POMPANO BEACH, Florida — Stay-at-home moms should be considered working moms, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) argued on Tuesday — just so long as they’re not poor.

ThinkProgress discussed the issue with the south Florida congressman on Tuesday following a town hall meeting. West argued that women who stay in the home to raise kids should be considered working mothers. But when asked whether mothers who are on welfare should be allowed to stay home and raise their children, West’s position was remarkably different. Instead of advocating for the work that poor mothers do at home raising kids, West decried the “growth of the entitlement or the nanny state.”

To West, the problem isn’t welfare-to-work, which requires mothers on welfare to work outside the home; it’s “people depending on the federal government”:

KEYES: Is there any question about whether or not stay-at-home moms who are raising kids, whether or not they should be considered working moms?

WEST: [...] Go to any military installation and go on that installation to a stay-at-home mom that is taking care of that family and that household why, or even a husband, a spouse, the primary person that’s deployed, and tell them that they’re not really working. I don’t think you’ll be walking off that military installation the same way that you walked onto it.

KEYES: What about mothers who are on welfare though? Do you think they should be allowed to stay at home and raise their children?

WEST: I think that what we need to do is how do we reduce the growth of the entitlement or the nanny state. Coming from the inner city, a good thing of the Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson, I think now you’re talking about second and third and getting towards fourth generation of welfare. And as I showed up there, I don’t want more people depending on the federal government. I want more people to be out there and enjoying the American dream.

Staying at home and raising kids is absolutely work, as any parent will attest. The problem is that conservatives like West will only defend the work of stay-at-home moms when they live in financially secure homes, while backing welfare reforms that prevent lower income mothers from doing the same.

As if poor people didn’t have enough to worry about, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) has given them one more: enslavement.

West, speaking at the Broward County Lincoln Day Dinner this past Saturday, warned the crowd about the danger of food stamps for American society. “In the last 10 years,” West said, the “food stamp program that has gone from about $20.6 billion to over $75 billion.” The Florida congressmen saw this increase not as a society practicing compassion for its most needy, but as a more nefarious plot. “That’s not how you empower the American people,” West declared. “That’s how you enslave the American people.”

WEST: What have we seen happen recently, in the last 10 years? A food stamp program that has gone from about $20.6 billion to over $75 billion in allocation of funds. A 267 percent increase. That’s not how you empower the American people. That’s how you enslave the American people. That’s how you drive toward economic dependence instead of economic freedom.

Watch it:

Of course, there is a very good reason for the rise in demand for food stamps: the Great Recession. The economic downturn threw millions of Americans out of work, and the government has rightfully aided those who are down on their luck. As the economy recovers, the demand for food stamps is projected to decrease.

Far from being a pernicious plot to enslave the American people, food stamps are currently working just as they’re intended to: to ensure that those who live in poverty get enough to eat. As the non-partisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes, food stamps are a “powerful anti-poverty program” that “lifted about 4 million Americans above the poverty line in 2010, including about 2 million children.”

Still, the situation for these Americans remains perilous, at best. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) is currently trying to slash food stamp funding, a proposal that West voted for.

Georgia’s controversial plan to mandate drug testing for all welfare recipients and other beneficiaries of government assistance got a big endorsement on Friday from Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney.

On a local NBC affiliate in Georgia, Romney said that he supported the measure:

Jeff Hullinger: [Lawmakers] have bantered about the proposition that welfare recipients should be drug tested. How do you feel about that?

Mitt Romney: Well my own view is, it’s a great idea. People who are receiving welfare benefits, government benefits, we should make sure they’re not using those benefits to pay for drugs. I think it’s an excellent idea.

Watch it:

Romney’s support for blindly drug-testing welfare recipients dates back at least two decades, to his failed 1994 campaign for the US Senate. Civil rights advocates, meanwhile, have been quick to challenge the constitutionality of drug testing bills that were passed last year, and courts blocked similar bills from being implemented in Florida and Michigan.

Rather than saving states money or ensuring taxpayer dollars aren’t used to purchase drugs, mandatory testing laws have succeeded only in proving that welfare recipients are actually less likely to use drugs than the public at large, and implementing laws requiring drug testing is costing states like Florida money they don’t have.

