The public image of poor Lyin’ Paulie Ryan has taken a bit of a beating these days, as Ryan worshippers have to explain why a man who supports the White House aspirations of a man who makes racist statements is still a saint. So they’ve got a new rap: Sure, he supports Donald Trump, but he only does it because he wants to help poor people. To show how much he loves the poor, Ryan even took an “armed tour” of Anacostia, Washington, DC’s blackest ghetto, to promote his new anti-poverty package. How admirable is that?
Not very. If Ryan wanted to help poor people, he wouldn’t lie, as he does, constantly, about the effects of existing anti-poverty programs, citing statistics that show a poverty rate that has remained essentially unchanged for decades without mentioning that these data don’t include the income and services provided to the poor by existing anti-poverty programs. It’s pretty easy to show that a program doesn’t work if you exclude all its benefits.
For the most part, Ryan simply wants to block grant existing programs, to reduce their cost and gives states “flexibility,” which, in the south (and elsewhere) simply means cutting the amount of money that reaches the poor. Still, Ryan’s new anti-poverty package does have one new twist: overturning the Labor Department’s new “fiduciary rule”, which will, shockingly, “require that investment professionals act in their clients’ best interests when offering advice on their retirement accounts,” as Jordan Weissmann explains over at Slate. Obviously, the idea that financial advisors have to think about their clients’ interests rather than their own doesn’t sit well with the GOP. And so that’s the Republican anti-poverty program: take from the poor, give to the rich. Paul Ryan, mega-hypocrite.
Afterwords
The Republican anti-poverty program doesn’t promise to drastically cut spending, although it certainly argues that we’re wasting billions on anti-poverty programs that don’t work. However, Ryan’s (ridiculous) balanced budget package promises tax cuts for the rich, spending increases for defense, and protection for Social Security and Medicare recipients, effectively mandating massive cuts in domestic discretionary programs (where all the anti-poverty programs are located), because there’s simply nothing else to cut.
