Newt Gingrich continues to fancy himself a policy wonk on poverty issues. Yet every time he opens his mouth, he leaves the real experts cringing.
They still haven't gotten over his pronouncement that if he were elected president, Gingrich would put the poor kids in failing schools to work as janitors. And his insistence that child labor laws are "truly stupid." (Despite research that shows kids forced to hold down jobs get lower grades and are more likely to drop out of school).
But once Newt gets on a rant, there's no stopping him. And now we have this totally bogus claim: Poor people, Gingrich says, are spending their food stamp money on Hawaii vacations.
He made that wild accusation while speaking in Iowa last week. As usual, he was railing about the increased use of food stamps, the federal government's assistance programs to help low-income and jobless Americans. Calling President Obama "the best food stamp president in history," Gingrich went on to say this:
"So more Americans now get food stamps therefore and we now give it away as cash. You don't get food stamps. You get a credit card and the credit card can be used for anything. We've had people take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii."
That's a "pants-on-fire" lie, as Politifact points out. The food stamp program has very specific rules about how these benefits can be used. Food stamps can be used for groceries, seeds or plants that produce food. They can't be used for restaurants or even many types of food, including hot dishes or anything that will be eaten in a store -- not even vitamins.
If the government doesn't even allow people to buy vitamins with food stamps, rest assured it's not going to allow them to buy an airline ticket to Hawaii. Besides, the average monthly benefit is less than $134 per person, amounting to about $1.45 per meal. Try planning a sunny vacation on that budget.
Maybe Gingrich was thinking of his own vacation shenanigans. Remember when his campaign staff quit to protest his lengthy vacations with his wife and his refusal to campaign seriously? Or when he made his own trip to the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Hawaii, supposedly to campaign? Then there was the time he claimed to have a much better understanding of the European financial crisis, thanks to a recent luxury cruise in Greece.
He expects us to believe that. Yet when Gingrich looks at record unemployment numbers, what he sees is this: poor people on vacation.