Yes, Paul, like his father, has certainly put his foot in his mouth in the past. But I’m not at all sure what the controversy is here:
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul says the poor in America are “enormously better off than the rest of the world,” citing an old Cold War film that showed even impoverished homes had color televisions.Paul’s recent remarks at his first forum with Democratic opponent Jack Conway stirred some anger in impoverished pockets of Kentucky, where as many as a third of residents live in poverty.
The libertarian-leaning Paul addressed the issue of poverty by alluding to a decades-old, anti-American propaganda film by the Soviet government designed to criticize the free-market system.
“They filmed a building in the poorer section of New York with some broken windows and they said, `Oh, this is how the poor in America lives,”‘ Paul said at last week’s forum. “But it backfired on them because the Soviet citizens looked at that video closely and they saw flickering color television sets in all those windows.”
Paul went on to say that “the poor in our country are enormously better off than the rest of the world. It doesn’t mean we can’t do better. But we have to acknowledge and be proud of our system of capitalism.”
The headline of the article is “Rand Paul Under Fire For Saying Poor in U.S. Better Off Than Poor Elsewhere.”
And the problem with his statement is…?
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