Nip this one in the bud

Hey, Republicans! Please nominate this liar.--SS

Nip this one in the bud:

It’s panicky, I know, but I’ve seen this movie before.

Before every food stamp recipient in the country gets smeared and lied about by Newt Gingrich, before we start pretending there’s something to debate about Gingrich’s lie that food stamps are credit cards, and go wandering off into the he said/she said weeds where things are unknowable and mysterious, let’s just stipulate that there is A TON of easily accessible information on food stamps in all fifty states and at the federal level. Boat loads. Huge collections of facts and figures. It isn’t chaos out there in foodstampland. There isn’t a lot of gray. There isn’t a lot of discretion, and opinions don’t differ.

And we now give it away as cash—you don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything.

Food stamps aren’t credit cards. He’s lying.

Here’s a state, and here’s the federal government. That only scratches the surface, because we collect information on food stamps like we collect information on every state and federal program. There’s no excuse for anyone to repeat this lie, or treat it as debatable. If Gingrich continues to repeat it, and he will, he should be called out each and every time he does so. If he isn’t called out every time, then we’re in birth certificate and death panel territory, and we’ll never find our way back.

Here is a primer on food stamps that has many exciting facts and figures.

I think the “working poor” part of food stamps is always interesting. No one ever wants to talk about that, because then we’d have to admit that many, many people work at jobs that don’t pay enough to feed their families. Maybe we could have a roundtable on why that is, instead of making shit up.

I also like this. I’ll discuss this anytime. Doesn’t get talked about NEARLY enough. It’s from 2005, so well before the Age Of Obama:

Rural Americans disproportionately rely on the Food Stamp Program to help purchase food for a healthy diet. Based on our analysis of data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), 22 percent of the nation’s population lived in nonmetropolitan or “rural” areas in 2001, but a full 31 percent of food stamp beneficiaries lived there. Overall, 7.5 percent of the nation’s rural population relied on food stamps, compared with 4.8 percent of urban residents.

There’s also an “elderly people on food stamps” sector that Gingrich, noted policy expert, might want to learn about before he goes wandering off all crazy with the food stamp lies, because he’s already announced he’s targeting the elderly with these lies.