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talkpoliticsForbes Columnnist John Tamny, on the Daily Show: I think food stamps are cruel… I don’t think anyone is happy if they are reliant on somebody else, if they’re taking a handout.
Jessica Williams: Okay, well what about kids being hungry, nobody getting the food that they deserve or need?
Tamny: I think if people were literally starving, you would see a massive outpouring a charity to make up for that fact.
Williams: What does ‘literally starving’ look like?
Tamny: This is going to come off the wrong way, but I guess it’s where literally people have distended bellies, where they’re getting almost nothing. We don’t hear about the poor in this country starving on the streets…
I guess for Mr. Tamny “com(ing) off the wrong way” means, making sights like this come across as a BAD thing:
And hey. There’s plenty in between health and that level of starvation. There’s rickets:
And Pellagra:
None of which, presumably, qualifies as "cruel."
For a better idea at what Mr. Tamny does and doesn’t consider cruel, consider a comment he made on Fox just a few months ago, when the subject was a bakery owner who refused to honor food stamps:
What a shame that we’ve erased shame from society. Why can’t we make someone feel embarrassed for living off of others? Why can’t business people do that?
Yes, that’s how NOT to be cruel – make using food stamps a humiliating public ordeal for hungry people, including any of their kids who might be tagging along. Mr. Tamny’s belief in the morality of public disgust for the less fortunate is especially interesting given the solution he offers Williams. Once Americans start “literally starving,” he says, the media will cover it and there’ll be an avalanche of giving from private charities! With, one gathers, a tasty helping of contempt, so those starving folks won’t forget for one instant where they stand in the eyes of all those “charitable” givers.
And if constant public humiliation doesn’t do the trick, the serious long-term cognitive deficits likely to result after children reach a certain level of chronic hunger will no doubt make those kids more amenable to that innate sense of inferiority Tamny and other folks at Forbes consider so important among the poor.
This would be barely worth posting if it the attitude of Tamny and others like him wasn’t more and more being openly espoused in the US. To be poor and in need of help is, in the minds of many of the wealthy, to be inherently inferior.
And they think public policy should reflect this.
Jessica Williams: Okay, well what about kids being hungry, nobody getting the food that they deserve or need?
Tamny: I think if people were literally starving, you would see a massive outpouring a charity to make up for that fact.
Williams: What does ‘literally starving’ look like?
Tamny: This is going to come off the wrong way, but I guess it’s where literally people have distended bellies, where they’re getting almost nothing. We don’t hear about the poor in this country starving on the streets…
I guess for Mr. Tamny “com(ing) off the wrong way” means, making sights like this come across as a BAD thing:
And hey. There’s plenty in between health and that level of starvation. There’s rickets:
And Pellagra:
None of which, presumably, qualifies as "cruel."
For a better idea at what Mr. Tamny does and doesn’t consider cruel, consider a comment he made on Fox just a few months ago, when the subject was a bakery owner who refused to honor food stamps:
What a shame that we’ve erased shame from society. Why can’t we make someone feel embarrassed for living off of others? Why can’t business people do that?
Yes, that’s how NOT to be cruel – make using food stamps a humiliating public ordeal for hungry people, including any of their kids who might be tagging along. Mr. Tamny’s belief in the morality of public disgust for the less fortunate is especially interesting given the solution he offers Williams. Once Americans start “literally starving,” he says, the media will cover it and there’ll be an avalanche of giving from private charities! With, one gathers, a tasty helping of contempt, so those starving folks won’t forget for one instant where they stand in the eyes of all those “charitable” givers.
And if constant public humiliation doesn’t do the trick, the serious long-term cognitive deficits likely to result after children reach a certain level of chronic hunger will no doubt make those kids more amenable to that innate sense of inferiority Tamny and other folks at Forbes consider so important among the poor.
This would be barely worth posting if it the attitude of Tamny and others like him wasn’t more and more being openly espoused in the US. To be poor and in need of help is, in the minds of many of the wealthy, to be inherently inferior.
And they think public policy should reflect this.
