Fox News contributor: ‘It gets a little comfortable to be in poverty’
Appearing Saturday on Fox News’s “Cavuto on Business,” contributor Charles Payne insisted that he knows firsthand how “it gets to be a little comfortable to be in poverty” in the United States.
“There’s this idea that between the food stamps and the welfare and the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit and the local programs, you know, it gets a little comfortable to be in poverty,” he said. “Listen, I’ve lived it first hand. I’ve seen when people don’t go to work because they get everything paid for them. The incentive is not there.”
Payne, one of the network’s more vocal critics of assisting the poor and under employed, expanded on his theory about the laziness of poor people during a broadcast last Thursday, explaining that he’s disappointed so many Americans — over 47 million, according to the latest official numbers — are on food stamps. “What we actually have ended up doing is created a wall, a giant barrier, where people don’t move out of poverty into the middle class because in that initial transition they actually lose money and lose benefits,” he said.
Payne is essentially repeating a common meme among many conservatives who believe that helping poor people keeps them poor and only fosters dependence and the growth of state benefit payments. What many Fox News reports on this subject fail to note is that 90 percent of all welfare benefits go to either members of working households, the elderly or the disabled, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/31/fox-news-contributor-it-gets-a-little-comfortable-to-be-in-poverty/
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