Gary Simpson utterly duped by Cato Institute – Or – Are we paying legislators too much for too little actual thinking ?
Genius, Gary Simpson today parrots a Cato Institute report that basically says that we are treating people on welfare too well. Not the corporations on welfare taking down the big buck in the form of tax breaks, mind you. The actual poor people on food-stamps that the Republicans keep saying have too much money.
My point falls in line with the conclusion of the Cato report, that “the current welfare system provides such a high level of benefits that it acts as a disincentive for work,” and that “recipients are likely to choose welfare over work, thus increasing long-term dependence.”
I’ll leave it to that left wing outfit, the Wall Street Journal , to completely demolish the Cato Institutes premise that we have created “welfare dependency” (spoiler alert, we haven’t. “According to the latest report on welfare dependency (covering 2009, the worst year of the recession), about 4.6% of the population received more than half of its income from the three main means-tested welfare programs:
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), food stamps and supplemental security income. That’s up from 2007, when about 3.5% were dependent on welfare.”)
My point here is that, being so easily duped, Simpson reveals himself to be a dullard. He has apparently been disabled (mentally) from the overly generous government payouts he has been pocketing all of these years. Simpson’s powers of critical thinking are clearly being sapped by the overly generous welfare you and I are paying for. I think the only fair thing to do, the only just thing to do, is to release Simpson and idiots like him from his debilitating dependance on the government teet.
Is this the same Gary Simpson who was chief of the state police when he was called early one morning and informed that a state senator had been stopped and fail a drunk driving test and had his troopers squash the report and allow the offender to go free? If so he has been on the states teat for years.
Nope, not even close.
This is Simpson’s tale of cluelessness as it appeared in the NJ today.
This $30,375 that he wants people to be shocked at presumes that the eligible cohort (single mom with two kids) gets to take advantage of every program they are eligible for. Which even the CATO report says doesn’t happen. Then they go on to add EITC to that pool of benefits — not paying any attention to the irony here. You need to have income to report on a tax return (for the Feds, at least) in order to get the EITC. So they are already assuming that their cohort has some employment — so how on earth can these programs be a disincentive to working?
Did you know that the Koch Brothers are “founding shareholders” of CATO? They had a big falling out with the Board recently, but the Koch Bros involved in this group clarifies a very great deal about their politics. They are actively working at pushing the American worker down the path to serfdom.
I don’t get how Gary Simpson could be so easily duped into putting his name to that hack work. He has no integrity or no brains. Although it is possible that he has neither.
He has no integrity or no brains.
He couldn’t be a Republican otherwise, I’m thinking.