Rep. Steve King compared the nation's unemployed to lazy children who refuse to do their chores and called on them to "step up" and take unskilled jobs if necessary to help support themselves and improve the nation's economy.
According to
Red Alert Politics, the Iowa Republican drew the analogy during an event Monday in Charleston, S.C., where he claimed that millions of Americans "aren’t contributing" to the workforce.
He said if children told their moms they were "not doing the chores" they wouldn't eat.
"Pretty soon those kids [would understand] 'you get to eat after you do the work! Not just in hopes that one day you might actually do the work," he said, according to Red Alert.
While he suggested the nation's still high unemployment rate of 7.4 percent is caused in part by Americans unwilling to work, he also said that welfare programs and immigrant workers are to blame as well.
"A hundred million Americans aren’t contributing," said King, who is opposed to current immigration reform measures. "And yet, we’re looking out across the border and saying, 'let’s bring in some more people that are uneducated, unskilled.' And we’re going to put them into the unskilled workforce, and somehow we’re going to increase our economy."
According to
The Huffington Post, King asserted that there are 80 different welfare programs in the United States that have led to the creation of a "dependency state" made worse by what he called the Obama administration's unemployment benefits that "pay people not to work."
"Our hearts," he concluded, "are bigger than our common sense."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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