03.13.13
“Poor people are fat”
Public figures and commentators are so routinely odious in modern American life that everyone learns to filter it out. It’s a defense mechanism for life in the plutocracy. However, occasionally you run across something so supremely stupid and hateful passed off as wisdom it makes your eyes water.
And so it is in this morning show commentary by the Daily Ticker’s Aaron Task at Yahoo.
Task begins to rant about a government bailout of the sugar cane and sugar beets industry. Task immediately reveals he’s so ignorant on the subject of food ingredients that “sugar,” in this case, means everything sweet and fattening in the US diet. Which isn’t the case at although I’m not going to get into it.
However, what the pundits really want to get into is a rant about poor people and how fat they are.
I’ve seen this before on television, either a derision or blurting rage in the haves along the lines that beggars and the impoverished, or people on food stamps, have too much to eat, or eat crap, and so are the fattest in society. And that there needs to be some manner of punishment arranged, either in cutting their food subsidies, taxing them, or in convincing people to never give money to the down-and-out in parking lots.
The Daily Ticker video is here. Advance to about 2:30 to get to the part where Task and his companion go over the top in their scorn for the poor:
Task: Poor people are fat. For the first time in human history. It’s ridiculous.
It goes on for a bit like that, about how stupid it is for the government to keep sugar prices low because that makes it too easy for poor people to buy a lot of candy. They roll pictures of Hershey bars.
His partner, Lauren Lyster, then suggests by not bailing out the cane industry, we could have an “obesity tax.”
The whole bit is stunning in its ignorance and casual malice.
Now, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth and don’t eat much candy, ever. But in the baking ingredients aisle I find that the price of granulated sugar, either from cane or beets, for use in my tea, just about right.
And while I do not bake I know people who do. Baking cakes, and so on, is a way to make wholesome food — and I consider baked goods part of a decent diet, and that nothing would be served by having to pay more for sugar and seeing to it that less people are employed in the cane and sugar beets industry.
It would also have never occurred to me that it was a handout to poor people who are allegedly too fat in America because all they eat is candy and sweet junk. And that they should not have that because it is bad.
As I said above, it’s eye-watering in its mean spirit and idiotic quality, passed off as righteous anger over government interference in the market. But, unfortunately, I think it’s fair to say you wouldn’t have to go very far to find fellow citizens who believe it to be informed and right.
Poor people are the fattest, only in America, for the first time in history. We should stop making sugar cheap for them with taxpayer money and then they would have to eat apples or look more like those starving in Africa or beggars on the streets of Bangladesh. Or something.
That’s the logic of it.