Recently newly-declared Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich made a statement which some considered racially tinged about Obama, which PolitiFact (PF) ruled as Half True. Because my conservative counterpart Bryan White claims it was taken out of its proper context, here’s the complete quote:
You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama's is an enormous success …The most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?
Bryan claims that Gingrich “used food stamps as an "analogy" (metaphor's more like it) to Obama's approach of relying on government action rather than private initiative. It isn't that Obama gave out food stamps, it's that he did not pursue successful job-creating policies.”
In the interview with David Gregory where Gingrich was asked for clarification he said that Obama “follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit. I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas.”
But how are things really going in Texas?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is reporting that food-stamp participation in Texas jumped from 2.68 million individuals in August to 2.95 million in September.
As the economic hard times continue, it is likely that those numbers will increase, officials estimate.
“Texas ranks 47th in the nation in the number of food-secure families, meaning we have more people wondering where their next meal will come from than almost any other state,” says Celia Hagert, senior policy analyst at the Texas Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin-based think tank.
So if this is true, what is Newt Gingrich talking about? And this was in 2008, right at the start of the recession. From 2009 to 2010, Texas’s food stamp usage increased a whopping 24.6%. However, Newt is correct is one respect: food stamps have a lot to do with lack of jobs, or BAD jobs (not the kind that used to be in Detroit), which I’ve addressed here before:
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| Click to enlarge: Top is food stamp usage by county, bottom is Bible Belt...Notice anything? |
So, sarcastically speaking, while some food stamp use, such as in Detroit, is clearly related to the demise of the auto industry and those socialistic labor unions, there’s really no good reason for such high food stamp use in the Bible Belt, where you’d THINK far larger numbers of people would have wonderful right-to-work, non-union jobs as instituted by the paycheck-creating policies of those red state Republicans.
Unfortunately, the paychecks created in these states aren’t quite what they were in Detroit. And many of those paychecks, unlike Detroit, are being indirectly subsidized by the Federal government, because they do not represent living wages, for example, by the current largest private employer in the country, Wal-Mart.
The Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce estimated the breakdown of costs for one 200-employee Wal-Mart store:
* $36,000 a year for free or reduced school lunches, assuming that 50 families of employees qualify.
* $42,000 a year for Section 8 rental assistance, assuming that 3% of the store employees qualify.
* $125,000 a year for federal tax credits and deductions for low-income families, assuming that 50 employees are heads of households with a child, and 50 employees are married with two children.
* $108,000 a year for the additional federal contribution to state children's health insurance programs, assuming that 30 employees with an average of two children qualify.
* $100,000 a year for additional Title I expenses, assuming 50 families with two children qualify.
* $9,750 a year for the additional costs of low-income energy assistance.
Overall, the committee estimates that one 200-person Wal-Mart store may result in an excess cost of $420,750 a year for federal taxpayers.
Factcheck.org weighed in on Newt’s statement as well, basically in agreement with PolitiFact. And as noted by Katrina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation, there is credence for “bad jobs”: (emphasis added)
More than 75 percent of SNAP [Food Stamp] participants are in families with children; and nearly one-third are in households with elderly people or people with disabilities. Over 34 percent of household heads are white, 21 percent African American, and less than 10 percent Hispanic. And the people receiving the benefits are exactly the people who really need them—over 90 percent have incomes below the poverty line, and 40 percent have incomes below half the poverty line (or “deep poverty,” just $9,155 for a family of three.) Finally, nearly three times as many SNAP households worked as relied solely on welfare benefits for their income.
So, based on the above, it would seem to me that PolitiFact regarded the “creating paychecks” as a side issue, and IF they did look at it, they might have further reason to give Gingrich a False instead of Half True. Most food stamp recipients are working—and those in the south, it would appear, are working at jobs which are not paying a living wage….bad jobs. Newt’s proposed “approach” is no better than Obama’s, perhaps even worse. In other words, we could make a pretty compelling case here that this ruling is conservatively biased! Not that Bryan would notice.
In fact, the most amusing part of Bryan’s post was a comment he received (which I do laud him for publishing) from one “Dordogne”:
This is the most pathetic attempt at an argument I think I have ever seen. How could PolitiFact deal with claim of racism since it deals with the internal motives of Gingrich which no one can discover?
To which Bryan responded that he was really “expressing amusement at the fact that PolitiFact apparently takes racial implications for granted before declining to delve into the issue.” Not quite.
PolitiFact made its case that it was unfair to blame the increased food stamp use on Obama. Additionally “delving into the issue” of “job creation” is a “red herring.” It was along the lines of other Gingrich-speak such as left/right “social engineering” or the same as what Bryan called Dordogne’s comment on Newt’s coded racism: baloney. Or just another reason to grade writer Lou Jacobson with a meaningless "F."
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