What is it about South Carolina? Are they putting something in the water down there, or maybe just in the water at the Governor’s office? It’s got to be something. But hey, at least this guy didn’t sneak off to a secret rendezvous with his Argentinian mistress while he was supposed to be on the job.

No, no, he didn’t do that. Instead, in what can only be described as a Bidenesque moment during a town hall meeting last Thursday, South Carolina Lt. Governor André Bauer — no, not Andre Braugher — decided it would behoove him (and boost his chances of being elected Governor) to make an unusual statement about people on welfare:

My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals. You know why? Because they breed! You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a person ample food supply. They will reproduce, especially ones that don’t think too much further than that. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to curtail that type of behavior. They don’t know any better.

Ah, but I do know better. Sometimes parents are just down on their luck. Even…yes…parents like Bauer’s. Seanna Adcox of the Associated Press reports

A child of divorce who benefited from free lunches himself, Bauer insisted he wasn’t bad-mouthing people laid off from work in the recession or advocating taking food from children, but rather emphasizing the need to break the cycle of dependency.

Ri-i-i-ight. Bauer managed not to fall victim to the “cycle of dependency” by eating a few of those free lunches himself back in the day. Hell, he’s a highfalutin’ politician. But we must stop the handouts now or we’ll be stuck with those pesky poor people forever!

Something tells me it doesn’t work that way. Jay Bookman of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has more:

We can test Bauer’s thesis here at home, by comparing states that offer varying degrees of support for the poor. A liberal Northeastern state such as Connecticut, for example, offers a more extensive government support system to its poor than does a conservative state such as South Carolina. Mississippi offers even less support to its poor than does South Carolina. Put in Bauer’s terms, Connecticut rewards poverty while South Carolina and Mississippi try to penalize it.

If Bauer’s thesis is correct — if government support causes poverty — then Connecticut ought to be drowning in poor people while Mississippi has relatively few poor people.  Yet in fact the exact opposite is true, and Census Bureau figures prove it. In Connecticut, which “subsidizes bad behavior” most heavily, 5.7 percent of families lived below the poverty line in 2007, while 16 percent did so in Mississippi, where poverty was least subsidized. (The figure in South Carolina was 11.2 percent; in Georgia it was 10.8 percent. And all those numbers are undoubtedly a lot higher in 2010.)

Now, maybe all the poor people take Connecticut’s welfare vouchers, move to South Carolina, and spend ‘em there. I don’t know. “André” doesn’t strike me as much of a redneck name. More like New Caanan.

Talk amongst yourselves.

UPDATE: Stephen Colbert.