The above two desperately poor people are Gloria Nunez and her daughter Angelica Hernandez, who is only 19. NPR says the economy is so bad these two people are having to cut meat out of their diet and skip meals.

No really, that’s what they’re claiming:

A generation ago, the livelihood of Gloria Nunez’s family was built on cars.

Her father worked at General Motors for 45 years before retiring. Her mother taught driver’s education. Nunez and her six siblings grew up middle class.

Things have changed considerably for this Ohio family.

Nunez’s van broke down last fall. Now, her 19-year-old daughter has no reliable transportation out of their subsidized housing complex in Fostoria, 40 miles south of Toledo, to look for a job.

Nunez and most of her siblings and their spouses are unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps. Some have part-time jobs, but working is made more difficult with no car or public transportation.

So her father worked and she doesn’t, and never has but it’s the economy that’s hurting her. Her father managed to work but none of her siblings have jobs, her daughter who has a different last name than her (and grew up seeing her mother never work) has no job. But it’s the gas prices going up in the last year and a half that’s hurting them. Right.

Nunez, 40, has never worked and has no high school degree. She says a car accident 17 years ago left her depressed and disabled, incapable of getting a job. Instead, she and her daughter, Angelica Hernandez, survive on a $637 Social Security check and $102 in food stamps.

Hernandez received her high school diploma and has had several jobs in recent years. But now, because fewer restaurants and stores are hiring, she says she finds it hard to find a job. Even if she could, she says it’s particularly hard to imagine how she’ll keep it. She says she needs someone to give her a lift just to get to an interview. And with gas prices so high, she’s not sure she could afford to pay someone to drive her to work every day.

People tell Nunez her daughter could get more money in public assistance if she had a child.

“A lot of people have told me, ‘Why don’t your daughter have a kid?’”

They both reject that as a plan.

“I’m trying to get a job,” Hernandez says. “I just can’t get a job.”

Hernandez says she’s trying to get training to be a nurse’s assistant, but without her own set of wheels or enough money to pay others for gas, it hasn’t been easy.

Huh. Hernandez had a job but doesn’t work there anymore. What’s that mean? Hmmm.

Putting all that aside, let’s say you just take their word for it that they can’t work. So, if I may be indelicate for a second, how do they manage to remain so, shall we say, rubinesque?

Couldn’t they use to eat less? And frankly I’ve been poor and I did not, at 19, look like that. These people probably go over 350 each, closer to 400 I’d say. To maintain that weight and not lose any walking everywhere, which is what they claim they do, they’d have to eat five or six times a day. They have no car but they buy groceries, they’re active enough to lose weight but they’re morbidly obese and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them?

Nice try NPR but if you want sympathy from me you’re going to need to trot out somebody who actually skips meals. And if this is the best sob story you have, a couple of obese people having to eat less than the 40,000 calories a day they’re used to, then maybe the economy isn’t really all that bad, huh?

h/t Gateway Pundit