Fox host complains about COVID relief for families: 'What happened to the work ethic?'

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade on Monday complained that American families have been receiving child tax credits, which studies have shown have dramatically reduced child poverty.

Kilmeade’s comments occurred during “Fox & Friends” in a monologue in which he also complained about Americans receiving stimulus checks and unemployment insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kilmeade: You watch the payments that went out for over a year, now people are getting paid just to have kids with these child tax deductions. And then you wonder why there’s people like you that described just saying, ‘You know I’m going to look back and find out what I want to do.”

 

Nobody I knew could afford to sit back and say, I’m going to think about out what I want to do next. You have to have a job while you’re figuring it out and maybe do some career seminars at night on your time. But I never saw more people who are more free from a paycheck and were not worried about it. In my life.

Kilmeade continued: “But America, we used to be the overworkers. What happened to the work ethic?”

Since July, most American families with children under 18 have gotten money from the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package that President Joe Biden signed into law in March. Families who received the benefit said they spent the money on necessities like food, clothes, housing, utilities, and education.

Research has shown the payments have helped low-income families, particularly in Black and Latino households. A September study from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University showed that after the federal stimulus payments began, the percentage of low-income parents who said their households frequently did not have enough food to eat dropped from 30% to 21%.

A related study found that child poverty dropped from 16% to 12% as a result of the Biden administration’s stimulus package. Roughly 3 million American children have been kept out of poverty because of the White House’s plan, according to the education policy site Chalkbeat.

An August study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities showed that rates of food hardship after payments began disproportionately dropped among Black and Latino households.

Kilmeade is considerably wealthier than the average American. While his exact salary is not confirmed, other cable news hosts at the same level as Kilmeade reportedly earn between $3 million and $6 million per year. Kilmeade’s latest book, “The President and the Freedom Fighter,” is on the New York Times bestseller list.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.