Politicians and welfare: A case of the pot calling the kettle black

The real welfare queens are our legislators, not food-stamp recipients

Catherine Rampell, Opinion writer, Washington Post, April 4

Let’s not be coy. There’s a certain population in this country that expects unlimited government handouts despite its piggish unwillingness to work.

Don’t tell me this is about their child-care responsibilities, or lack of access to transportation or education. Nonsense. These people simply don’t want to work.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new welfare queens: your democratically elected U.S. legislators, the laziest, most do-nothing generation of federal politicians in decades.

Sure, they talk a big game about work ethic and personal responsibility.

Thanks to legislators’ devotion to public industriousness, for example, tens of thousands of Americans lost access to food stamps Friday. Legislators had decided, as part of welfare reform, that non-disabled adults without dependents should be required to work to receive food stamps; the work requirements had been temporarily waived in many states during the downturn, but now those waivers are expiring.

(More here. In case the reader does not get the title, see "The pot calling the kettle black".)