Wisconsin’s Dumb Senator Ron Johnson recently launched an attack on single mothers who are struggling to provide for their children, saying that he thinks that single mothers intentionally have children out of wedlock in order to get more benefits from government-run public assistance programs:
Johnson’s personal attack and stigmatization of women is based on a completely false belief that conservatives have that single mothers would be better off having more children out of wedlock than marrying someone. As Wisconsin progressive blogger Jud Loundsbury noted in this diary on the progressive website DailyKos, Johnson’s claims are absolutely absurd:
As anyone who works and has kids would expect, Johnson and (Republican Congressman Glenn) Grothman’s modern redux of the “welfare queen” has been rated “Mostly False” by Politifact and was given “Two Pinocchios” by the Washington Post’s fact checker. Why? Because it is a ridiculous notion to suggest that when you’re a single parent, working below the poverty line, that you would intentionally have another child to get more government assistance and “increase your take-home pay.” Obviously, food stamps, health care and other government assistance don’t come close covering all the expenses that come with having a child and what Johnson and Grothman fail to grasp in their misleading calculations of “income,” is that children actually eat and children actually get sick– the “increased income” they’re talking about comes in the form of increased benefits that all (in most cases literally) get eaten-up by the children.
In other words, single mothers who receive food stamps and other forms of government assistance would not financially benefit from having another child out of wedlock, since any extra benefits that single mothers would receive by having another child would be used by the children in the form of eating food, getting medical treatment, and so on. What Republicans like Ron Johnson don’t take into consideration is that children eat food, (in most cases) live in homes with some type of heating system, and become ill.
Wisconsin and the rest of America has had to deal with Ron Johnson’s stigmatizing and shaming of the American people, as well as his absurd logic, for far too long. I hope Wisconsinites vote him out of office next year.
The Progressive Midwesterner 