Rep. Paul Ryan agreed to sit down with the Congressional Black Caucus after members of the radical far left group branded comments he made about inner city poverty “highly offensive.”
It’s a fine organization.
One-third of the Congressional Black Caucus members have been named in an ethics probe during their career.
On Wednesday Ryan asserted that there are “generations of men in the inner city not working and not even thinking about working”… a true statement.
Reuters reported via Free Republic:
Republican Representative Paul Ryan on Friday agreed to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus after members of the group branded his remarks about inner-city poverty this week “highly offensive”.
The controversy began on Wednesday after Ryan said on William Bennett’s talk radio show, “Morning in America,” that there was a “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 of work.”
Representative Barbara Lee of California, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, called Ryan’s remarks a “thinly veiled racial attack.”
“Let’s be clear, when Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black’,” Lee said in a statement.
Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate, is known for budgets with proposed deep cuts to programs that help the poor. The potential 2016 presidential contender has made a point of proposing Republican solutions to ease poverty that focus on the private sector.
The Wisconsin lawmaker, who chairs the House Budget Committee, said in a statement that he “was inarticulate” about the point he was trying to make.
“I was not implicating the culture of one community, but of society as a whole,” Ryan said. “We have allowed our society to isolate or quarantine the poor rather than integrate people into our communities. The predictable result has been multi-generational poverty and little opportunity.”
Last week Ryan released a report on the federal government’s 50-year-old “War on Poverty” that concluded that many of the 92 federal programs aimed at assisting the poor were “haphazard” and contributed to a “poverty trap” that keeps people dependent on welfare benefits.
And now– thanks to the Congressional Black Caucus and liberal media, the story is about Paul Ryan’s ‘racist’ tone and not the fact that 92 federal programs have failed the poor across America.
