Math-challenged.
Yes, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann is still at it, still being a one-woman
job creator for fact checkers. This time it's the convoluted "truth" she told at CPAC about SNAP, the food stamp program:
“Here's the truth that the president won't tell you. Of every dollar that you hold in your hands, 70 cents of that dollar that's supposed to go to the poor doesn't. It actually goes to benefit the bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. — 70 cents on the dollar. That's how the president's caring works in practice. So $3 in food stamps for the needy, $7 in salaries and pensions for the bureaucrats who are supposed to be taking care of the poor. So with all due respect, I ask you, how does this show that our president cares about the poor?”
Interestingly enough, this one (unlike seven-foot tall doctors and retardation-causing HPV vaccines) has a traceable origin, which isn't to say that she didn't completely fuck up the story. Glenn Kessler tracked it all down, and the long and the short of it is that the guy who came up with the formula says about Bachmann's assertion: "That’s not what I said."
He was talking about all public assistance programs and he was talking about the entire infrastructure around public assistance, not just the federal government. And he really wasn't talking about SNAP, at all. Tanner told Kessler that he didn't intend his figures to apply to it, as a cash program at all: "The overhead on these things are not outrageous."
Of course, Bachmann tends to miss a lot that happens out in the world where everyone else exists. Like when the Agriculture Department sent its 2013 budget report to Congress, where she is actually employed, reporting that SNAP's overhead is less than 6 percent of its budget. Which does not equal 70 percent. Unless you're using Bachmann math.