When Trump fired Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, he accused her of mortgage fraud — which is, apparently, commonplace.2 One 2015 paper estimates that important misrepresentations can be found in 7%-14% of applications for a mortgage. A 2023 paper looking at owner-occupancy fraud (the kind that Lisa Cook is accused of) ended up estimating that fully one-third of people buying properties to rent out are falsely claiming on their mortgages that they intend to live there.
I am in favor of Fed independence and against selective prosecution, so I’m not amused by the administration going after Cook, particularly without an evenhanded effort to root out everyone who committed such frauds. But it has not escaped me that Cook’s selective prosecution is only possible because the underlying crime is so widespread — and there should not be a form of fraud that is widespread and rarely prosecuted! That’s just a subsidy for dishonest people at the expense of honest ones, and it lays the groundwork for charges that are transparently pretextual.
In some cases, I’d like us to lift ourselves out of this dishonesty-rewarding equilibrium by getting stricter and enforcing the rules every single time. There should never be an easy, widespread way to get ahead by doing mortgage fraud.
But in other cases, I’d like us to move in the opposite direction: If the rules are widely ignored, it’s probably because the rules are badly designed. We allow widespread rulebreaking as a workaround in place of actually fixing them. But while rulebreaking might be better than enforcing stupid rules, it’s a lot worse than changing them.
Most accessory dwelling units built from 2016 to 2020 in San Jose were built “informally” — that is, without having gone through permitting. I don’t think we need better enforcement that would prevent this housing from getting built — we need fewer rules for people building much-needed housing!3
The U.S. is not a high-trust society. This is a long-running trend that is partly about scandals like Watergate or Bush lying about WMDs, but it’s also partly about the small, constant reminders that a lot of the rules aren’t “really” the rules — that plenty of people you know are getting ahead by lying. And worse, that the government expects citizens to lie.
These snares are everywhere, but they aren’t that hard to fix. The Biden administration made several rule changes of this kind to make Supplemental Security Income less of a nightmare to qualify for and maintain eligibility for.
Imagine that you’re severely disabled, can’t work, qualify for SSI, and live in your sister’s basement. Your sister sometimes invites you to family meals. Should your benefits be cut to reflect that you are receiving the “income” of your sister’s meals? Before 2024, the answer was “yes” — punishing anyone who would admit to sitting down to dinner with family. Under the new rules, you only see an automatic one-third reduction in your benefits because of living with your sister if your sister pays for all of your food; if she only pays for some of it, you can instead negotiate with the state how much “income” living in the basement should count as.4
I’m getting into into the weeds because I think most Americans have no idea how complicated these programs are, how many restrictive requirements they impose, how many things you’d think are “obviously” allowed that aren’t, and how often we put people in a position where if they’re truthful about occasionally eating dinner with their family then they can’t pay their bills. But I also want to emphasize that we can fix those laws and build a system that isn’t hostile to honesty, generosity, or common sense.
Back in 2021, I had high hopes when the Biden administration’s Office of Personnel Management announced it would revisit some old guidelines that said anyone who admitted to using marijuana — even if it was many years before — was considered “unfit” for federal employment.
Now, those laws were always stupid. I’m not a fan of marijuana, but drug use years or decades in the past shouldn’t be relevant to a job application in the present. These laws also had a long-standing workaround: Most people who had used marijuana in college simply lied about having ever done so.
But the administration, it seemed, was saying that this was no longer necessary. Some staffers then disclosed that they’d used marijuana.
Then, at least five staffers who disclosed were fired, and others were reassigned to remote roles. The problem, apparently, was that while the administration was thinking about relaxing rules about past weed use for federal employment, it was still regarded as a barrier to a security clearance.
This is very far from being the worst decision made by the Biden administration, but it’s an example of a phenomenon that I absolutely despise and that I think is fundamentally at odds with a free, liberal, and high-trust society. We set high — stupidly, counterproductively high — standards and then minimally enforce them because full enforcement would be a disaster. So, almost everyone just lies.
Then, the people you punish are the people who are unwilling to lie, or who don’t know the rules about what kinds of lies are “normal” and what kinds are seriously out of bounds. Those less likely to know these informal rules are not a randomly selected group of people — the more connections you have in D.C., the more you know what “not to mention.”
