Two Tennessee lawmakers introduced legislation that would tie welfare assistance under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program to the educational performance of students who benefit from it, and the legislation was approved by committees in both the state House and Senate last week.
Under the legislation brought by two Republicans, a student who doesn’t not make “satisfactory progress” in school would cost his or her family up to 30 percent of its welfare assistance, the Knoxville News and Sentinel reported.
Now, it seems amending the bill to allow exceptions for kids with disabilities is enough of a sop in order to allow the state to punish the rest of the poor kids, who must be poor because their parents are lazy. Here's the fun part:
House Democratic Caucus Chairman Mike Turner of Nashville said parents of children with “undiagnosed learning disabilities” could suffer because of the bill and, even if a child is performing poorly in school, “the kid still has to eat.”
Turner also said the bill apparently does not apply to home-schooled children and, “I guess a person who wants to get around this just can say ‘I’m home schooling my children’.”
Surprise! Of course the bill doesn't apply to home-schooled kids. We know they have involved non-lazy parents because they're home-schooled! The fact that the overwhelming majority of home-schooled families vote GOP has nothing to do with it.
Oopsie. Still, the point of the bill is to punish "those people" for being poor, so they stop being lazy working at their $8 an hour job 40 hours a week and get a second job like a real American, so they'll have even less time at home to become involved with their kid's schoolwork. That'll teach em to be poor people!
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