UPDATED
Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King appeared at an event in North Carolina Monday where, according to a Red Alert Politics blogger who attended, he chastised unemployed Americans, saying “I want to see more Americans step up.”
King reportedly compared the unemployed to children who refuse to do chores, implying that those who are out of work should not receive a helping hand: “Now what kind of a family — if you had six kids and a third of those kids would say ‘I’m not doing the chores, Mom,’… pretty soon those kids would be on the ‘you get to eat after you do the work.’”
Speaking to a group of conservatives in Charleston, S.C., on Monday evening, the Iowa Congressman said that it wasn’t the economy that was sluggish, but the 100 million non-working Americans giving up jobs to “unskilled” illegal immigrants.
“One hundred million Americans aren’t contributing and yet we’re looking out across the board 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,” King said during the Charleston Meeting. “…I want to see more Americans step up.”
This “middle class standard of living” is the direct result of President Obama propelling the country into a “dependency state,” according to King.
“We borrow money from China to pay people not to work and we say we’re going to grow our GDP because we have sympathy for people that are in this country illegally,” he said.
King equated America to a family, comparing the amount of non-working Americans to children refusing to do their chores.
“Now what kind of a family — if you had six kids and a third of those kids would say ‘I’m not doing the chores, Mom,’” King said. “…pretty soon those kids would be on the ‘you get to eat after you do the work.’”
UPDATE: Raw Story found the video of King’s remarks.
Here, King compares the unemployed to delinquent children:
And here, King claims that President Obama is using unemployment benefits to encourage women “not to have a man in the house” and “pushing the dependency class” in order to “increase [his] power base.” Later on, King recalls a controversial incident in which he declined to contradict a constituent who called President Obama a Muslim and a Marxist. “I don’t know his religion, I don’t question that at all,” King said. “But my answer was, ‘Well, he’s at least a Marxist.’”
