THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO RYAN

Or what the poor really need. Hint it isn't food, shelter, medical care or any of those other pesky social programs. This is the text of the NY Daily Ingelligencer article. And this is the link to the Washington Post article  mentioned in the main article.

"Paul Ryan has spent more than a year furiously distancing himself from the wreckage of the 2012 Republican campaign. Even in the closing weeks before the election, Ryan gave a high-profile speech about poverty that amounted to a personal escape pod from Mitt Romney’s disastrous caught-on-tape denunciation of the moocher class. Since then, Ryan’s team has openly discussed the need to rebrand himand the particular danger, in the wake of the 47 percent tape, of his association with Ayn Rand-ism.

Today, we see the next step in Ryan’s rebranding, in the form of a largely credulous Washington Post story outlining his plans to launch himself into anti-poverty policy.

The article asserts, “Unlike Romney, Ryan is no child of privilege.” And Ryan certainly did not come from Romney-esque riches; he was born into “one of the most prominent families in Janesville,” and received a share of two family trust funds. Ryan Lizza reported in a profile of Ryan last year:

Three families, the Ryans, the Fitzgeralds, and the Cullens, sometimes called the Irish Mafia, helped develop the town, especially in the postwar era. The Ryans were major road builders, and today Ryan, Inc., started in 1884 by Paul’s great-grandfather, is a national construction firm.

Ryan does carefully tend his working class bona fides – when his visit to a Belgian brewery was discovered, he let it be known he prefers Miller Lite and found the foreign beers on tap unfamiliar.

The substance of Ryan’s anti-poverty agenda remains yet to be announced, but the general spirit of the endeavor can already be discerned from Ryan’s previous remarks, and those of the allies helping him formulate it. Ryan believes that the main impediment facing poor people is the existence of government programs that give them money and health care – a problem his budget rectifies by cutting subsidies to the poor. Those subsidies, Ryan hassaid, amount to a “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.”

Ryan’s new line seems similar to the old one:                                            

“Paul wants people to dream again,” Holloway said of Ryan. “You don’t dream when you’ve got food stamps.”

In fact, lots of people who survived on food stamps — like J.K. Rowling — went on to achieve great things.

The other emerging element of Ryan’s anti-poverty agenda is Jesus:

“You cure poverty eye to eye, soul to soul,” he said last week at the Heritage forum. “Spiritual redemption: That’s what saves people.”

Basically, Ryan loves the poor the way fundamentalist Christians love gays."
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So with the money from the government cut, how do we replace it? Why, with private charity and volunteers. News flash. Those with jobs are already working their butts off. Food Pantries are strapped already and it's getting worse. And what guarantees do we have that willing volunteers will be living in the same areas where the need is the greatest? As much Ryan and his supporters like to demonize the inner city poor need cuts across race and geography. From inner city New York or LA to rural Oregon and Kentucky. The need is there. And it's largely there due to the slavish support of a hyper Capitalism that doesn't care where the jobs are as long as the investors get their dividends. 

It's always amazed me how the stock in a struggling company goes up after likes of Mitt Romney and Bain swoop in, break up the company, lay off employees, sell what has any worth and declare bankruptcy on the rest. "I've got mine, screw the rest of you" is so firmly entrenched I don't know how to eradicate it short of a second American Revolution. 

What is glaringly obvious is that too many good "Christians" haven't read Proverbs, the Prophets or the Gospels. At least they never got past the Gospel according to Ayn Rand. 

And yes, I have read several of the prophets in the last year.