As in one lighting up inside my skull. I was reading about food stamps and poverty among children, and then I came to this conservative interpretation of the findings that about half of U.S. children will be on food stamps at least once:
Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank, says the study design and survey data are solid. But he says the findings are neither surprising nor troubling.
"That's effectively like saying that at some point in a 20-year period, a parent would be unemployed for a month or so," Rector says.
"There's no evidence that even consistent poverty in the U.S. produces a nutritional risk," he says, noting that rich and poor children tend to have about the same intake of protein, vitamins and minerals.
Do you see where I'm going here? The wingnuts usually tell us that being poor is fun: lots of singing and dancing and watching cheap televisions and owning cell phones and getting enough food. If that is the case, why not apply strong income progression in all taxes? That way the rich can become happy, too, and the rest of us can get health care and education covered from those tax receipts.