Topic: WorldNetDaily
Ben Kinchlow -- who is unusually prone to devoting columns to discredited right-wing memes and bogus chain emails -- does it again in his March 12 WorldNetDaily column:
Here are 12 steps to facilitate the “New American Way of Life.” A guy has a girlfriend with two kids:
- He doesn’t marry her and always uses his mom’s address to get mail.
- The guy buys a house.
- He rents out the house to his girlfriend and kids.
- Section 8 pays $900 a month for a three-bedroom home.
- Girlfriend signs up for Obamacare, so guy doesn’t have to pay for family insurance.
- Girlfriend gets to go to college free for being a single mother.
- Girlfriend gets $600 a month for food stamps.
- Girlfriend gets a free cell phone.
- Girlfriend gets free utilities.
- Guy moves into home, but continues to use mom’s address for his mail.
- Girlfriend claims one kid and the guy claims the other on their separate tax forms. Now both get to claim head of household at a $1,800 credit.
- Girlfriend gets $1,800 a month disability for being “crazy” or having a “bad back” and never has to work again.
Bottom line total: An unmarried couple with a stay-at-home mom on disability nets $21,600; $10,800 free housing; $6,000 free Obamacare; $6,000 free food, $4,800 free utilities; $6,000 Pell Grant money plus $12,000 a year in college tuition free; $8,800 tax benefit for being a single mother. Grand total for single motherhood: $75,000 per year in benefits. Benefits to legally married mother $0.”
(Mr. John Tabb has been credited with the preceding information. While every single item may not be exactly precise and totally accurate, the fact remains that something, somewhere, somehow is stirring the storm.)
Kinchlow's evidence to back this up is a link to a thread at Quora that discusses Tabb's column. But if he had bothered to scroll down a little bit, he would have found a link to Snopes that explains -- and discredits -- Tabb's column.
Snopes points out that Tabb's column is based on something that had been circulating online at least several months before, adding: "As is often the case with e-mail polemics focused on purported welfare abuse and taxpayer outrage, the 'New American Way of Life' offers an implausible, far-fetched scenario to condemn those who use public assistance to make ends meet."
Afater going through each item in detail, Snopes summarizes:
As the excerpt above concludes, the figures bandied about in the e-mail encompass virtually all programs available to low-income Americans and extrapolates the fictional family described routinely accesses all of them. Some of the benefits described (such as free college for single mothers or free utility programs) don’t seem to exist, and several of forms of assistance (such as Section 8 or disability) are not administered in the simplistic manner suggested by this item.
Furthermore, while this item asserts that the complex welfare hustling plan described here is “perfectly legal,” several aspects of it involve defrauding the system in an expressly prohibited (and largely criminal) fashion. Were any family to hide assets or lie about household income on application forms, they would be subject to severe penalties and prosecution should their perfidy be unraveled. The scheme also rests upon the (fallacious) notion that access to assistance programs is easy to both maintain and retain.
Finally, the causes of the national debt are fairly complex. However, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense broadly account for most government spending.
Kinchlow ironically concludes his column: "Today, the number of blacks on welfare has skyrocketed, and more than 75 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Could the above stats be a contributing factor? As President John Adams said, 'Facts are stubborn things.'"
Yes, they are, Ben; you might want to try that fact-checking thing out the next time you feel compelled to copy-and-paste a right-wing chain email into your column.
