Few things are going to keep me up at night more than the prospect of Paul Ryan with too much time on his hands and $7 million to spend advancing his poverty agenda.
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thecentersquare.com/national/paul-…
A quick refresher on the former Speaker (and self-styled “poverty crusader”)’s wish-list....
✔️ Block-granting survival programs and modeling them after TANF—which has become such a pitiful shell of a program, that it now helps fewer than 1 in 4 poor families with kids, and in no state provides enough help to take a family to even *half* of the meager poverty line
✔️ Dismantling housing assistance—which already helps fewer than 1 in 4 eligible poor families—in the midst of a national affordable housing crisis
✔️ Slashing Social Security, privatizing Medicare, and eliminating cash assistance for poor disabled kids and their families
✔️ Ensuring payday lenders are able to prey upon cash-strapped borrowers with abandon
✔️ Slashing the school meals program for hungry school kids, and eliminating funding for Head Start
✔️ Year after year as chair of the House Budget Committee, his budgets famously got TWO-THIRDS of their cuts from programs that help families meet basic survival needs—all to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.
✔️ He led the House GOP crusade to burn down not just the ACA but also Medicaid—famously admitting he’d been dreaming of slashing Medicaid since he was drinking out of kegs in college.
✔️ He also led the House GOP quest to take food assistance away from 2 million Americans—and strip hundreds of thousands of hungry school kids of free school meals—in the Farm Bill (which Trump is now carrying out through a series of administrative attacks).
✔️ In the process, he took GOP hypocrisy on poverty policy to new heights, voting against raising the poverty-level minimum wage at least 10 times while in office—while literally giving speeches about the need to “push wages up.”
✔️ And all along the way, he spearheaded the GOP’s Orwellian rebrand of their soak-the-poor agenda—including such gems as rebranding proposals to slash Food Stamps “workforce development.”
✔️ Meanwhile, ya gotta hand it to him – it takes real chutzpah to host a year-long series of hearings on poverty, and not invite a single person who’s ever experienced it to testify.
Note to media reporting on his foundation to "fight poverty": This is your chance to accurately report on what he's been after all along -- lighting a match, setting fire to what's left of the safety net, and climbing over the wreckage to advance his political career.
