Don't Let Them Eat Cake or They'll Breed

"My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. You're facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don't think too much further than that. And so what you've got to do is you've got to curtail that type of behavior. They don't know any better." -- South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer (R), quoted by the Greenville News, comparing poor people to stray animals.

Via Josh, from The State:

In South Carolina, 58 percent of students participate in the free and reduced-price lunch program.

Bauer is running for Governor. He supports mandatory drug tests for anyone receiving public assistance. I support drug tests for politicians (just another form of public assistance). He supports mandatory attendance of PTA meetings. I support mandatory civics schooling for Republicans who apparently don't realize that under the welfare reforms, people on public assistance have to get jobs, which are subsidized (cheap workers for corporations: see Dick Clark segment from Farenheit 911). Many of them have two jobs, and their bosses wouldn't be too happy with them missing work for a PTA meeting.

But this guy was just getting warmed up!

"You see, for the first time in the history of this country, we've got more people voting for a living than we do working for a living."

According to the BLS, there were 131,997,000 non-farm workers in the US in 2009 (note that there were 131,785,000 at the end of Clinton's term--way to go W, guess those tax cuts didn't trickle down after all...).  In November, 2008, the unemployment rate was 6.7%, with 10.3 million people being listed as unemployed.  According to the New York Times (note the information about having to work for the money after the Welfare Reform Act), the number of people getting cash assistance in November 08 was about 4 million. The number of people getting food stamps (which is the main way you get free or reduced lunches) was about 30 million.

Now I'm going to do a little math (note, I was a free lunch kid for a while). There were about 212 million voting age people in the US then. I'm not going to spend all day on this finding obscure exit polling data on how many people who voted actually work, but let's do some basic math here with some assumptions that are fair to Mr. Bauer.

Just over 130 million people voted in the 08 election. Even if only half of them had jobs (and this is unfair to homemakers, farmers, etc), then that's 65 million people with jobs who voted. Even if all unemployed, public assistance recipients, and food stamp recipients voted, then only 44 million "welfare recipients" voted, so, Mr. Bauer, even with these very generous assumptions, is full of shit.

No word on whether this asshole got free lunches when he was a kid.