Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace
asks Rep. Steve King about
last week's vote by House Republicans to pass a farm bill without including support for food stamps:
CHRIS WALLACE: Don't House Republicans run the risk of once again being seen as being insensitive to the needs of the poor?
And here's how King began his answer:
REP. STEVE KING: Well, I think that that was characterized by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Hispanic Caucus on Thursday in the wrong fashion.
So, asked whether Republicans were insensitive to the poor, Steve King couldn't even get through a full sentence without injecting race and ethnicity into the question, as if poverty were only an issue for African-Americans and Latinos. But what King either doesn't know or willfully ignored is that there
are more non-Hispanic white people receiving food stamps than African-American and Latino people combined. In fact,
in his congressional district (now Iowa's 4th, but it was Iowa's 5th when these statistics were published), 85 percent of food stamp recipients were non-Hispanic whites.
There's no question that African-Americans and Latinos face higher poverty rates than white Americans, but even if Republicans don't care about that (clearly, King does not), you'd think they'd at least be able to care about poor whites. But not King, because even though he voted for the farm bill, he says he was against it—because it didn't cut enough from food stamps:
I opposed splitting them because it takes out of our hands the ability to reform the SNAP program, the food stamp program, and it goes into perpetual motion mandatory spending type of a situation.
So, I think they characterized it wrong. I am opposed to doing this because I want to reform it. They want unlimited food stamps.
So, if you're being completely fair to Steve King, you'll admit he's not just singling out African-Americans and Latinos. He's against all poor people.