Last Friday, South Carolina’s Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer compared giving public assistance to poor people to “feeding stray animals.” Quoting his grandmother, Bauer says that stray animals breed, so feeding them just makes it worse. He elaborates:
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.
On Saturday, he refused to apologize, saying that South Carolina needs to have an “honest conversation” about dependence on public assistance.
Bullshit, Bauer. If you were interested in an honest conversation, you would have discussed 12.6% jobless rate instead of vilifying the 58% of your states children who receive public assistance.
How dare he. His state is struggling with double-digit unemployment coming off the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and he has the audacity to talk about his own constituents this way?
I agree with Race Wire’s Channing Kennedy. Bauer needs to quit blaming South Carolina’s struggling families and instead address the joblessness problem. He can start by creating a job opening for the position of Lieutenant Governor.
