No one would ever seriously expect a right-wing Republican like Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan to come up with any rational solutions about how to help people in poverty.
It’s the same reason nobody goes to a religious fundamentalist for sex therapy. Those who believe something is wrong can’t be expected to do it very well.
Ryan, whose family received Social Security survivor benefits after his father died, now makes it clear through his vicious Republican House budgets that he firmly believes it is wrong for government to do anything to ease the lives of the poor.
Ryan opposes government providing even the most basic necessities of survival, including health care for those without insurance, shelter for the homeless or food for hungry children.
He’s even created a glib cover story to justify treating poor people so poorly.
“We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives,” he says proudly.
In other words: “I’m not really a heartless human being kicking people when they’re down and taking food out of the mouths of children so my wealthy friends and I can get big tax cuts. I’m doing it to help poor people by forcing them to stop being so damn lazy.”
Despite Ryan’s terrible record, everyone knows why he’s written a book arguing totally out of character that Republicans should take the lead in fighting poverty and reaching out to Latinos instead of deporting all of them.
Ryan wants to run for president after joining Mitt Romney’s ugly presidential campaign in accusing 47% of the country of being worthless parasites sucking benefits from the government.
You know, all those shiftless Social Security and Medicare recipients and people who worked hard all their lives until being tossed out in the street by the Great Recession created by Republican economic policies.
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Ryan Pretends to Care about Poor
To set himself apart from the usual clown car of Republican presidential candidates, Ryan has decided to pretend to be the Republican candidate who cares about poor people and racial minorities. No competition there.
First, Ryan knows he’s going to have to rewrite his own nasty history. No problem. Ryan’s greatest political talent has always been telling outrageous lies with big, innocent eyes and well-faked sincerity.
So Ryan is now distancing himself from his own inflammatory campaign rhetoric of dividing voters into “makers” (those wonderful rich people who create jobs) and “takers” (all the bums who receive government benefits).
Ryan claims a constituent opened his clear blue eyes when the man asked: “Who are the takers? Is it the person who lost their job and is on unemployment benefits? Is it the person who served in Iraq and gets their medical care through the VA?”
Interesting examples, since Ryan has voted to cut both long-term unemployment benefits and VA benefits.
But rather than answer for those cruelties, Ryan vowed to stop using the phrase “makers and takers” because “it sounds like we’re saying people who are struggling are deadbeats.” You think?
Ryan’s self-proclaimed innovative idea to end poverty is similar to his previous proposals to gut Social Security and Medicare. He makes his proposals sound harmless when they’re really intended to destroy those programs.
Ryan’s basic idea is to combine all of the federal government’s anti-poverty programs—food assistance, child care, housing subsidies, unemployment benefits and other aid—into large block grants to be turned over to the states for “experimentation.”
The glaring flaw and sinister intent behind that idea is obvious. Currently, 24 Republican governors in this country, including Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are depriving about 5 million poor Americans of health insurance by refusing to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act with 100% federal funding.
The Republican idea of “experimentation” with federal funds to help poor people is reminiscent of the work of the late Dr. Frankenstein.
The only positive suggestion by Ryan that really would reduce poverty is increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit to lower taxes for the working poor.
But allowing governors to control anti-poverty spending does just the opposite. Ryan knows Walker, his own state’s right-wing Republican governor, slashed such tax credits for the poor so he could send an overwhelming two-thirds of Wisconsin’s tax cuts to the very wealthy.
Because Ryan hasn’t mentioned cutting funds for combined poverty programs—yet—Ryan fooled some commentators into believing he was somehow becoming more benevolent.
Hardly. Ryan still passionately argues government spending for everything has to be cut drastically to prevent the doomsday economic apocalypse he’s compiled mountains of distorted data to predict.
Slash spending for everything, that is, except for enormous government giveaways to Ryan’s heroes, those magnificent billionaire “makers” who make America great and deserve all the millions in taxpayer subsidies Republicans shower upon them.
