House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) appeared on NBC's "Today" show yesterday, and co-host Ann Curry asked a reasonable question about his budget plan: "Do you acknowledge poor people will suffer under this budget?" Ryan dismissed the idea out of hand.
The answer is important, in part for what he said, and in part for what he didn't say.
On the former, Ryan argued that high poverty rates are the results of "the president's policies." That's ridiculous -- poverty rates are high because a recession started in 2007, and it was followed by a global financial crisis in 2008.
He added, in apparent reference to welfare reform, "What we want to do is replicate those successful strategies that worked in the late '90's." But that's absurd, too, because as Ed Kilgore explained yesterday, Clinton-era welfare reform and Ryan's vision have nothing in common.
Finally, Ryan argued, "We just don't agree that throwing more money at failed programs works." The problem, of course, is that they're not failed programs -- as we were reminded this week, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), better known as food stamps, has been an extraordinary success. Ryan doesn't want to eliminate "failed" programs; he wants to slash funding for effective ones.
And then there's what Ryan didn't say -- that poor people really will suffer under the Ryan plan.
Look, this really isn't complicated. Paul Ryan's budget plan is simply brutal towards the poor and working families.
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's budget plan would get at least 62 percent of its $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts over ten years (relative to a continuation of current policies) from programs that serve people of limited means. This stands a core principle of President Obama's fiscal commission on its head and violates basic principles of fairness.
While giving a massive tax break to the wealthy, the Ryan budget plan slashes funding for Medicaid, food stamps, and other for low-income programs, nearly all of which Ryan's plan would eliminate over the next couple of decades.
As the CBPP's Robert Greenstein put it, "[T]he Ryan budget would impose extraordinary cuts in programs that serve as a lifeline for our nation's poorest and most vulnerable citizens, and over time would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose their health insurance or become underinsured." He added that Ryan's plan "would cast tens of millions of less fortunate Americans into the ranks of the uninsured, take food from poor children, make it harder for low-income students to get a college degree, and squeeze funding for research, education, and infrastructure."
"Do you acknowledge poor people will suffer under this budget?" The fact that Ryan would acknowledge no such thing suggests he doesn't know what "suffer" means, or he's not as familiar with the consequences of his plan as he should be.
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ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? Ryan NEVER answers an 'inconvienent' question...he dismisses it and then the HOST dismisses it...just move on nothing to see here. THAT is why when he got 'graded' by the CBO they called it BS. But nobody reports on THAT. 'The poor will suffer'...HONESTLY do you think that is a GREAT question??? No. It's 'according to your plan, facts and figures, you will decimate the poor to give to the wealthy, facts and figures'. Sorry Mr. Ryan it's what you SAID. No Mr. Ryan we will not move on. These are YOUR words.
So as a nation we can either respond like Oliver "can I have sum more please, Sir", or like the French responded after being told "let them eat cake". I'm sure that if it's the latter, Paul Ryan will come to understand "suffering" quite well! /snark
Ryan was grilled unmercifully by the reporter, who was armed with facts and figures, chapter and verse.
After an unbearable hour of this torture, Ryan staggered from the room, silently weeping.
-and then I woke up. . .
lol!!!
Republican War on Humanity continues. If you have a pulse, you have no rights.
BTW: Will Rachel be sued as part of the Apple book pricing scandal?
You can't expect Ann Curry to ask real followup questions like a real reporter. She isn't and in 2012 neither do the real reporters. I will demand more out of Ann Curry when I see some real follow up out of David Gregory or Chuck Todd.
and Joe Scarborough
The Mourning Joke Scarborough is a republican puke who makes only surface efforts to hide that he is a repuke front piece.
David Gregory and Chuckie Todd are infinitely more contemptible because they probably actually believe that they are being 'fair and balanced' and not repuknican stooges.
name calling only deminishes your arguement.
so does spelling, lol!
lol!!!!!!
poverty rates are high because a recession started in 2007, and it was followed by a global financial crisis in 2008.
both of which were caused by the same policies Ryan is proposing: low taxes, little investment in the future, less regulation (or enforcement). I think he overestimates how much candy there is to steal from babies.
