Paul Ryan’s Cruel Agenda

I don't want to appear to beating up Paul Ryan to the exclusion of others in the GOP, but since the man likes to hold himself out as the GOP budget guru, he brings much of the trashing he rightfully is receiving down upon himself.  Add in his callousness towards the unfortunate even as he claims to be a good Roman Catholic and his dishonesty and hypocrisy literally goes off the charts.  Sadly, Ryan - a/k/a Lyin Ryan - is the face of today's Republican Party which only sees a minority of Americans - i.e., white, conservative Christians - as "real Americans and deems everyone else as disposable garbage, including poor children.  The man is horrible in my view.  Here are excerpts from a column in the Washington Post that looks at Ryan's cruel agenda which is the antithesis of Catholic social teaching:

Blaming poverty on the mysterious influence of “culture” is a convenient excuse for doing nothing to address the problem.

That’s the real issue with what Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said about distressed inner-city communities. Critics who accuse him of racism are missing the point. What he’s really guilty of is providing a reason for government to throw up its hands in mock helplessness.

The fundamental problem that poor people have, whether they live in decaying urban neighborhoods or depressed Appalachian valleys or small towns of the Deep South, is not enough money. 

Alleviating stubborn poverty is difficult and expensive. Direct government aid — money, food stamps, Medicaid, housing assistance and the like — is not enough. Poor people need employment that offers a brighter future for themselves and their children. Which means they need job skills. Which means they need education. Which means they need good schools and safe streets.

The list of needs is dauntingly long, and it’s hard to know where to start — or where the money for all the needed interventions will come from. It’s much easier to say that culture is ultimately to blame. But since there’s no step-by-step procedure for changing a culture, we end up not doing anything.

In depressed urban and rural communities, there is an acute shortage of meaningful work. There was a time when young men who didn’t plan to go to college could anticipate finding blue-collar work at “the plant” nearby — maybe a steel mill, maybe an assembly line. There they could have job security, enough income to keep a roof over a family’s head, a pension when they retired. Their children, who would go to college, could expect lives of greater accomplishment and affluence.

This was how the “culture of work” functioned. How is it supposed to happen without work?

I’m suspicious of the cultural hypothesis as a way to explain who succeeds and who doesn’t. I believe outcomes mostly depend on opportunities and that people are much less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior if they see opportunities that make sense to them.

If we had universal pre- kindergarten that fed all children into high-quality schools, if we had affordable higher education, if we incentivized industry to invest in troubled communities — if people had options for which they were prepared — culture would take care of itself. 

But all of that is expensive. Hot air, as Paul Ryan knows, is cheap.

One of the ironies to Ryan's excuse of "culture" being the problem is that in many of Virginia's desperately poor rural areas, the populace consists of what the GOP considers to be "true Americans" - white conservative Christians - yet because of the populace's embrace of ignorance and social values bigotry, no progressive business in its right mind would consider locate or expanding a plant in the region.  Ryan utterly ignores this reality and instead sends a racist dog whistle call by focusing on "culture " of the inner cities.