Nugent: Budget deal should suspend welfare recipients' voting rights

Conservative rocker Ted Nugent is urging the Republican Party to "stop the insanity" and insist that voting rights be suspended for welfare recipients as a part of a larger budget deal.

In his Monday Washington Times column, Nugent ranted that talk about raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans proved that Washington was a "financial insane asylum."

"What we need is a wholesale, top-to-bottom assessment of the federal government, and then we need to slash and burn all Fedzilla departments, agencies and offices that are not constitutionally required or deemed vital," he wrote. "This should be fundamental before any deals are cut regarding new taxes."

"The three sacred entitlement cows in the room that no politician wants to poke are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A blinding statement of the obvious is that we are never going to get our financial house in order until these sacred entitlement cows are not only poked, but slaughtered."

According to Nugent, a budget deal should "spread the pain around" and raise taxes on Americans who currently don't make enough income to pay a federal income tax.

"Let’s also stop the insanity by suspending the right to vote of any American who is on welfare," he added. "Once they get off welfare and are self-sustaining, they get their right to vote restored. No American on welfare should have the right to vote for tax increases on those Americans who are working and paying taxes to support them. That’s insane."

And, of course, any good budget deal would have to mandate that photo identification was required to vote nationwide, Nugent said.

"It shouldn’t take a Motown guitar slayer to come up with these common-sense bargaining chips before taxes are raised on the producers, which will further choke the economy," the rocker concluded. "How about it, GOP?"

Following President Barack Obama's re-election last month, Nugent opined that welfare recipients were "gluttonous, soulless pigs who feast on whatever Fedzilla provides."

"And you thought 'Planet of the Apes' was a movie," he wrote. "Too many Americans have become entitlement chumps who have been convinced by Democrats and other liberal scammers that they are entitled to the sweat and hard work of other Americans. Free cellphones aren’t free. Food stamps have become vote-getting extortion vouchers."

In 2009, FactCheck.org debunked the myth that the Obama administration started a program which provides free cell phones to low-income Americans.

(h/t: Media Matters)