He wants "less regulation" on polluters, oil conglomerates and price gouging healthcare rackets. He wants to eliminate those evil aspects of government that keep food safe and prevent strip mining in national parks. He wants less regulation on reckless Wall Street speculators and reduced limits on corporate welfare in general. It is wrong for the government to interfere when banks want to play casino with depositors money. If you want to work in a unionized shop for a third of the money, he thinks the union needs to be pushed aside and you should be allowed to exercise your "Right to Scab" all you want. You have no right to a minimum wage or overtime pay, either. But don't think for a second that you have a right to the Social Security and Medicare you paid into for your whole working life, because Paul Ryan thinks that stuff is immoral and the money "wasted" on those programs needs to be given to Rush Limbaugh and the Kardashian sisters in the form of massive tax cuts ASAP. And if you're unemployed, don't expect to eat while you look for the remaining jobs that Mr Ryan hasn't shipped off to Micronesia because that's just unfair and wicked. And communistic.
On the other hand, if your daughter is brutally raped and doctors assert that an abortion is necessary because the resulting pregnancy will kill her, after a mind numbing round of interventionist "conservative," up close & personal government nobody thought possible until recently, followed by "Then you're going to die because that's God's Will, don't expect anything more than a prayer circle for the rapist's "precious" baby. Because Republicans believe that government assistance should be based on how much money you have and how much you don't actually need assistance.
Sometimes all government is evil and sometimes you just can't get enough government intervention into people's lives. And uteri.
I would love, just once, for an interviewer to just lose it and yell "LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!".
"stealing from the poor to give to the rich" and it still balances nothing. Great plan. How anyone is even taking this budget seriously is beyond me.
I want Rachel to do this *so* badly. She's come close, one of the rare ones who will call a liar a liar, but she's too professional just to let it out. But maybe if she gets her wished for interview with Cheney? :)
They won't come on her SHOW because they already KNOW she will ask...have you seen her on Meet the Press? Everytime she nails them with facts and figures, David Gregory rushes in to 'smooth it all over'...You know how they hate those FACTS.
First of all, WHY is bush and cheney not being held for treason? Or is only sexual misadventures the citizenry worries about?
Mr. Benen,
Beware of DLC/DINO/Repuke-Lites and everything they say...
I wish that you would be extremely selective of when, if ever you refer to anything from Ed Kilgore.
As a DLC/DINO/Repuke-Lite, Ed Kilgore probably believes that his old boss Harold Ford is a 'centrist'. As a DLC/DINO/Repuke-Lite, Ed Kilgore probably believes that Billy Bob Clinton's triangulating, center right, 'I'm a kinder and gentler repuke' administration was centrist. Kilgore also probably believes that Billy Bob and the repukes 'welfare reform' was a success.
Welfare reform signed by Billy Bob was a success if the only objective was to cut federal spending and cut people from receiving it. In terms of helping people who needed/need it, it is quantitatively a failure.
If Billy Bob Clinton's 'welfare reform' is a success, then so must NAFTA and repealing Glass-Steagall.
There are plenty of credible sources available for a real and believeable contention that Paul Ryan is an @sshole on the payroll of the Koch brothers who does not give a sh!t about the poor or the ameriKKKan workers.
You don't like Ed Kilgore much do you. I think he does a good job at the Monthly. Not as good as Steve, but better than most.
When Kilgore was first guesting over at Political Animal, I asked him about his DLC past. I thought he answered it pretty well. Check it out:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2011_12/point_of_personal_privilege034419.php
Thanks. I think Ed Kilgore does a pretty good job. I would hate to think I have to 'answer' to those I worked for. I like to answer for MYSELF.
Wow, take it easy on Ed. I think he's doing a great job and he has been very transparent about his past. Would you be happier if he referred to Republicans as repukes? Get over it.
Paul Ryan is a sociopath.
Not that that distinguishes him from the rest of his party's Congressional delegation.
Has anyone else noticed that Ryan has a really low forehead? His head is literally small. Which means his neocortex (frontal lobes) aren't that big. And that explains a lot about this blithering moron. No wonder he managed to get past Sophomore Year and remain a Randian.
No, he just has an unusually low hairline. From the front he clearly has a normal-sized head.
http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/paul-ryan-1110-lg-95966050.jpg
Neanderthals had really low foreheads.
