Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) on Sunday lashed out at Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for thinking he could "multiply the bread and fishes" like Jesus Christ by limiting the amount of federal funds available to help hungry children.
Last week, Rubio declared former President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty a failure and proposed ending most federal social saftey net programs and replacing them with block grants to the states. Experts argued that the current programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps are “counter-cyclical” in that they increase during recessions, something that would end under Rubio's proposal.
"What he's saying is, 'We'll send you less money because this year we want to cut dollars to feed hungry children,'" O'Malley told CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday. "The answers to feeding hungry children is not fewer dollars to feed hungry children, it's to do more... We believe in doing more of the things that actually work, not in this cynical shell game of cap and block grant and then dismantle."
"If your goal is to dismantle government for some ideological purpose then it doesn't work," he added. "But this notion that somehow that by capping the dollars that the federal government puts into feeding hungry children that somehow that will miraculously multiply the bread and fishes is poppycock, and it's part of this ideology that we've been suffering from and our economy has been suffering from."
"What we need to do is enact policies that actually help our middle class rather than follow this ideology of dismantling Washington and getting Washington out of everything we do. We're all in this together and we need our national government."
