Republicans, especially those on the far-right, have never liked the social programs this nation has established to help the elderly, children, the unemployed, and the poor & disadvantaged. They are particularly aggravated with the programs to help the poor, because their main constituency are the affluent (and social programs take money from the rich and middle classes to fund the programs to help the poor).They don't like that. They voted against those programs when they were established, and they are still trying to get rid of them -- or at least severely cut their funding (so new tax cuts can be given to the rich). And the main Republican today leading this charge to cut poverty programs (and reward the rich with more tax cuts) is Rep. Paul Ryan -- the GOP's economic guru in the House of Representatives.
In an interview with GOP apologist Bill Bennett the other day, Ryan made the following statement:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
There are two obvious faults with Ryan's outrageous statement. First, it is racist. Right-wing Republicans love to use code words to thinly hide their racist views, and one of their favorite code words is "inner city people" (which is their term for Blacks). Ryan might as well have just said America has too much poverty because Black males are lazy and don't want to work -- because that is what he meant, and that is what his teabagger base heard.
Why would he say such an outrageous thing? Because he wants to cut poverty programs, and he can do that more easily if he can get the White majority in America to believe that poverty is mainly an inner city Black problem, and is caused by lazy Blacks. This isn't the first time right-wingers have tried this argument, but it is one of the most blatant.
Republicans like to accuse Blacks and liberals of playing the "race card", but the truth is that they are far more guilty of that than Blacks and liberals combined. They have been playing the "race card" since the Civil Rights Acts were passed in the 1960's -- and it is the primary reason they have achieved majority status in the South. And as Ryan's outrageous statement shows, it is still a favorite tactic.
The second thing wrong with Ryan's statement is that it is an easily disproved lie -- although I doubt many of his teabagger base will bother to do the minimal amount of research it takes to expose the lie (since it is a lie that most of them want to believe. The truth is that most people who live in poverty are not Blacks. According to U.S. Census figures, Blacks make up only about 22.2% of the people living in poverty, while Whites comprise about 44.4% of those living in poverty -- meaning twice as many Whites live in poverty than Blacks.
And that's not the only lie. As early as 2008, there were over 1.5 million more poor people living in the suburbs than in the inner city -- and the poverty rate continues to grow much faster in the suburbs than in the inner city. And that doesn't take into account all the poor people living in rural areas of this country. Historically, the rural poor have always outnumbered the urban poor -- and that continues to be true today.
Ryan had to know his racist statement was untrue. It's just too easy to find the truth. But he said it anyway, because he knew that's what right-wingers want to believe and it would help him justify his vicious cuts to social programs to help the poor. That makes him a racist and a liar.
(The caricature of Paul Ryan above is by DonkeyHotey.)
