This morning, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien couldn’t stop gushing over how much she simply “loves” the story surrounding New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker’s stupid, illogical, nonsensical “Super Size Me” quest to see if he can live on food stamps for a full week.
All this week, Booker will attempt to eat on only $4 per day, which is what the average federal food stamp benefit works out to per person in New Jersey.
Three points that I but no one else in the media will ever make:
1. No one on food stamps lives on a $4 per day. Food stamps are meant to “supplement” food budgets. If those on foods stamps are not working, they’re almost always receiving other forms of government aid. This means they almost always have more money for food.
2. The end result of Booker’s silliness will only be that we need to increase federal spending on food stamps. Not that we need to get the bloated government out of the way of the economy so we can create the jobs needed to get tens of millions off food stamps.
3. A majority of the people on food stamps are not individuals. They’re families, which means the food stamp money goes further than the way Booker and his media fans are framing it. Any homemaker will tell you that $12 a day means more food for three people than $4 a day does for one.
None of this matters to Democrats or the media, though, because anything that moves the ball towards increasing federal spending and keeping people dependent on the government dole is always and forever virtuous. To these fools, the tragedy of poverty is never that people are in poverty but that the government isn’t doing enough to make poverty more comfortable.
*This story is part of the Big Journalism Live Blog, which you can bookmark here.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC
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