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Anyone who frequents this blog even if you don't watch Fox at all, knows how terrible a lot of their "business block" coverage is on Saturday mornings because I try to make a habit of posting at least some of it when I've got the stomach for or the time to watch any of it. This was another typically horrid segment with Cashin' In host Cheryl Casone opening up the show by saying there is a "new debate" over whether spending on "entitlements" are "doing damage to America."

The premise for why this "debate" is happening -- New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his recent attack on Americans receiving government "entitlements" that we covered here at C&L in these two posts:

Gov. Christie: 'We're Turning Into A Paternalistic Entitlement Society'. Oh Really, Governor?

Christie: Americans 'on Couch Waiting for Government Check'

What followed was the panel of Tracy Byrnes, Jonathan Hoenig and Wayne Rogers all repeating Christie's lines about how receiving everything from food stamps, to unemployment benefits, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, to mortgage loan modifications was somehow destroying America and turning us all into a bunch of lazy slobs that don't want to work and just sitting home waiting for their checks to arrive.

For "balance" we had former professional wrestler and conservative John Layfield actually pointing out that it might be a good idea to feed people so we don't end up having another revolution in America if massive amounts of people are starving. And milquetoast "liberal" and Fox regular Julian Epstein countering with how "reasonable" it would have been for President Obama to have made some "grand bargain" with Republicans and agreed to austerity measures in the middle of trying to recover from a recession.

And they ended the segment with regular Jonathan Hoenig, who is always reading straight from some script by Ayn Rand, saying we'd have real "freedom" in America if we just got rid of Medicaid and Medicare all together.

I have to wonder just how many people that watch these shows and take them seriously instead the sorry, sad joke that they actually are, consider themselves members of the "tea party" and are receiving Medicaid benefits. The terrible thing is segments like this would be laughable if they weren't so dangerous, because there are so many out there that buy into the nasty rhetoric they were spouting here.

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Our friends over at News Hounds flagged this segment from Saturday's Cashin' In on Fox News and par for the course on that show, they opened it up with attacking the poor and those suffering from the economic consequences of the recession and were demonizing a program that provides badly needed economic stimulus and the people who are using the program.

Fox News Attacks Food Stamps: Food Benefits For The Poor Are “Inherently The Problem”:

Yesterday’s Cashin’ In was another thinly veiled effort to make poor people look like welfare queens – and to make the Obama administration look like welfare-queen enablers. The vehicle this time was some government advertisements for food stamps. As a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted, more than 1/3 of those eligible for SNAP (food stamps) benefits are not receiving them. Furthermore, the program was originally pushed for by the grocery industry because it bolstered household consumption and shored up the retail economy. But none of that information was provided by “objective” host Cheryl Casone. She announced, “The government is now marketing entitlements.”

Go read their post for a complete overview of the segment which I don't want to just copy and paste, but I'll just highlight a few of their points here:

Christian Dorsey was one of only two supporters on the panel. As usual, he was terrific. “Hopefully, this is destigmitizing something that doesn’t need to be stigmatized at all,” he said. He also pointed out, “In order to get food stamp benefits, you have to be working or looking for work, you have to be a dependent child, or you’re elderly, or disabled. None of those are shameful circumstances. The reason we’ve spent so much more on food stamps is because we had a really big recession where we increased poverty… This is a really efficient program. Low administrative costs, and money goes to people in need. They spend the money at private businesses, and that spending multiplies by at least 50% in economic activity.”

And of course Jonathan Hoenig was doing his usual Libertarian flogging of the "welfare state" when he touted this nonsense:

Rather than contest Hoenig, she “quipped,” “Maybe that’s a great diet plan for all of us to go on food stamps.” She was referring to ads talking about how food stamps help people stay healthy.

John Layfield spoke up. “I certainly hope not… You can’t spend this for sugary drinks… These people have nothing else to eat if you don’t give them this. The problem is, that many people are in poverty.”

Hoenig said, “Look at Mississippi. One in five people there are on food stamps. It’s the fattest state in the nation six years running.”

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On this Saturday's Cashin' In, the topic of Ron Paul wanting to completely eliminate five of our government agencies was brought up during one of their panel segments and apparently their regular Jonathan Hoenig has decided to turn full-blown Libertarian after listening to his support of Paul's idea during the segment from Fox above.

CASONE: Imagine wiping our five government agencies from the map in Washington. That's what GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to do as part of his $1 trillion spending cut plan. He says it will get the American economy booming again. Okay, will it? Jonathan Hoenig, will it?

HOENIG: Cheryl it will, I mean, government spent $3.8 trillion last year. We don't need a little tweak, we need a slash and burn, and Rep. Paul's program does just that. We've come to think of this bloated government as something normal, but it's really not. You know, Housing and Urban Development was a product of the 1960's. The Energy Department which he wants to get rid of was a product of the 1970's. We should slash and burn, return to the Constitution, put this country back on a course for economic prosperity.

