Wanker of the day: John Stossel [View all]

[sheshe2]

John Stossel has said some pretty ridiculous crap over the years, but this might take the prize for the most insensitive, moronic thing that has ever come out of his piehole:

Fox Business host John Stossel on Thursday declared that government programs should be cut based on the false assertion that “no one” died of starvation in the Great Depression before the modern “welfare state.” [...]
“And when people are needy you want them [to get] help,” Stossel agreed. “But think about the [Great] Depression. That was before there was any welfare state at all. How many people starved? No one.” “Right, good point,” Doocy agreed.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2013/5/31/104238/031

I made a dumb statement about starvation on Fox & Friends yesterday AM,” he added in another post to Twitter.

“I was almost certainly wrong,” Stossel explained on his blog. “During the Depression, the governor of Pennsylvania wrote, ‘we know that starvation is widespread, but no one has enumerated the starving.’ However, all other governors who wrote to Congress, 43 of them, sent letters saying that they knew of no starvation in their states. Historians Steven Mintz and Sara McNeil wrote that there were hundreds of deaths in NYC alone.”

But at the same time, the Fox Business host also asserted that government welfare programs had “caused more problems by driving private charity out.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/30/fox-business-host-cut-government-because-no-one-died-of-starvation-before-welfare/

Photo Credit: Photograph of non-starving woman and children during the Great Depression, courtesy of blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu) and Dorothea Lange, documentary photographer employed by the Federal Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration from 1935 - 1939)