But lying is bad! Selecting for liars is bad! This may end up looking sort of similar to the result you’d get if you just had a reasonable policy in the first place, but it’s actually a lot worse — you screened out everyone who wasn’t willing to be dishonest.
Actually enforcing the policy that recent marijuana use is disqualifying for public service would be totally unworkable, as the government would lose tons of qualified people overnight (this policy is particularly challenging for efforts to recruit programmers). The government is saved from rationalizing its policies by the fact that most people subject to them will just lie — and the only people who get hurt are the ones who weren’t willing to.
Two years ago, I worked with the city of Oakland to get approval for a homeschool co-op. It operated out of one of the families’ homes in a mixed-use urban neighborhood with plenty of small businesses. Along the way, I ran into a strange rule that prohibited putting up a small wooden sign that “direct(s) attention to a commodity, service, business, or profession” without filling out a 15-page form and paying a fee. Most people weren’t even aware of this requirement.
But now, every time I walk through the neighborhood, every small wooden sign is a reminder of the honesty tax, the gap between the written rules and the real rules. And a reminder that it’s the honest who pay the price.
This survey gave numbers broadly in line with the numbers from other surveys, and I know people who personally engaged in such exaggerations, but I don’t want to share it without a caveat: This survey is not super high quality, and if the rates of lying about being Native American were as high as it suggests, there would be more (supposed) Native Americans on college campuses than there are. I think this phenomenon is disturbingly widespread, but these surveys almost certainly overstate it.
This one was news to me. I knew college students were playing fast and loose with their genealogies, but I don’t know anyone who would straight-up lie in a contract for millions of dollars. At least I think I don’t.
Or take the high rates of government overpayments for free and reduced-price school lunches (that is, payments when an applicant should not have actually qualified). This one is a product of the rules for eligibility being really confusing, meaning that lots of people end up answering dishonestly or wrongly getting denied assistance they needed. Here we gain absolutely nothing from fencing people out. Kids are required to be at school; schools should be required to feed them. States that have adopted universal lunch policies cut down on confusion about eligibility, dishonesty about eligibility, and enforcement costs.
While I’m at it, the Biden administration made some other changes to SSI that I deeply approve of. Another rule change — ultimately finalized in 2024 — lets your household qualify as a “public assistance household” (which means that help the household receives doesn’t get subtracted from your benefits) as long as you and another family member receive public assistance. Additionally, SNAP now counts as a benefit you can receive. This may all sound incredibly abstruse, but for people on these programs, these rules cause so much heartbreak, headache, and limitations on how you’re allowed to survive. And you can just fix them!
I think it’s also worth highlighting how this intersects with neurodivergence; there is a whole class of people who are systematically disadvantaged in these situations due to, for example, autism.
Another example is unemployment benefits. At least in my state, to receive the benefits you're required to apply for at least 3 jobs per week that you reasonably think you're qualified for, and to accept any interviews or job offers you receive. I took this literally, so when I was really depressed one week and didn't manage to apply to any jobs, I was honest about it. Not only was a denied my benefits that week, I got a call from the state where I was yelled at and required to go to a three hour job search training. This training was clearly meant for extremely disadvantaged people who didn't know the basics of finding a job, not young professionals who had an off week. It was a complete waste of time.
Of course I realized later that what I was "supposed" to do in that situation was quick apply to 3 BS jobs I wasn't qualified for and just report those, because nobody was going to audit my job applications.
That said, I think the reason we end up with policies that de facto expect lying is because there is no set of rules that, if enforced literally, would make people happy. With unemployment benefits, for example, most people don't want to deny them to a responsible adult who just had one bad week where they didn't apply to any jobs. But most people also don't want unemployment benefits going to people who treat it as a government subsidized vacation and put zero effort into finding another job. I don't know how you formalize that in official policy, since the line between a responsible adult and someone taking advantage of the system is inherently fuzzy and subjective. So the equilibrium is we have a tacit agreement that normal adults can lie, and we keep the rules on the books so that we can go after the egregious cases, or at least be able to judge them for violating the rules even if there is no enforcement. It's not great, but I can see why, politically, we end up here.