During a Monday appearance in South Carolina, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) voiced his displeasure with the "100 million people [who are] "simply not in the workforce," calling on unemployed Americans to "step up."
(Watch a video of Rep. King's remarks, originally posted by Raw Story, above)
At a meeting in Charleston organized by Mallory Factor, King attributed rampant unemployment to many Americans' unwillingness to work, drawing an analogy between the unemployed and lazy children, according to Red Alert Politics.
"Now, what kind of a family, if you had six kids and a third of your kids would say, ‘I’m not doing the chores, Mom’? If any of them say, ‘I refuse, I’m not going to participate, I’m not going to contribute to the American GDP.’ Pretty soon those kids [would understand] 'you get to eat after you do the work! Not just in hopes that one day you might actually do the work!" said the congressman.
“And so here we sit, this great big country that is a family, and we have common interests and a common history and a common culture and a common language and we have free enterprise capitalism, and this all should tie us together," he said. "See what’s happening?"
While the United States Department of Labor reported that the unemployment rate fell to 7.4 in July, and the number of long-term unemployed in the U.S., 4.2 million, has dwindled by almost 1 million in the past year, King remained adamant that immigrant workers and welfare programs have exacerbated the problem of unemployment.
"A hundred million Americans aren’t contributing. And yet, we’re looking out across the border and saying, 'let’s bring in some more people that are uneducated, unskilled,'" he said. "And we’re going to put them into the unskilled workforce, and somehow we’re going to increase our economy."
Noting that 80 welfare programs are currently in operation, King further asserted that "we have become a dependency state," fueled by Obama administration-backed unemployment benefits that "pay people not to work ... because it expands the dependency class and it expands their power base in this country."
Denouncing these elements that he believes diminish Americans' incentive to find work, King concluded that "our hearts are bigger than our common sense."