Blame the Poor…

I talked about smoke and mirrors, redirection from real problems to scapegoats on which to blame economic woes. This one centers particularly on the poor and a statement that Allen West a former Representative from Florida (one term) said in a tweet July 8^th: "More Americans receive food aid than work in (the) private sector."

Now he used some numbers from CNS news to back up this rather preposterous claim, that many really believe. But it is one of those numbers game pieces where uses numbers inappropriately to supposedly prove the point they are trying to get across.

Here’s how it works. You take all the people who receive aid of some and give the total. That number is about 101 million people. Then you take the number of people working full-time in the private sector and you get a bit over 91 million people. Viola, West must be right, right? No. West, and his sources didn’t count those not working full time, which brings the number up to a bit over 113 million. But it still seems bad right? Wrong.

Now you have to figure out just who is included in his figures that receive food assistance. If you look at the numbers folk in one program also are likely to be in another food assistance program because they are poor such as kid’s getting free lunches are also part of the food stamp program. Here is out these programs break down according to the Agriculture department:

Program	Participants	Period
Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps)	47,548,694	April 2013
National School Lunch Program	30,839,021	iApril 2013
School Breakfast Program	13,481,128	April 2013
Food aid for adult and child care	3,535,000	Highest month, fiscal 2012
Summer Food Service	2,347,000	Highest month, fiscal 2012
Women-Infants-Children	2,032,248	April 2013
Indian Reservation Food Program	76,500	All year, fiscal 2012
Commodity Supplemental Food Programs (non-elderly)	17,600	All year, fiscal 2012
Commodity Supplemental Food Programs (elderly)	576,600	All year, fiscal 2012
Senior Farmers' Market Nutrition Program	863,097	All year, fiscal 2011
WIC Farmers' Market Nutrition	1,900,000	All year fiscal 2011
TOTAL	103,216,888

Get it? There are all types of overlaps. Then you also have to adjust as to who is employable; omitting those who are 17 or 18 and under and also seniors.

When it is all said and done about 33% of the U.S. population receives some type of food assistance. Plus you have the working poor who receive assistance but also work.

All this is must smoke and mirrors to hide the fact that they ultra rich have caused an incredible economic imbalance that lead to all these problems. Too bad they don’t put their efforts into solving real problems rather the creating non-issues. The real issues is getting folk jobs, descent jobs you can live on.

More simply put Allen West lied. People in the political arena shouldn’t do that and in the case it appears pretty intentional not just a mistake in understanding. It is another case of a person put vested interests and ideological ideals ahead of the common good.