John Stossel helped further Fox News' war on the poor yesterday when he reported back from his experiment pretending to be a homeless beggar. Based on an hour's effort, Stossel concluded he'd earn $90 a day or $23,000 a year. "Tax free," Stossel added. While I'm sure Stossel would not feel like that was such a terrific amount of money if he had to actually live on $23,000 a year (tax free or not), he and the Curvy Couch Scrooges on Fox & Friends did their best to persuade their viewers that giving money to the homeless only enables their drug and alcohol abuse.

Scott Keyes at Think Progress has a great write up of this segment, including a breakdown of the many falsehoods and false assumptions about the homeless. Then Keyes says:

Chastising beggars is an annual tradition for Stossel: Pretending to be poor and homeless is becoming an annual tradition for Stossel. Here’s his 2011 segment, his 2012 segment, and now his 2013 segment. Some journalists use their perch to give voice to the voiceless. Stossel’s hobby horse, on the other hand, is apparently to convince Fox viewers that poor people are too well off. Privilege: “I felt foolish and uncomfortable,” Stossel said of the experience, right after imploring viewers not to give poor people the dignity of believing they are actually poor instead of drunks, addicts, or scammers. Watching four wealthy white people sit in a New York television studio and banter about the evils of giving money to homeless people is like waking up the day after your 21st birthday: it’s not surprising, but still painful.

Only Stossel would be capable of benefiting from people’s generosity, and then deciding that they were rubes with too much holiday spirit and we should really all be grinches who are suspicious of one another. War on Christmas, indeed.

At the end of the segment, Stossel announced that while his hour's take wasn't really much, it was still more than minimum wage. And, no he didn't mean it as proof that minimum wage is too low, but that begging is just too profitable.

I guess if homeless people really want money, they should sell a kidney.