After fellow panelist Wayne Rogers pointed out that those agencies employ 235,000 people and have a budget of $175 billion, it's unrealistic to think that the Congress is just going to dismantle them and that making cuts to those agencies would be a more realistic approach, Casone asked the lonely Fox “liberal” on the panel, Regina Calcaterra to weigh in. As she pointed out, Paul's plan does a whole lot of damage to everyday working Americans that Hoenig apparently wasn't that concerned about.

CALCATERRA: It also substantially reduces funding for preschool programs for impoverished kids. It reduces funding for food stamps. And it wholeheartedly eliminates the Community Policing Program, which was put in place in the 1990's, which led to a substantial decrease in crime nationwide. So you look at what programs he's proposing to cut here, and they're going to be cut in low community incomes and while he's doing this, he's also saying he wants to extend the Bush tax cuts, he wants to repeal all tax income on investment income and on estates and like you said, he wants to repeal wholeheartedly, without even looking at the merits some of the issues relating to Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley. And those two laws were put into place because of the bad actors on Wall Street...

At which point she got shouted down by the rest of the panel on the show.

Tracy Byrnes followed with a little screed, carping about how the politicians in Washington are wasting our money, which I don't disagree with, but certainly not for the same reasons Byrnes was going ballistic over here. She goes on to say that “no one even knows what the Department of the Interior does, and for all we know, they decorate, which was thankfully rebutted by their lonely "liberal" a bit later in the segment.

CALCATERRA: It's also going to affect the employees nationwide. You're just looking at the salaries of the administrators sitting behind desks in Washington, but when you cut the Department of Interior, which doesn't have to do with interior design, it actually has to do with national parks and a controlled oil drilling and federal parks as well, you've got park rangers and you've got people operating that that don't make over a hundred thousand dollars...

After which Tracy Byrnes started talking over her again and screaming again about how we'd better get rid of all the federal employees working “useless jobs.” To which Calcaterra managed to get a word in edgewise and point out that regulators at the federal level are necessary when you look at what happened with BP and the disaster in the Gulf.

After Hoenig got a chance to make one one last comment at the end of the segment, talking about how wonderful Ron Paul's ideas are for our country, Calcaterra got one last shot in at him as well for “cutting our funding for poor kids.” Which was met by moans and groans from the rest of them as the time for the segment ran out.

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While discussing the fact that a large number of school districts across the country have now decided to start operating on a four day schedule because of budget constraints, Fox Cashin' In contributor Jonathan Hoenig jumps the shark so badly during this segment, that even his fellow wingnuts that normally spend these Saturday show trashing public education and any public sector unions had to disagree with him.

HOENIG: Government, which of course has a monopoly over the public schools, really has become the parent. If the reason for keeping this failed school system is day care, I mean honestly Tracy, believe me, it's cheaper for you to hire a baby sitter for your kids, than to fund this union dominated school system.

(crosstalk)

BYRNES: Jonathan, it's about learning. It is about keeping us on par with the rest of the world.

HOENIG: Why do you want to keep them there more? That's the whole point. They're not learning in the public schools. You want to keep them there more... an extra day? They'd do better on the streets!

This is the same idiot that John wrote about back in Feb. 2008 here -- Jonathan Honeig thinks it's a right to smash a dog's head against a wall.

And I'm beginning to think Tracy Byrnes is suffering from the same syndrome as Megyn Kelly who suddenly became a born again liberal when it comes to maternity leave that Karoli wrote about here -- Megyn Kelly Defends The Family Medical Leave Act. Besides defending the public school system as she did in this segment, earlier in the show she was defending national flood insurance, after, you guessed it, her home was in one of the areas affected by the hurricane and she just got her power turned back on the day before the show.

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Here we go again. Whether it's bashing the long term unemployed as lazy, wanting to replace government workers with welfare recipients, calling for getting rid of Social Security, or comparing those who receive food stamps to crack cocaine addicts, you can always count on the panel of Fox's Cashin' In to attack unions and the working class and to defend the rich and powerful against having their taxes raised.

And as always the one liberal allowed to come on the show was outnumbered five to one.

This week they were attacking government workers as being overpaid compared to their public sector counterparts; a talking point has already been thoroughly debunked by our own Jon Perr last December -- Republicans Launch Phony War on Public Employees. Go read his entire post for much, much more, but here's a snippet:

Pawlenty repeated his charge to Fox News on Monday:

"You have public employees making more than their private-sector counterparts. They used to be under-benefited and underpaid. Now they're both over-benefited and overpaid...it needs to stop."

Sadly for would-be President Pawlenty, the charge - whether at the federal, state or local level - is false.

That's the conclusion of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. Just one of many recent analyses debunking Republican charges about government workers and their unions, EPI found that "on average, state and local government workers are compensated 3.75% less than workers in the private sector." (See the table above for details.) The report by Labor and Employment Relations Professor Jeffrey Keefe of Rutgers University revealed that public employees are undercompensated compared to similarly skilled private sector counterparts:

The study analyzes workers with similar human capital. It controls for education, experience, hours of work, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity and disability and finds that, compared to workers in the private sector, state government employees are undercompensated by 7.55% and local government employees are undercompensated by 1.84%. The study also finds that the benefits that state and local government workers receive do not offset the lower wages they are paid.

