Posted: May 21, 2012 at 12:11 pm
TEA Party Republican Embarrasses Montana in the Wall Street Journal
TEA Party Republican legislator Tom Burnett has a letter in the Wall Street Journal last week calling for slashing school food for poor and hungry children.
Burnett’s letter comes in the wake of calls to reverse Congress’s idiotic declaration that pizza counts as a vegetable. Rep. Tom Burnett, of Bozeman, argues that instead of improving school nutrition, he has “a better reform.” Burnett wants to reduce the food assistance given to poor kids to help them afford school meals.
“To be practical, reforms must re-examine the over-abundance of food offered to children, not just nutritional quality. Too much food, too often, harms.”
For some kids, meals at school are the only food they get.
The Wall Street Journal letter is a follow-up to the bizarre 53-page treatise Burnett penned recently to convince others of his belief that we should cut food for needy kids. In “Hunger in America: The Myth [PDF].” Burnett writes that hunger doesn’t exist because he hasn’t seen it:
No advocates parade a line of emaciated children at any school or playground. They just can’t be found.
But that’s not the only reason Representative Burnett has come to the conclusion that no one is really going hungry. He also bases his case on…wait for it…pictures of fat people he found on the Internet (see right), which he includes in his article as “evidence.”
In addition to claiming that hunger doesn’t exist. He also sanely tells us that not being hungry “kills,”
Hunger is a normal part of a healthy person’s day. One should expect to be hungry six hours per day, the two hours preceding each meal. Satiety kills.
In the treatise, Burnett proposed to create a massive federal food police bureaucracy to crack down on the poor to stop them from buying items that Burnett feels they don’t deserve. Those in need, says Burnett are characterized by “Indolence. Shirking responsibility. Indulgence. Enabled laziness.”
They don’t budget or plan. Lack of foresight is common in this population. They don’t restrain their impulses, one of the definitions of management problems. They don’t discipline themselves to stay in school, to turn in their homework, to get out of bed on time, to study when they’d rather watch movies.
Republicans in Congress and the Montana Legislature have made several recent attempts slash the budget for help for hungry kids.