During an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) compared social programs like Social Security to slavery, arguing that President Obama’s failed economic policies are creating a culture of “dependence” that is causing people who lose their unemployment benefits to enroll in the Social Security program:

HOST: The number of people going on Social Security disability out-paced the jobs created by the economy in the the month of June, that is a trend we have seen increase, and holding steady since ’09. Do you have a theory as to why that is happening? Is that something the federal government is creating or an unfortunate consequence of our economy?

WEST: That is an unfortunate consequence of failing economic policies coming from the president so that now when people are running out of the unemployment benefits, now they are looking toward going on Social Security disability… so once again we are creating the sense of economic dependence, which to me is a form of modern, 21st century slavery.

Watch it:

West’s comparison is not only dismissive of the 12.3 million people in forced labor around the globe — including many sweatshop workers held illegally and paid very little, girls and women forced into prostitution, and many others — but it is also wrong on the facts.

More than 8.1 million Americans received SSI in January 2012, and nearly 1.3 million of the recipients were children. SSI’s support is modest — the average monthly payment in January was $517 — but important. A 2005 study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that SSI lifted 2.4 million Americans above the poverty line in 2003 and is a crucial safety net that is keeping families afloat.

Ignoring a federal judge’s injunction, Scranton, Pennsylvania moved ahead with its plan to reduce the pay of city workers to the federal minimum wage starting Friday. Scranton Mayor Chris Doherty claims the city is broke and that the minimum wage payments are all it can possibly pay, the Scranton Times Tribune reports:

Amid Scranton’s ever-deepening financial crisis, Mayor Chris Doherty said his administration is going forward with a plan to unilaterally slash the pay of 398 workers to the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour with today’s payroll, insisting it is all the city can afford.

That will likely earn administration officials an appointment with Judge Michael Barrasse, who granted the city’s police, fire and public works unions a special injunction temporarily barring the administration from imposing the pay cuts after a brief hearing Thursday.

Many of those workers are police officers, firefighters, and other public safety workers, industries that have been slammed by contractions in state and local budgets since the Great Recession. Congressional Republicans repeatedly blocked efforts to extend aid to the states that would have helped shore up their budgets and keep these workers on payroll. In the case of Scranton, such aid may have helped the city actually pay its workers a living wage instead of a federal minimum that hasn’t been raised since 2006 and has less buying power than it had in 1968.