Andre Bauer Is A Jackass

Crossposted at the American Princess

So, it’s been a while since I’ve written, but this guy just flat out pissed me off.

My friend Sarah pointed out this story to me, and it is incredibly offensive, to say the least. Andre Bauer, the lieutenant governor in South Carolina who is running for the big job to replace cheating Mark Sanford, compared people receiving government aid to “stray animals” during a campaign appearance recently.

Bauer said, “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed. 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.”

In the midst of the worst economic crisis in this country in decades, Bauer is reviving rhetoric straight from the 1980s, ignoring the fact that welfare was dramatically overhauled in the 1990s, and acting like his state, one of the poorest in the nation, should just be filled with starving homeless people. Because THAT’S going to make it such an attractive place for people to want to visit, live and work in.

Bauer added, “I can show you a bar graph where free and reduced lunch has the worst test scores in the state of South Carolina,” adding, “You show me the school that has the highest free and reduced lunch, and I’ll show you the worst test scores, folks. It’s there, period. So how do you fix it? Well you say, ‘Look, if you receive goods or services from the government, then you owe something back.’”

58 percent of South Carolina’s children are in that program. Could it be that their schools have crappy funding and don’t get the materials they need to teach the children properly? Could it be that their economy is in the toilet? South Carolina was filled with textile factories and the like, jobs that have disappeared over the past 20 years. Furthermore, statistically (thank you, Census Bureau), South Carolina’s income levels are well lower than the U.S. average and their poverty rate is higher than the U.S. average. People can be working full-time and still under the poverty ceiling, meaning, wait for it….they get government assistance.

Bauer’s comments reek of a lack of knowledge, not to mention a lack of compassion for human beings. The only thing of intelligence he said was that aid programs should require drug testing from its receipients. That’s fine, most of them do anyways. A once-a-month random drug test is not the worst thing in the world to ask. But Bauer’s requirement that parents attend PTA meetings and parent-teacher conferences or lose their aid is idiotic. An awful lot of people receiving aid are working at the Wal-Mart to bring in a little more money to support their families and they don’t necessarily have that sort of time. PTA meetings are pretty useless in any case, but that’s beside the point. Sarah is a single mom, not by choice, and she works 60-70 hours a week, and her daughter gets the free lunch program at school. She doesn’t have time to go to a freaking PTA meeting. Should her daughter go without food because she’s working hard and doing her best to make a living?

Look, long story short here is that it is incredibly easy to demonize people who are beneath you on the socio-economic scale. It makes people feel better about themselves when they can portray the random idiot who lives off a dole as the rule and not the exception. It’s also incredibly shortsighted and downright stupid to say such things. I know a multitude of people who’ve had to be on food stamps or get state aid and NONE of them wanted to be there and were trying hard to get work that would support their families or were going to school to make their chances better. It’s an awful economy and people do need help right now. Not helping people who are unable to get work just means you’re going to increase the amount of people who are homeless, starving, and filling our streets, and who does that benefit?

Maybe it’s easy when you are a high government official and live in an official home and don’t have to see the consequences of such things, but for those of us who do see it, for those of us who have experienced it, Andre Bauer is a jackass. Stray animals? Really? Do us a favor and get the facts or shut your ignorant mouth.

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~ by Thad on January 27, 2010.