Welfare

As yours truly noted on April 12, actress Gwyneth Paltrow made a bit of a splash earlier this month when she announced that she would add her name to the list of ignorant politicians, advocates and celebrities taking on the deceptively designed "Food Stamp Challenge." The idea is to "try to survive" eating for a week on the average benefit a Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)…

On Saturday, MSNBC’s Alex Witt hosted Washington Post reporter Elahe Izadi to blast a new Kansas law that would limit what items welfare recipients could purchase using their taxpayer benefits. Izadi asserted many call the law “mean spirited” and then touted how “some advocates feel like lawmakers are basically saying the poor can't be trusted to manage their own money."

On Saturday, CNN hyped actress and self-appointed "lifestyle guru" Gwyneth Paltrow's participation in the "Food Stamp Challenge." This is the fundamentally dishonest campaign which has been working for at least eight years to convince Americans that benefits provided under the federal government's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are inadequate. As usual, Paltrow has taken up the…

The Fiscal Times is a generally strong and informative online publication. That said, it has occasionally exhibits symptoms of what could be seen as either serious leftist bias, quite disappointing ignorance, or both. One such example arrived in my email box early this morning. It contained the following headline and opening tease for a story about the food stamp program:

As President Barack Obama and Governor Jerry Brown continue to extol the wonders of the alleged economic recovery of nation and the Golden State, respectively, stories of significant growth in homelessness continue to rain on their parades. The latest example comes on the heels of reports on Seattle's burgeoning problem and the city's apparent willingness to allow officially sanctioned outdoor…

At the Lafayette, Indiana Courier Journal, reporter Mikel Livingston, that paper's social policiy reporter, set out to try to pass the Food Stamp Challenge. The idea, in his words, was to "survive for one week on $29.69," because, he says, that is "what the average recipient of SNAP benefits, commonly called food stamps, receives each week in Indiana." By Day 6, he claimed, "faced with the…

Far be it from me to talk a leftist columnist out of an ignorant, self-satisfied position which might, if anything, cause his fellow travelers to hit the accelerator a little less aggressively in future political campaigns. At the Atlantic on Monday afternoon, Richard Reeves, policy director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, claimed that the left shouldn't be …

On Thursday, President Barack Obama did something Republicans have inexplicably been reluctant to do. He nationalized the impending midterm elections by telling a friendly audience at Northwestern University that "I am not on the ballot this fall ... But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot -- every single one of them." That evening on Fox News's Special…

Following President Obama’s speech on the economy on Thursday, the PBS NewsHour offered a 48-second news brief on the subject, in which co-anchor Gwen Ifill offered no opposing viewpoint to the President’s claim in his speech that “by every measure, the country is better off than when he took office.” The show then played a soundbite of the President, in which he lamented that “millions of…

The GOP wildly exaggerates problems like voter fraud because its solutions would move the country to the right.

In today’s Biased Headlines department, see today’s Reid Wilson report on the Washington Post website from Wednesday: “Nevada is about to pass the biggest corporate tax giveaway in its history.” But has the Post recently described welfare programs or food stamps as a "giveaway"? It doesn't look like it.

The press is good at putting the most positive spin possible on the monthly job-market news. But at the same time, many of its members still claim that food stamp enrollment remains as high as it is because of the lingering effects of the (Bush did it) recession. On Friday, following the release of August's employment numbers, Obama administration Labor Secretary Tom Perez celebrated how "…

Fort Thomas Independent Schools in Northern Kentucky have decided to get out of the federal school lunch program, specifically because of the requirements imposed in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by First Lady Michelle Obama. Simply put, the district is tired of being forced to give kids food they won't eat. Until it ran into problems, HHFA was seen as Mrs. Obama's signature…

Meet the Press moderator David Gregory did his best to condemn Congressman Paul Ryan’s new anti-poverty proposal during an interview on Sunday, July 27.  The NBC host played a clip of Ryan from 2013 in which he criticized a “dependency culture” in America which Gregory interpreted as not sounding “like there’s a lot of sympathy for people you think need the government's help. What you seem to…