December 04, 2010 02:31 AM UTC

Mike Coffman, Westword's "Schmuck of the Week"

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• by: Colorado Pols

Westword’s Jonathan Shikes reports:

Colorado food banks have seen “a staggering increase in need,” the Denver Post reported this week, and 12.2 percent of households “were categorized as food insecure in 2009.”

The answer, according to Republican U.S. Representative Mike Coffman: cut off food stamps.

“The current food-stamp program is a contributor to childhood obesity, diabetes and learning disorders,” he told the Post.

Right. Let the fatties starve…

Westword says this logic is akin to college scholarships making people dumb. We were thinking it’s like life jackets making you drown or toothpaste rotting your teeth, close enough. It’s possible that Coffman was referring to the fact that a limited budget tends to force unhealthy processed food purchases, but the solution to that problem isn’t less money for food. Sorry, we really don’t know how you’d salvage this one for Coffman–yet another to file in the “just wow” department.

What? It’s not like Coffman can say “let them eat cake,” since cake is very fattening.