Paul Ryan’s shiny new toy


Recent Romney VP pick Paul Ryan has a shiny new anti-poverty program that has taken the usual DC pundits breath away, because he cares, he really cares:

Esquire — The reboot centers on Ryan’s casting himself as “The Conservative Who Cares About The Poor.” This, he says, stems from his deeply held Catholic faith — except that, when he tried to run that riff past the Jesuits at Georgetown during the campaign, they handed him his head, and even the National Council of Catholic Bishops wasn’t buying this codswollop. Now, though, he’s back again, and with a 200-page report about government anti-poverty programs that comes to the unsurprising conclusion that Paul Ryan is right about anything. Nonetheless, because the report has been produced by Paul Ryan, there has been a positive scramble to announce that a new actual “debate” about poverty has been opened, and that the Republicans now have a “chance” to come up with their own solution to the problem afflicting millions of people who wouldn’t vote for them even if they could …

I’m told the proposal misquotes data from legit studies and is rife with deregulation and tax cuts. Shocking!

One of the things I try to get through to my conservative friends is, even if I didn’t object to Republican policies for analytical or moral reasons, there’s nothing in them for me, even though I’m a college educated middle-aged white guy. I live in poverty, barely scraping by on low paying jobs, an occasional free-lance gig, and the generosity of readers. If a racist conservative white guy offered me a job paying a paltry 40k a year, let alone 60k, it would be so much money to me after years of barely surviving, maybe I would be conflicted. Maybe, I would be sympathetic, I might even be reachable.

But that doesn’t happen. They don’t offer me a job paying a living wage. They don’t offer me a job at all and they pay other people good money to actively make my dismal life even more difficult. Right now the House is voting to repeal Obamacare. Ryan is trying to turn Medicare into a crappy voucher program, others are trying to eliminate Social Security and unemployment. And thanks to Rick Perry and the GOP controlled House in Texas, tomorrow morning I have to forgo interviews or filling out applications to get up at the crack of dawn, put precious dollars into my gas tank, drive to the other side of town in rush hour traffic, take the chance a job will pop up on a job site that I won’t see, and spend most of the day sitting in a bullshit required seminar where a TWC wonk will teach me there is a thing called the Internet and show me the job sites I search half a dozen times a day as if it is useful information I never knew about.

As long as Republicans are making my life worse and/or not helping me, why would I vote for them?

Comments

  1. StevoR : Free West Papua, free Tibet, let the Chagossians return! says

    Becoz *he’s* b-b-b-bleck!!!!!!!!!!! *

    You know who he** is.

    * With apologies to Leathal Weapon II.

    ** Teh auntyChriiist! Teh Kenyan-Communist- nazzi-Socialist Aye-rab, gun-takin’, freedumb-hatin’, n … nazzi , did I say Communist already?, AaauntyChriiiiiist nnnnn ..non-american in the bbb- white house, y’know!

    (^ I think that’s a hyperbolic caricature, I could be wrong.)

    But seriously, they think if you call the other side enough names and rant and rave enough maybe you’ll believe them and vote or them? Or so they hope? I think.

    When all you have to offer is,well what you’ve noted, I guess that’s all you’re really left with?

  2. Reginald Selkirk says

    And what are the Republicans proposing to do about poverty? It appears they are offering more of the same. Austerity. Trickle-down. I.e. the things we’ve been doing for 30 years which have made the situation worse, not better. Somehow if we keep doing them that will magically make things better.

  3. Hatchetfish says

    “And what are the Republicans proposing to do about poverty?”

    See, you misunderstand the term “Anti-Poverty.” It’s not that they oppose poverty, it’s that they oppose those who are affected by it and wish they’d just hurry up and get out of it on their own or die already. That “the things we’ve been doing for 30 years […] have made the situation worse not better” is a feature, not a bug.

Leave a Reply