Tom Vilsack: Food Stamps Are "Economic Stimulus"

Former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack has told some big lies in the past, but perhaps none bigger than his suggestion recently that food stamps are "putting people to work."

Well, obviously, it’s putting people to work. Which is why we’re going to have some interesting things in the course of the forum this morning. Later this morning, we’re going have a press conference with Secretary Mavis and Secretary Chu to announce something that’s never happened in this country — something that we think is exciting in terms of job growth…

…I should point out, when you talk about the SNAP program or the food stamp program, you have to recognize that it’s also an economic stimulus. Every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy in terms of economic activity. If people are able to buy a little more in the grocery store, someone has to stock it, package it, shelve it, process it, ship it. All of those are jobs. It’s the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.


To many people just encountering Tom Vilsack around the country, they may be amazed that he's such an economic illiterate and a complete dunce.  But Iowans have had a lot of experience dealing with him over the years and we're still cleaning up the damage.

Let's remember the Legacy Of Tom Vilsack in the State of Iowa:

• Appointing Michael Gartner to state boards.
• Corporate welfare (Vision Iowa).
• Touchplay
• Ongoing polluting of Iowa's rivers and streams by factory farmers.
• An out of control deer population that is killing people and ruining livelihoods.
• The draining of the Senior Living Trust.
• Allowing the fraudulent spending of the tobacco shakedown money.
• Expansion of gambling.
• ISU tuition has gone up 87% from 2001 to 2006.
• CIETC
• Appointing Jonathan "I'm Gay" Wilson to legally whitewash the CIETC scandal.
• Trashing Wal-Mart after helping them out for so many years when it was politically expedient for him to do so.
• Teacher pay fell from 35th to 40th.
• Proposing budgets that went up nearly twice the rate of tax revenue.
• Appointing a bunch of rich and catty bitches to the Iowa Board of Parole who gave a rich female killer a break while trashing a poor and abused woman who killed her husband.
• Giving tax breaks to the rich for questionable projects.
• Believing that government should have the power take away your private property through eminent domain and give it to some out-of-state developer so they can build another strip mall.
• Gave sex offenders and other felons blanket citizenship rights, including the right to walk into an elementary school on election day and vote after rejecting 24% of applications between 1999 and 2005.
• Wanting to import 300,000 illegals to Iowa for slave labor and votes.
• Wanting to give illegals a driver's license (and a Motor Voter card, wink wink...)
• He destroyed public records by being supposedly ignorant about how to use email in the year 2003.
• But he can operate two Blackberry devices.
• Blamed the theft of his son's automobile at Terrace Hill on security staff rather than the fact that junior left the keys in the car.
• Offered a $95 million taxpayer-financed bribe to Whirlpool in order to keep Maytag in Newton.
• Signed the "English-only" bill in Iowa, but later publicly regretted it despite 81% of Iowans supporting it.
• Wants Iowan taxpayers to spend $180 million in corporate welfare in order to entice gas station owners to sell E85, a fuel that has so far been a complete failure.
• After a prison break at Fort Madison, Vilsack recommended tearing the place down and building a new one. Vilsack was way off on what a replacement prison would cost.
• Appointed a judge who was soft on drunk/drugged drivers who kill and appointed a Iowa Supreme Court justice who basically paid for his seat.
• Vilsack appointed three of the five State Board of Education members who thought that a student-athlete with four D-minuses and two F grades in classes should be able to continue to participate in sports.
• Despite no military experience whatsoever, Vilsack was theorizing how to conduct the war in Iraq in 2005.
• Vetoed legislation that would have raised fines for polluters.
• He is sort of in favor of bringing back the draft, or at least some kind of forced conscription.
• On the murder of 5 year old Evelyn Miller, Vilsack said (viaRadio Iowa):

  "...Vilsack reviewed five-years-worth of files kept by Department of Human Services social workers who investigated complaints about the child's welfare. On Monday, Vilsack said the complaints came from family members who had 'an ax to grind' and whose 'credibility' was 'a bit suspect.'"

With Vilsack, everything is political. What a slimy piece of shit.  That goes double for his racist dumbass wife, Christie Vilsack.