If the Ryan budget passes we would have to EAT THE RICH. Just pinch their tiny little heads off and eat them like grapes.
LOL, sorry this just is funny but probably true as they will be the only ones who have anything !
Since Ryan and many others on the far right are all about their religion and being Catholic--I would ask him and them to point out where in the bible or even in any Papal Encyclicals does it state "give to the rich and take from the poor" or "it is better to lay up riches in this world than the next" or any of these AU Christian virtues that the Republicans are always trying to put into law. It's funny though, I remember reading and hearing exactly the opposite of what they're preaching when I was brought up Catholic. What really needs to happen is for a real priest/minister to ask Mr Ryan and the others who only give lip service to being Christian---how they can justify being so unChristian since the laws they are attempting to pass will definitely hurt "the least of the brethren"--the very ones Christ said shows how they (really) are treating him. It shouldn't be impossible to find someone who has actually read the new testament, is it? Put it on Sunday morning on all stations. They shouldn't be able to claim to be what they aren't.
Ah but they'll just respond that the idea of taking from the rich and giving to the poor is the "Robin Hood" strategy and this is, obviously, a bad thing. Because apparently Robin Hood is a bad guy.
They are obviously following the revision of Christian doctrine ("The Fellowship" and C Street) introduced by Avram Vereide, the Norwegian immigrant who had a vision that Christ came to him and told him that all Christian churches had gotten His teachings upside down, and were simply wrong. He wasn't for the meek and mild, he wasn't on the side of the poor: he was on the side of the powerful and the wealthy, something like the fascism that was in the air when he had his vision.
Indeed, C Streeters have recently gone to the mat for African dictators, and always side with the rich and powerful against the poor. Remember Inhofe, I think, holding up the picture of an African dictator our government was opposing to Congress and yelling about how sweet he looked, how wonderful he was....
Is Ryan a member of The Fellowship, or C Street? that could explain a great deal.
Umm just out of curiosity how do the changes in Medicare encourage people to become "self sufficient?" Like I could understand promoting job training programs or food stamps in exchange for work training or something like that. But how does Medicare meet that qualification? And, like in the case of food stamps, 3/4 of those receiving food stamps work full time w/ a large portion belonging to US soldiers and WalMart workers. Many more have 2 income earners w/ both working full time or one working part time and the other working full time. The rest are almost all disabled or elderly. Not exactly sure what benefit it is to tell a disabled person who can't work that they have to work for food? I just don't understand. Like I'd seriously like to believe Ryan's rhetoric except he doesn't explain how his programs do that and from the budget he proposed there is no explanation or statistics as to how his program would accomplish this. Does he have evidence to support his claims that he's going to help people become more self-sufficient?
Would you PLEASE stop asking questions that need facts and figures???? You are getting in the way of his 'tour'...
I know plenty of people who used food stamps to continue their education, and are now making a decent living because of that help. But it's so much more important to give that extra money to the super wealthy, so they can send more jobs overseas to slave labor, and add more money to their stock piles. It's not going to trickle anywhere. A good economy was never paved on the super-wealthy's "good intentions", and I don't like the idea of counting on religious organizations to help the poor either. If there are no people with the money to buy their products here, who is Ryan really hurting? He's an idiot.
When will the media start calling Paul ryan and Mitt Romney what they are......bald faced liars!
They are not called the Corporately Owned Media without reason. By and large, their just perform their corporately assigned tasks of being echo chambers and message amplifiers for repuknican messages.
Click here for references.
The Patriot Act caused The Great Recession.
Real estate value represents over half of accumulated US wealth, and real estate value depends upon population.
This wealth is destroyed when real estate abandonment becomes common, and that is caused by population decline.
The most important changes are periods of unusually high unemployment and poverty. California personal value dropped from 2007 for the first time since 1938 (Legislative Analysis Office, California, 2009).
Every period of economic decline corresponds with population decline.
These are as follows.
Illegal immigrants contribute about $200 billion in GSP across the entire US right now. That consumer demand employs about 10 million US residents.
Three important events occur from 2000 to 2006 during the Bush presidency.
These regulatory changes cause real estate prices and stock prices to skyrocket as investors borrow as much money as is possible. This is intended to restore economic losses that followed the attack of September 11, 2001.
