LUCK, PLUCK AND BULLSHIT.

Trickle-down is not just for conservative economists; it is also the mechanism of action for wingnut memes. Take lazy-food-stamp-bum messaging: It starts with Republican congressmen, seeps down to Bill O'Reilly, and eventually it gets to Greg Gutfeld.

This is a question that never needed to be asked but must be asked now: if you can get by without working, why work at all? 

It is a question rich layabouts would ask themselves sunning on their daddy's yacht, sipping blender drinks and pawing eastern European pole dancers. But now just about anyone, of any color or stripe, with access to unemployment benefits, welfare, or food stamps can ask themselves that question too.

Yeah, you can live large on fifty bucks worth of food stamps a week. (The welfare check would of course all go to the pool boy and valet.) Sign me up for that life o' leisure!

But you don't have to be unemployed to earn Gutfeld's contempt; if you think a forty-hour week of busting your hump should be worth three hots and a cot at least, in his eyes you're just as bad as a welfare bum. (Only the well-off and those who bust their humps and sleep on straw without complaint escape his wrath.) Gutfeld opposes a living wage because it's demeaning to the worker, who never gets to experience the wonderful feeling of achievement one gets by moving up and out of a minimum-wage, hard-labor job:

The concept of a living wage (which is essentially dramatically increasing the minimum wage) will create entry-level workers who never move up or off that first rung. Why bother moving up if the wage moves up for you?... 

We create a brutal assessment of menial or service work—that it is so awful for your soul, you are better not working, period. I guess the only way a liberal can live with the idea of such work in their world is to reward these poor souls with cash and punish their evil bosses... 

And God, that is wrong. The only way to enjoy the higher rungs of the ladder is to have climbed those lower ones first, as a teen, a college kid, or new "resident" to this country. Not only do you feel the pride of achievement through the upward climb, but at the top you can look down at everyone else and say, in an annoyed voice "You know, when I was your age..."

The following is from Gutfeld's Wikipedia page:

After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in English, he interned at The American Spectator, as an assistant to conservative writer R. Emmett Tyrrell. He landed his first full-time job as a staff writer at Prevention magazine. He formerly worked in Emmaus, Pennsylvania for approximately a decade as an editor at various Rodale Press magazines. In 1995, he became a staff writer at Men's Health. He was promoted to editor in chief of Men's Health in 1999...

I'll cut to the chase: there's no burger-frier or busboy jobs in there (though maybe just being around Tyrrell is sort of like being spattered with grease all day). I suspect Gutfeld's equivalent of the hard-knock life was having to wonder why his corner office was taking so long.

With these guys, the rap always starts off like Horatio Alger and inevitably turns into Patrick Bateman.

(Other key words in the article: "Sharptons," "race baiters," and, I'm not even kidding, "Murphy Brown.")