Gregory to Rep. Ryan: Do You Have Sympathy for People Who Need Gov’t Help?

On Meet the Press Sunday morning, host David Gregory quizzed Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) about his new poverty plan, which seeks to combine various entitlement programs into block grants to states, so as to “customize” poverty plans. Gregory pressed Ryan on his previous statements about the “culture of dependency,” in which he appeared to claim poor people were taking a nap on federal assistance programs.

“It doesn’t sound there’s like a lot of sympathy for people who need the government’s help,” Gregory said. “What you seem to be saying is that people have a problem with their own dependency here, that the government is only furthering.”

“That’s not my intent,” Ryan said. “Far from it. My point is we don’t want to have a poverty management system that simply perpetuates poverty. We want to get at the root causes of poverty to get people out of poverty.”

“That’s what we’re proposing here, have benefits customized to a unique person’s problems, because poverty is very complicated, to not just keep them where they are but help them get where they want to be,” Ryan continued. “That is the thrust of these proposals. The federal government’s approach has ended up maintaining poverty, managing poverty. In many ways it has disincentivized people going to work. …So we need to reemphasize getting people up in their lives, giving them the tools to do that. That’s the point.”

Watch the clip below, via NBC News:

[Image via screengrab]

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