This deregulation does create rapid economic growth, and illegal immigrants flood into the country at the highest rate since the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1920. This fuels a construction boom in the American south and west as hundreds of thousands of excess dwellings are constructed.
The following begins in 2006.
The Mexican economy improves in 2007, and the US population begins to decline. Population decline creates over a million extra dwelling vacancies by 2009.
Real estate prices plummet in 2007 and a foreclosure boom begins in 2008 as foreclosure rates increase by 400%.
Pres. Bush realizes the magnitude of the coming disaster caused by eliminating depression era financial regulations. Bush signs the Emergency Mortgage Loan Modification Act of 2007 in an attempt to prevent the coming banking system collapse, but it is too late.
Real estate value depends upon people to demand dwellings in which to live (US Census Bureau).
Immigration departing the US accounts for a drop of about 1.6% in the population in less than 2 years.
Each US resident creates consumer demand for real estate, vehicles, food, and consumer goods, and that consumer demand includes illegal immigrants.
The illegal immigrant population of Arizona produced $42 billion in GSP during 2008, and immigrant population decline is one of the underlying causes for economic collapse in the American south and west (Immigration Policy Center, 2011).
Birth nearly equals mortality during this period, so this population change is entirely due to migration that contributes the following to the US economy.
The following shows how migration contributed to part of the decline in US real estate values, which collapses real estate value in the American south and west.
The resulting foreclosure boom and real estate collapse in 2007 leaves inadequate asset recovery from foreclosure sales, which reduces bank assets to dangerously low levels.
Banks issue margin calls for stock market investments to cover lending losses in an attempt to avoid bankruptcy.
Margin calls result in rapid trading that collapses the stock market. Over 60% of value is lost from 2007 to 2009 as the population declines.
Investment firms, banks, and businesses lose sufficient capitol that they cannot cover the losses, and the US government is forced to issues loans in order to prevent total economic collapse and double digit unemployment.
This chain of events halts the startup of new businesses, at the same time that millions of jobs are lost in manufacturing, real estate, construction, finance, and investment.
Departure of 5 million immigrants raised unemployment by about 4 million from 2007 to 2009.
A return of 2.6 million immigrants reduced unemployment by about 2 million from 2009 to 2011.
Three important events occur from 2000 to 2006 during the Bush presidency.
One of three correct is not that good. The first two were signed into law by Billy Bob Clinton, who I used to believe was the least damaging republican president since Eisenhower. I have since changed my mind and now believe that he was even more damaging to our country than Bush the Elder.
Beautifully done
Ryan is auditioning for higher office. Let him keep talking because the more he speaks, the more words are recorded for future use. I hope that Dems use his budget for the upcoming elections. If the Ryan budget is found to be responsible for the losses in Congress, Ryan will get blamed and his rising star will plummet. Republicans have not learned their lesson from the loss of the safe district in NY.
if the gop win in november this country will becaome latin amercia and what i mean by that the poor will become the super poor and the super rich will be the super times 10 rich and the poor will start kiddnapping the rich and killin this is not what the founding fathers would have wanted for use
Why is no one talking about the churches war on science?
Ryan must know that the poor would suffer under his budget plan, so the only conclusion I can draw is that he does not care.
I've often thought the conservative Utopia would be where they don't pay their employees; they just give them food and a place to live. Serf's up!!
When are Democrats going to start calling out Republicans for the Fascists they really are?
I just don't think Ryan understands what it's like to be laid off (hopefully he will be in November) or to be in poverty. He's too focused on the debt which the Buffett Rule will help fix. But since it's a plan created by Obama it's "socialist jargon".
I think Ryan doesn't understand what's it like to be laid off (hopefully in November he will) or be in poverty. All he cares about is cutting the debt and destroy Obama's presidency. He cares more about destroying Obama's presidency because he if he didn't he would support the "Romney Loophole" (see what I did there?)
I invite everyone on here to Google "ALEC" Just check it out and look who their board members are and who their "private board members are". This is a total flat out explanation written in black and white on what the right wants for our Country and judicial process. Now with the citizens united decisions they no longer have to hide their agenda. Big Business in bed with our members of the Senate and Congress. I was especially enlightened with their agenda on the justice system. Since when do we have a predisposed purpose in our courts. I thought we had trials to seek truth and justice.