The ACLU of Florida has estimated that the state saved just over $40,000 between July and October by denying residents welfare support based on their failure to pass a drug test, while it spent more than $245,000 in reimbursements for the cost of the exam in the same time period.

The GOP is cultivating a staggeringly disdainful view of Americans who are struggling to get by in the wake of the Great Recession. Seeking to gut the social safety net programs on which an increasing number of Americans rely, Republicans have demonized the poor as dependent, lazy drug-users who pilfer Uncle Sam for trips to Hawaii. In that vein, House Republicans are bringing a bill to the floor today to ensure that low-income Americans don’t use federal benefits to pay for “lap dances.”

The bill’s sponsor Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-LA) says he’s trying to close a “strip-club loophole” which allows beneficiaries of the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program use state-issued debit cards at strip clubs, casinos, and liquor stores. “It’s pretty rampant around the country,” he insists.

Naturally, no one thinks adult entertainment is an appropriate use for TANF funds. But as Center for American Progress Action Fund’s Melissa Boteach notes, the use of funds at strip clubs, liquor stores, and casinos is hardly a “pressing national crisis,” but rather a politically valuable message for the GOP, regardless of its veracity, because it’s useful to the GOP to paint vulnerable Americans as “delinquent and criminally inclined“:

But putting politics above policy in this crass way is unfortunate and cynical. The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program has experienced benefit cuts of more than 20 percent, after adjusting for inflation, even as the Great Recession and the slow economic recovery have caused elevated levels of unemployment and poverty. Many low-income workers on TANF are unable to access the child care they need to make work possible and ultimately end up paying nearly half their income towards care for their children. And low-wage workers are constantly facing the threat of a layoff because more than 80 percent lack access to a single paid sick day to take care of themselves, a sick kid, or an elderly relative.

And the big vote on TANF is about strip clubs?

This vote represents yet another instance in the creeping trend of conservatives to demonize the poor — and then threaten anyone who votes against the legislation with supporting “welfare spending” for strip club admissions. The tactic enables conservatives to imply that tough economic circumstances somehow make poor people delinquent and criminally inclined.

Boustany pushes the common refrain that such bills are an “obligation to make sure taxpayer dollars are spent appropriately.” But as Boteach points out, TANF and other social safety net programs are already subject to federal and state audits. And for measures like drug-testing welfare recipients, such proposals can cost thousands to catch one drug user because the positive test rate is so low.

At a time when nearly half of the U.S population is just one financial shock away from poverty, Republicans should focus on bolstering the very programs that ensure the economic security of families. Instead, Republicans seem committed to push a strip club stereotype for a political win while stripping vulnerable Americans of a safety net.

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum has been trying to pull off an upset in the Iowa caucus, but he’s drawing criticism ahead of tonight’s contest for racially charged remarks he recently made about welfare recipients:

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn’t want to “make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” [...]

It is unclear why Santorum pinpointed blacks specifically as recipients of federal aid. The original questioner asked “how do we get off this crazy train? We’ve got so much foreign influence in this country now,” adding “where do we go from here?”

Watch it:

It’s hard to say which part of the story is stranger — that Santorum spontaneously derided poor black people in response to a question about foreign money or his explanation of why he did it.

When asked about the comments in a CBS interview, Santorum bizarrely referenced a documentary about the education achievement gap, Waiting for Superman, to explain the context. “Yesterday I talked for example about a movie called, um, what was it? ‘Waiting for Superman,’ which was about black children and so I don’t know whether it was in response and I was talking about that,” he said. The movie actually portrays students of several races.

There had originally been some confusion about whether Santorum actually said the word “black,” which he appeared to clear up in the CBS interview by acknowledging that was in fact the statement he made. (The candidate seemed to think better of his words mid-sentence, so the line comes across garbled.)

CBS points out that only nine percent of Iowans on food stamps are black — and 84 percent are white. Nationally, 39 percent of welfare recipients are white, 37 percent are black, and 17 percent are Hispanic. So Santorum’s decision to single out black welfare recipients plays right into insulting — and inaccurate — stereotypes of the kind of people some voters might expect to want a “handout.”

Attacking families who receive government aid has been a theme among many of the Republican candidates. In nearly every speech, Newt Gingrich accuses President Obama of being a “food stamp president” and even said “really poor children” have bad work habits and no knowledge of how to make an income “unless it’s illegal.” (HT: Raw Story)