The public/private earnings differential is greatest for doctors, lawyers and professional employees, the study finds. High school-educated public workers, on the other hand, are more highly compensated than private sector employees, because the public sector sets a floor on compensation. The earnings floor has collapsed in the private sector.

I'd just like to know what Rupert Murdoch is paying these blowhards to come on the air week after week and attack unions, the employed and the poor.

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If there's anything you can count on from the yappers on some of the Fox Business Channel shows that they air on Fox News on Saturdays, it's that if there's a way to trash unions or to paint anyone who receives any sort of government assistance as lazy, good-for-nothing loafers who just want to suck off of the government teet, they're going to do it. With this story, they got a two-fer.

What could possibly be wrong with getting rid of union MTA workers only to have them replaced with welfare recipients? It's nothing but a big race to the bottom where the Wall Street bankers in New York get their tax breaks and after saying the layoffs are necessary because the city's broke, union workers get replaced by those with no protections in place working for minimum wage. And if these welfare recipients are single mothers, just who is supposed to be paying for their daycare while they're out there cleaning the subways in New York City? And just what type of meaningful job training are you giving anyone by teaching them how to push a broom? Looks like none to me.

I'm all for programs that help those on welfare gain some skills so they can get back into the workforce and earn a decent living instead of having to be dependent on the government and where they're allowed to work without being cut off of their benefits if that job training is going to lead to them being independent and able to earn a living wage where they can take care of themselves and their families. I don't see how this is one of them.

I agree with the one outnumbered "liberal" on the panel who they actually allowed some air time. When host Cheryl Casone asked Christian Dorsey about whether this might help any of those workers get a full time job, we got one of the few moments of truth out of this segment.

DORSEY: Look, I'm all for making sure that people who have been left out of the workforce and who are on welfare receiving public assistance get the skills to be self sufficient, but remember, welfare is now administered by the states. It's not an overall federal program. It's block granted. And what's happening in New York is cause for alarm, not praise Cheryl. They're laying off transit workers and replacing them with lower cost transient workers, so this is in essence getting rid of decent jobs for people, adding to unemployment and then saving money by putting welfare recipients in those jobs that used to be held by non-welfare recipients. It's not improving the overall job situation in New York or in the country. This is bad policy.

And one of the worst parts of this segment was Fox hack Jonathan Hoenig letting everyone know what conservatives think about anyone receiving welfare at all.

HOENIG: What about just getting rid of welfare? Let me just throw that one out there Cheryl as a real alternative idea. I mean, point to me somewhere in the Constitution where it says anything about charity. It does not. Now were the founders such (?) were they such jerks that they didn't want to put that? No. Of course because charity is something that should be privately motivated. And I'm sorry Cheryl, working for money. That's called a job, not another government assistance program, another government handout program.

And of course in Hoenig's mind, anyone on welfare is just some lazy person who wants to destroy our economy, unlike those poor businesses that might be forced to pay more taxes so women and children aren't left to starve on the streets while they outsource the jobs they'd probably love to have to China and India, where the workers there can work for slave wages instead.

When this country relied on the good will of the rich to provide for the welfare of the least among us instead of asking all of us to take care of each other, things didn't work out so well. People like this tool Hoenig are more than happy to perpetuate a system that's taking us right back there, along with his buddies at Fox News and Fox Business Channel.

Here's more from FindLaw on the legal predicament the city may have put themselves in as well -- MTA Wants to Put NYC Welfare Recipients to Work:

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When Michael Moore comes to Wisconsin to speak out against the amount of income disparity we have in the United States that we've not seen since the Gilded Age, leave it to the yappers on Fox to go crazy and call him every name in the book, and to also insist that he's picking on the so called "job creators" in America. Someone tell me that these idiots weren't just reading straight off of the pages of Atlas Shrugged for Fox "news" with this breathless defense of how we're not supposed to pick on the rich by asking them to pay more in taxes.

According to Jonathan Hoenig here, Moore is preaching Communism and a society of... get this... "slavery" and the rich should be paying even less in taxes. Because heaven forbid we can't ask the rich to pay more or we're going to turn into Venezuela or Cuba or some other country that he wants to make completely irrational and ridiculous comparisons to. These people make my head hurt. Up is down and black is white on Fox.

Here's more from Michael that they were up in arms about.

VIDEO: America Is NOT Broke:

America is not broke.

Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.

Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined.

Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.

And I can see why. For us to admit that we have let a small group of men abscond with and hoard the bulk of the wealth that runs our economy, would mean that we'd have to accept the humiliating acknowledgment that we have indeed surrendered our precious Democracy to the moneyed elite. Wall Street, the banks and the Fortune 500 now run this Republic -- and, until this past month, the rest of us have felt completely helpless, unable to find a way to do anything about it.

Here's Michael in Wisconsin.