Mr. Ryan knows firsthand how lazy the government dole can make you.
Rep. Paul Ryan is fond of saying that our safety net has turned into a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.”
He’s a leading purveyor of the belief that people who are getting rich off the government are the poor. The poor are the “lucky duckies,” the true robber barons of this Gilded Age.
With that in mind, Ryan recently unveiled a budget that guts Medicare, Medicare, student loans and every other program that helps struggling Americans in order to pay for more military spending and huge tax breaks for people who don’t need them.
The best part of Ryan’s budget? It explodes the debt.
Why does it explode the debt? Because Paul Ryan didn’t include one of the tax loopholes he would close to pay for the huge tax breaks he’s handing out. Not one. That’s complacency. Apparently, something has taken away his incentive to make the most of his life.
When the government pays your salary and your health care, you just feel the urge stop working apparently.
The President and the Democrats have named a loophole they’d like to close. It’s the one that allows millionaires and billionaires to pay lower tax rates than bus drivers and nurses.
Republicans deride the so-called Buffett Rule because it only will raise $30 to $40 billion over the next 10 years. Ezra Klein points out that’s much more than you save by eliminating funding for Planned Parenthood and NPR over and over.
The Buffett Rule is important because it starts balancing the budget where we should start: with the people who can afford it. It proves that the GOP simply won’t raise taxes on the richest EVER.
Everyone know the only way to cure laziness is to cut taxes on the richest who have never been richer and never paid lower taxes.
Unless we ‘starve the beast,” how else are we going to teach the “lucky duckies” a lesson? Those damn able-bodied duckies like Paul Ryan soaking us all.
I hate to interject reality into Mr. Ryan’s lazy political discourse but the able-bodied is not generally who our safety hammock usually helps. Harold Pollack explains:
I doubt Rep. Ryan was talking about my brother-in-law Vincent, who requires Medicaid and food stamps because he is permanently disabled. I suspect that most conservatives would be embarrassed to learn the true impact on the intellectually disabled of conservative state policies.
Ryan is speaking about many of the direct care workers who assist disabled persons such as Vincent. We trust these women and men to care for our loved ones. They clean soiled linens. They calm agitated people suffering from autism spectrum disorders. Their professional peers do similarly worthy work as nurse’s aides, and child care workers. They earn very low wages, nationally averaging just above $11/hr. Many provide health care while they, themselves, go uninsured.
Like their counterparts who scrub floors, change diapers, or operate cash registers at McDonald’s, these are the lucky duckies whose kids rely upon Medicaid or CHIP, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other elements of our safety-net. Below them on the economic ladder are low-income single moms trying to raise their kids on Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), traditional cash welfare. Many of these women can’t find a job in the midst of an economic crisis. Still others are quite poor, yet for one reason or another are ineligible for TANF aid.
Few people are resting on “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency.” Welfare rolls are at record lows. In some states, maximum TANF cash benefit for a family of three are below $200. That’s well below the $350 that Rep. Ryan apparently paid for a single bottle of wine at a swank business dinner.
How can Paul Ryan not see who he’d really be hurting? I blame that government dole.
It’s time to send him home. He’ll just end up in the twisted world of corporate lobbying but at least he we won’t be paying directly. I hate to think I’m in any way responsible for making an able-bodied man so lazy.
[CC image by Muffet]
