Geo

House Speaker Paul Ryan has a little over six months left before he retires from his current iteration in political life. What he's going to do with those six months concerns us all, because he is bound and determined to make poor people suffer, one way or another. At this point, it seems he's going to target their food and welfare benefits, because that's what the legislative calendar makes easiest. Both the food stamp, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in the farm bill and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program (TANF) need to be reauthorized by the end of September.

He wants to add onerous work requirements to SNAP, a series of hoops an already stretched-thin population must jump through to prove just how stretched they are. The end result would be people just not having the time or energy to do so, and giving up government food assistance. The plans for TANF include renaming it the "Jobs and Opportunity With Benefits and Services program, or JOBS, and require that funds go only to people living under 200 percent of the federal poverty line." It would give states more "flexibility" to spend federal dollars. As with every Republican idea of state flexibility, that would mean allowing conservative states to basically do wh**ever they felt like with the money.

Ryan is bound and determined to do this before he leaves office, he says, because it's what God wants him to do. Really.

“Catholic social teaching tells us that our public moral culture—the foundation of our political culture—is shaped by these natural institutions and free associations of civil society. And it cautions us against allowing the state too great a reach into civil society,” Ryan said during his May 24 address to the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast. […]
“This is about saving souls, not dollars,” he said in the PBS interview, noting that money would be saved on the back end when more people are out of poverty and off government assistance.
Curiously, that teaching didn't prevent Ryan from trying to fire the Jesuit priest who, as House chaplain, committed the sin of reminding the Republican leadership that they should be taking care of the poor as well as the rich. It also didn't prompt Ryan to see the log in his own eye—the survivor's benefits he received when his father died young that paid for his college education, where he started "dreaming" about destroying Medicaid while he was "drinking out of kegs."

That Ryan intends to use his last six months to jam through major cuts to something is clear. His leadership team is reportedly drawing up a budget that will include reconciliation instructions to allow them to do it without Democratic v**es—the only way to get it out of the Senate. It could happen after the e******n, in the lame-duck session when he's feeling either triumphant over the GOP retaining Congress or forced to do as much damage as possible before Democrats take over.

rational1

Watch that lame duck session it will be brutal, the Republicans will have a little time to smash what little is left of out caring Republic.
As a Jesuit educated Political Moderate, it is obvious that most of Christ's teachings are being discarded, by political expediency.