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Only on Fox News would unemployment insurance be presented as some kind of “cruelty” to the poor that “deters” them from getting hired at low-paying jobs. That’s right, with a straight face, Fox guest John Tamny said that we should scrap federal unemployment benefits in order to make “existing jobs” more attractive and “help” the unemployed by “luring” them back into the workforce. Naturally, host Tucker Carlson was all ears.

It started with a suggestion by Carlson that unemployment insurance benefits are unnecessary and wasteful. He cited a statistic that, during the past recession, the federal government paid “almost $80 million in jobless benefits to households that made more than $1 million a year.” He added, “Is this proof that the system is broken or should top earners be entitled to federal assistance if they lose their jobs?”

His guest, John Tamny took the concept a few steps further. He thought it would be even worse if millionaires were “forced” to pay into a system “that only non-millionaires could collect from.” But he went on to advocate for getting rid of unemployment insurance altogether - couched in the kind of rhetoric George Orwell would surely have loved - by calling one of our most important social safety nets “anti-poor” because it doesn’t encourage them to work for lower wages.

(The system) makes it that much more expensive for (businesses) to lure workers back from the sidelines. It actually raises their labor cost. If you didn’t have the federal government essentially paying people not to work, their labor demands would naturally fall to the level at which the markets would hire them again and they would get back to work more quickly. I think it’s anti-poor to say only you get a program that’s going to make you unemployed for a longer time.

…If you’re being paid money not to work, it’s going to make it that more expensive for businesses to hire you back into the labor force. So if you wanted to rid that, you’d get rid of unemployment benefits and people would then have to accept the existing jobs that are available. Many of them maybe don’t look attractive now. …Unemployment benefits are a deterrent to getting back into the labor force so I think it would be particularly cruel to say if you’re poor, you get paid to stay on the sidelines.

Predictably, Tamny’s solution is to privatize. He wants “401K-style programs" that both employers and employees would pay into "so that if the unthinkable happens, you have a little cushion that you own for during the time that you’re looking for new job.” What nobody mentioned is that this would do exactly what Carlson was supposedly against in the first place - subsidize higher-paid workers' unemployment longer and better.

But if you're new at a job before getting laid off or working at a low-paying job that would only provide a very small “cushion” or if the stock market should tank again – well, I guess the rest of us could count our “lucky” stars as we flip burgers at McDonald’s.

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If you don’t believe that Fox Newsies would love nothing better than to go back to the feudal system where those with money and property rule the rest of us, check out guest John Tamny’s remarks on Fox & Friends this morning where he pointedly said our country is “blessed by the efforts of the relatively few. (The) one percent.” Implicit in the sentiment is that the rest of us are just schlubs who should kowtow to their greatness – and give them more money.

Despite the fact that the election could be seen as a referendum on Americans’ support for the middle class, Fox has spent the days since then waging class warfare in an effort to paint Obama voters as welfare queens just looking for more stuff.

Meanwhile, they applaud those one percenters who want more stuff in the way of tax cuts. There’s no way that Fox & Friends didn’t know that was the kind of cheerleading they’d get when they booked John Tamny on the show this morning. This is the same guy who said just a few months ago on Fox that police and firefighters should be thanking us for their cushy livelihoods at our expense.

In a discussion about the “burden of looming taxes,” as the banner on the screen put it, co-host Dave Briggs asked Tamny if the Bush tax cuts would end for those making more than $250,000 a year as President Obama has been such a “stickler” for.

TAMNY: I don’t think so. I think actually they won’t come to an end because Democrats, conversely, don’t want major reductions in spending and so if you hit the cliff, it wouldn’t just be taxes going up, it would be spending going down and we know that politicians love to spend money. So my guess is that they’re actually going to get some sort of extension of the Bush tax cuts. And that’s very good for the economy, lest we forget we are blessed by the efforts of the relatively few. That one percent is Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com CEO), that’s Fred Smith of FedEx, that’s the late Steve Jobs (of Apple). You want to remove the barriers to their production, not raise them.

You can hear one of the hosts agreeing with Tamny off camera.

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I think I'm supposed to take something away from this segment. Something like the idea that poor people shouldn't eat pie. Or cookies. At least, not if they're made by this lady, who stomped her tiny little hoof and forbade those food stamp baddies from eating her nummy pies.

Wonkette's Rebecca Schoenkopf sums it up rather well:

This is odd: in a four-minute segment on our hero baker lady who simply does not care to sell her sticky treats to those gross food stamp families, fully two separate people bring up the Civil Rights Act and how shop owners may not discriminate against entire classes of people! Huh. Weird. But never fear, others step into the breach to remind us that shop owners have a right of association (as, of course, does the farmer’s market that wanted the baker lady to participate in their EBT-accepting token system in the first place), and that sometimes people on welfare buy cigarettes and tattoos, and that states are looking into that … somehow. (Obviously, Poors are not buying tattoos or cigarettes with their food stamps, but somehow the state will ensure that they never use Money to purchase legal products that the state finds gauche.) Anyway, the whole thing ends as it should, with some man person intoning, “What a shame that we’ve erased ‘shame’ from society. Why can’t we make someone embarrassed for living off others?”

Someone tell that guy about farm subsidies, okay? Also oil subsidies?

But no, instead they rise up, shouting "Let them eat pickles!" No pie for the little government-teat sucking poor, no. Pickles. And shame. Those are okay.