The Return Of The Granny Starver

If you have any doubt what GOP control of the Senate would mean in 2015, it would entail the GOP putting Paul Ryan's budget on President Obama's desk and saying "sign it or else".  Robert Costa pulls no punches:

Ryan and his aides are unsparing in how they take the hammer to current federal policies. On page after page, the report casts a critical eye on how the government administers money to the poor and related bureaucracies, using a bevy of academic literature and federal studies as evidence.

Ryan said the crux of the report is the conclusion that federal programs need to be entirely reimagined, with more than tweaks or axed appropriations, and that legislation this year should move toward broader solutions that solve what he thinks are structural weaknesses in how the government supports the poor.

“Because these programs are means-tested — meaning that benefits decline as recipients make more money — poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates,” the report says. “The federal government effectively discourages them from making more money.”

During the Clinton years Republicans demanded that programs had to be means tested to make sure that Cadillac-driving welfare queens weren't magically buying T-bone steaks on Uncle Sugar's dime and getting rich.

Now in the Obama years, means-testing means the welfare queens are poor and staying poor because it "discourages them from working".  So now "reforming" these programs means scrapping them entirely.

According to the report, Head Start, a federal program for early-childhood education and nutrition, is “failing to prepare children for school,” and “a consolidated, well-funded system would be better.”

Medicaid, which provides health coverage to low-income families, is the object of a sharply worded review. “Medicaid coverage has little effect on patients’ health,” the report says, adding that it imposes an “implicit tax on beneficiaries,” “crowds out private insurance” and “increases the likelihood of receiving welfare benefits.”

Head Start and Medicaid have to go.  Time for block grants, which means states can use the money however they want to, and that of course means "not for the poor".

Ryan also huddled with Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Smith is well known in the United Kingdom for his attempts to better connect conservatives with the poor.

“We’ve been paying very close attention to the Tories and their think tanks,” Ryan said. “They’ve done a lot of work already, and we can learn from their experience, both their mistakes and their successes, so we can rework our welfare system and get people out of poverty and onto lives of self-sufficiency and dignity.”

Remember, what Republicans mean by "self-sufficiency and dignity" is "working more than 40 hours a week, with no minimum wage, with overtime pay replaced by 'comp time' that your employer never has to actually let you have, for an employer who can fire you for any reason without recourse, for a rent payment that takes up the vast majority of your income."

And if the GOP wins control of the Senate, the Ryan Austerity plan becomes the budget.