Truth=Controversy: Rand Paul & the 21st Century's Welfare Queens

There's another Rand Paul outrage for media liberals to flog. This time he's shooting off his mouth about how poor people in America are much better off than poor people everywhere else. Cue the violins: Rand Paul Under Fire for Saying Poor In The US Are Better Off Than The Poor Elsewhere

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."

That's not a controversial statement. That's the freakin' truth. Not only should conservatives say this every time a liberal starts crying crocodile tears over "inequality," it should be the sort of thing adults of average intelligence know by instinct. The poor in other countries struggle for food and shelter. The poor in America - many of whom properly belong in Mexico - struggle to choose between big screen TV's.

Oh, I know. You can find some homeless guy who's worse off than a Kalahari dirt farmer. And, surely there's a Chicago public housing project that is as much a hellhole as a Rio slum. But, the privation and desperation so common in the rest of the world simply does not have an analogue in the United States, no matter how much the Democrats would want to believe otherwise.