"Mr. Ryan’s Small Ideas on Poverty"

[applegrove]

Mr. Ryan’s Small Ideas on Poverty

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD at the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/04/opinion/mr-ryans-small-ideas-on-poverty.html?ref=opinion&_r=1

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Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the House Budget Committee chairman, has an important role to play within the Republican Party. He provides polished intellectual cover for his party to mow down as many antipoverty programs as it can see. Most Congressional Republicans would love nothing more than to eviscerate programs like Medicaid, Head Start and food stamps. But so as not to appear cruel and uncaring, they need a high-minded excuse to do so.

That’s what Mr. Ryan gave them on Monday in a 204-page report that finds flaws with almost every attempt the government has made to relieve poverty and its effects since the 1960s. The report will undoubtedly become the foundation for Mr. Ryan’s budget proposal to cut financing for these programs, and Republicans sound incredibly grateful that they can now point to an official report when their votes are challenged on the campaign trail. “Paul Ryan remains our big-ideas guy,” said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, a member of the House leadership.

The ideas are actually small and tired. There are scores of duplicative antipoverty programs, the report says, and since poverty persists, they are obviously wasteful and ineffective. “Federal programs are not only failing to address the problem,” it says, “they are also in some significant respects making it worse.”

To fit that broad and unsupportable argument, Mr. Ryan then goes about distorting the facts. For all of Medicaid’s billions, the report says, its recipients are less healthy than people on private insurance or Medicare! Well, yes, that’s not exactly surprising because Medicaid cares for the nation’s poorest residents, many of whom come from troubled backgrounds and have trouble attending to their own needs. But that’s hardly a reason to turn it into a block grant and dump it on the states, as Mr. Ryan proposed in 2012. Medicaid has made millions of low-income people healthier, and its expansions have dramatically reduced infant mortality and childhood deaths.



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