Reince Priebus Backs Paul Ryan, Republican Attacks on Poor
http://www.progressive.org/reince-priebus-backs-paul-ryan-republicanr-attacks-on-poor
Ryan's comments, widely percieved as racist, did not hurt the Republican Party, Priebus said. And Priebus went further, defending Ryan as a model for other rich, white, Republican men who may have felt too shy to weigh in on the moral failings of poor people and the hazards of providing them with benefits like unemployment insurance and food stamps.
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Whether he is voting for job-killing free trade deals that devastate his home town, or opposing the extension of unemployment benefits, school lunches, and food stamps that serve as a lifeline for his hard-hit constituents, Ryan has made his reputation as the brains behind the Republicans' most divisive, live-and-let-die economic policy proposals.
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The biggest lie in Ryan's poverty report is that federal antipoverty programs actually create poverty. This is an old line of argument, and fits in with Ryan's invocation, in that same controversial radio interview, of Charles Murray, the Bell Curve author who delighted conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s by lending intellectual heft to their political arguments that the poor are lazy, that there may be a genetic explanation for racial inequality, and that heaping shame and punishment on single mothers, including by cutting off their food stamps, might help alleviate poverty by discouraging out-of-wedlock births. The notion that poverty is an attitude problem, and that inequality is perhaps linked to innate, genetic factors, is suddenly popular again, as the staggeringly rich suck up more of our nation's wealth than ever before.
Ryan and other Ayn Rand acolytes in the Republican Party are pressing home their efforts to repeal not just the Great Society and its anti-poverty programs, not just the New Deal safety net, but the Progressive Era itself and the foundational notion that the public must be protected from rapacious corporate greed.