…being poor is like this hilarious scam and poverty is a lifestyle anyone would choose, if they really thought about it:

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash, unless it is illegal.” — Newt Gingrich, defending his stance against certain child labor laws during a campaign stop in Iowa yesterday, 12/1/11.

Newt Gingrich made the claim that some people who receive government aid through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program “take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii. More Americans now get food stamps therefore and we now give it away as cash. You don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card and the credit card can be used for anything. We’ve had people take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii.” — Gingrich today, 12/2/11, in Iowa (his claim is false, by the way)

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“Don’t try to stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, Allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up. The Obama administration has slow walked the foreclosure process … that has long existed and as a result we still have a foreclosure overhang.” — Mitt Romney, Las Vegas Review-Journal interview on 10/17/11, criticizing President Obama for not foreclosing on American families fast enough.

Mitt Romney sat at the head of the table at a coffee shop here on Thursday, listening to a group of unemployed Floridians explain the challenges of looking for work. When they finished, he weighed in with a predicament of his own. “I should tell my story,” Mr. Romney said. “I’m also unemployed.” He chuckled. — Romney in Tampa, FL on 06/15/11