“I’d go to, like, six different schools in one year. We were on welfare, and my mom never ever worked.” —Eminem
During the Republican Presidential Debates, Newt Gingrich referred to President Obama as the, “Food Stamp President.” That was last week. Yet, over two years ago, Wyatt Emmerich, Publisher for the Northside Sun based in Jackson, Mississippi posited an editorial where his underlying thesis was, “a one-parent family of three making $14,500 a year (minimum wage) has more disposable income than a family making $60,000 a year.” (See Emmerich’s Editorial in its entirety, Here)
In his analysis Emmerich states that it only took him a couple of hours to check the numbers he used, attributing his query to internet searches as almost all welfare programs post their data on Web sites where one can call up “benefits calculators.” Emmerich states, “Just plug in your income and family size and, presto, your benefits are automatically calculated!”
Emmerich continues to tell us, “I looked at what our country spends on welfare at a national level. Backing out Social Security, the U.S. spends about $750 billion a year on welfare. The U.S. has about 120 million households. If 25 million get welfare (20 percent), that comes to about $30,000 per family. This figure pretty much backs up my analysis.”
| Money Earned in a Year | $3,625 | $14,500 | $30,000 | $60,000 |
| Payroll and Federal Income Taxes | (278) | (1,225) | (4,574) | (13,034) |
| Childcare Cost | (2,400) | (9,600) | (9,600) | (9,600) |
| Mississippi Income Tax | (109) | (725) | (1,500) | (300) |
| Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) | 1,450 | 5,020 | 2,163 | 0 |
| Food Stamps (SNAP) | 6,312 | 6,312 | 2,163 | 0 |
| National School Lunch Program (NSLP) | 1,800 | 1,800 | 0 | 0 |
| Temp. Assistance For Needy Families (TANF) | 2,040 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Medicaid and CHIP | 16,500 | 16,500 | 10,890 | 0 |
| Section 8 Rent Subsidy | 1,450 | 4,350 | 0 | 0 |
| Utility Bill Assistance (LIHEAP) | 1,240 | 845 | 0 | 0 |
| Total Economic Benefit | 31,630 | 37,777 | 29,542 | 37,066 |
| Source: Wyatt Emmerich: Publisher, The Northside Sun |
The editorial went viral, racing around the blogosphere, often misquoted and not properly attributed to the original author. Of course, any public domain discourse on this piece would be sans replete if it did not have the rank and file, predictable liberal-hegelian dialectical charges that Emmerich over-simplified or misstated the data. True to principle, The New Republic’s Jesse Singal weighed in in February of 2011, charging that,
“the chart is full of errors. I traced it back to the man who made it, a newspaper publisher in Mississippi, and found that the math, methodology, and logic he used to generate the chart, as well as an op-ed he wrote to accompany it, are wholly unsound.”
And of course, Singal’s rant wouldn’t be a complete without the subtleties of a class-warfare sneer at Emmerich. Singal writes,
“So the Harvard graduate, who was born into a newspaper-publishing business in Greenwood, Mississippi, and now runs a paper of his own, spent some time this fall playing around with online calculators that, he told me, allow people to determine, by plugging in family size and income, how much in government benefits they are eligible for.”
And as a final ideological zing Singal ends his article with,
Emmerich, it turns out, was partially right. In Obama’s America, there are people who have little incentive to work: Internet pundits, particularly conservative ones—and especially those who think poor people are a threat to America.
I don’t know who said, “If you can’t dazzle ’em with brilliance, ya baffle ’em with bullsh*t” But that is where I ended up reading Jesse Singal’s analysis of Emmerich’s piece. First and foremost, Sandbagging is the hallmark of liberal discourse. How many countless times has there been some piece of legislation, initiative, policy debate or measure where the counter-argument is, “This is misguided, misapprehended, misunderstood? Emmerich took some straight-forward calculators available on the internet…plugged in the numbers from sources publicly available and penned his result. Reasonably intelligent people can do some basic math.
Second, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is left-leaning and advocates for expanded social spending and government fiscal solutions. For Singal to hold this out as a credible source is dishonest.
Finally, Singal’s New Republic Piece is little more than an ideological hit piece on Conservatism or those who advocate for fiscal responsibility.
A new political season is upon us. We are enduring what seems like never-ending Primary debates with a slate of Republicans. Newt Gingrich referred to President Obama as the “Food Stamp President” because of a marked increase in people obtaining assistance from the Government…i.e. food stamps. I think Newt was rather generous, personally. Obama has worked tirelessly to see America turned into a socialist welfare state on par with only that which can be found bankrupting nations in Europe. Obama is much, much more than just the Food Stamp President.
