Let Them Eat Ketchup

Somehow, I suspect funeral director campaign contributions behind this great move by Wisconsin's recently elected governor—Walker's Budget Slashes Medicaid, While Increasing Funeral Assistance For Destitute Who Die.

Scott Walker has been in quite the rush to become the new Reagan. The original model had eight years to defund social programs while projecting "sunny optimism."

Walker does not care about the human cost of his program; Reagan may or may not have been less heartless, but he simply refused to believe anyone in America went hungry.

Quotes from Paul Slansky, The Clothes Have No Emperor: A Chronicle of the American '80s—

[1981]

9/4 The Agriculture Department proposes cutting the size of school lunches... In addition, condiments such as ketchup and pickle relish would be reclassified as vegetables.

9/25 President Reagan—untroubled by the drop in stock prices "because I don't have any"—announces that he has withdrawn the proposal to cut school lunches. He suggests that a dissident faction in the Agriculture Department might have come up with the idea as a form of "bureaucratic sabotage."

Just to set the record straight, aide James Johnson explains, "It would be a mistake to say that ketchup per se was classified as a vegetable. Ketchup in combination with other things was classified as a vegetable." And what things would ketchup have to combine with to be considered a full-blown vegetable? "French fries or hamburgers."

[1982]

3/24 Agriculture official Mary C. Jarratt tells Congress her department has been unable to document President Reagan's horror stories of food stamp abuse, pointing out that the change from a food stamp purchase is limited to 99 cents. "It's not possible to buy a bottle of vodka with 99 cents," she says. Deputy White House press secretary Peter Roussel says Reagan wouldn't tell these stories "unless he thought they were accurate."

4/4 "If Mr. Reagan thinks he has to cut social spending to help right the economy, others might disagree, but he has earned the right to try. What he is not entitled to do is to cut spending for the poor and then claim that he is increasing it."
— New York Times editorial

4/22 The Reagan administration complains that the CBS documentary People Like Us—a Bill Moyers report on four people who have slipped through the President's "alleged safety net"—constituted a "below-the belt" attack on its economic policies. The network rejects a government request for a prime time half hour "to present our side."

[1983]

8/2 Claiming to be "perplexed" by continuing accounts of Americans going hungry, President Reagan establishes a Task Force on Food Assistance to explain it to him.

8/3 POVERTY RATE ROSE TO 15% IN '82, HlGHEST LEVEL SINCE MID-1960'S
— The New York Times

[1986]

5/21 President Reagan tells a group of students, "I don't believe that there is anyone that is going hungry in America simply by reason of denial or lack of ability to feed them. It is by people not knowing where or how to get this help." Asked what this observation is based on, Larry Speakes says, "That is his view." Critics note that the Reagan administration eliminated the program that informed needy people of available benefits.

6/11 President Reagan distinguishes himself at his 37th press conference by claiming that the government is providing 93 million meals a day to hungry Americans.

Bonus undated quote, from domestic adviser Martin Anderson—

The number of people remaining in poverty is very small and it grows smaller every day.