Walker, Ryan wrong about Food Stamps: "Actually increases economic self-sufficiency when children grow up."

Are Republicans trying to be wrong all the time? Can an ideology be so misguided that everything that springs from is just the opposite of reality?

While Scott Walker and Paul Ryan make complete asses of themselves bashing the poor and their dependence on "government," the cuts to food stamps is one of their most egregious mistakes.

Salon: Hilary Hoynes is a University of California at Berkeley economist who wrote ... Instead of increasing dependency, as conservative critics have repeatedly claimed, Hoyen’s paper showed that, for women at least, food stamp use during pregnancy and early childhood has exactly the opposite impact of what conservatives allege: It actually increases economic self-sufficiency when children grow up, in the next generation.

That was just one of two main results reported in “Long Run Impacts of Childhood Access to the Safety Net,” ... access to food stamps for women leads to “increases in economic self-sufficiency (increases in educational attainment, earnings, and income, and decreases in welfare participation).”  Hoynes and her colleagues took advantage of the fact that food stamp programs were established county-by-county over a period of years, creating a sort of “natural experiment” beginning half a century in the past.

Hoynes herself said, “This work indicates that there are important benefits of the safety net that to date have been ignored. They predict that a more generous safety net can reduce health disparities ... the emerging evidence points to an important role for investments in early life — and those investments generate important returns in terms of better health and economic outcomes in adulthood.”

Or we could just arm people so they can protect themselves from those we didn't invest in.