Joni Ernst's Bread Bags and Inequality

It's been a little while since the President's State of the Union address and Republican response (or responses, for some reason).

The unenviable task of delivering the official GOP response fell to freshman Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, whose speech included the following remarks that have gotten plenty of attention:

"You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes. So on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry. But I was never embarrassed, because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet."

It is unfortunate that most of the attention given to this by Ernst's critics has been plain mockery without analysis; it's a missed opportunity to point out that the anecdote lends credence to the value of economic equality.

Update, because I probably didn't have time to put this down in full before:

To spell it out, it sounds like she's saying that the fact that all the students experienced the same level of economic consumption lessened the sting of that being a low level of economic consumption.  In other words, this Republican admits not only absolute need and poverty as possible areas of concern (at least in word, if not in deed), but inequality and relative poverty too.