Poor people, right? Visit the "news of the weird" section of a major media site and you'll find a gauntlet of undesirables engaging in such wacky antics as getting into drunk fistfights at McDonald's and whatnot. And, in basically all of these cases, what you're reading barely qualifies as news. It's Internet rubbernecking and -- as far as most news outlets are concerned -- anyone below the poverty line is fair game as a source of national amusement (and it's not unlike similar stunts the news pulls on Asian people and the youths ).

5 "Poor People Are Living Like Kings On Food Stamps!"

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The Narrative:

Even if you're a staunch conservative, you're probably on board with SNAP, or food stamps as we used to call them back in the day. After all, nobody wants American kids starving to death because their parents can't get their financial act together, right?

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Unless those scheming lowlifes abuse the goodwill of tax-paying citizens by using food stamps to buy drugs or steak and lobster or accrue a balance worth several thousand dollars in their accounts, as evidenced by photographs of receipts harmlessly posted by cashiers who secretly want to be investigative reporters. According to this overarching narrative, broke people should exist on ramen, Cheez Whiz, and errant cockroaches, as God intended.

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"They're the lobsters of the land!"

The Reality:

Keep in mind that anyone -- even the completely boneheaded, as we'll see -- can mock up a fake receipt. Case in point: One viral Facebook post purporting to show the receipt of someone with a food stamp balance of $15,464.00. Right off the bat, anyone who's ever balanced a checkbook knows that no one ever has a balance ending in ".00" unless they're either a wizard or suffering from a highly specific form of OCD.

via Washington Post

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That's no more than 1 percent of the population, according to the

Hogwarts Institute of Mental Health.

Second, the receipt is labeled as the grammatically offensive "Foodstamplable EBT balance," which is inconsistent with the rest of the receipt and everything anyone has ever typed. It also exploits a hilarious credulity regarding how much benefits recipients are even capable of receiving. As the Washington Post points out, it's theoretically possible to carry a food stamp balance of over $15,000 in Michigan, where the story comes from and where benefits roll over from month to month -- for a family of nine, who have zero income and never use their benefits. If anything, we should praise this family that apparently lives for the year on one bottle of lemonade and one bag of BBQ chips.