April 24, 2014

Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisconsin) thinks that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisconsin), who chairs the House Budget Committee and is in line to become the next chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, is “a nice guy.” The budget he proposed earlier this month is not, Moore and other Democratic lawmakers say.

Facing a tough midterm election cycle, they’re hoping that the budget’s proposed cuts, which they argue help the rich by hurting the poor, will be an issue for Americans as they head to the polls in November.
“Budgets reflect our priorities. They show what we care about and they show what we care less about,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) told reporters on a conference call Tuesday.

The Republican budget proposal, he added, protects the nation’s wealthiest and powerful special interest groups and knocks down ladders of opportunity for middle income and struggling working class families. Communities of color, he said, are hit hardest.

According to Moore, who sits on the Budget Committee, middle-income families will face higher taxes and minorities who are disproportionately poorer will lose health, education and other benefits that will have a chilling impact.Raising the minimum wage, which congressional Republicans oppose, would lift 6 million workers out of poverty, Moore said, 60 percent of whom would be people of color. It also would raise wages for African-Americans by $5.2 billion.

April 22 (BNA) — The House Budget Committee is slated April 30 to hold its third in a series of hearings on federal anti-poverty efforts, an area Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has focused on recently.

House Budget Committee Sets Third Hearing On Federal Anti-Poverty Programs April 30 Read More »

After being criticized as racially insensitive for his comments on unemployment in “inner cities,” House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., will meet with the Congressional Black Caucus next week to discuss the issue of poverty, an aide for the CBC says.

“Congressman Ryan is a nice guy, and as such you know he has tried to frame the comments that he made about inner city folk as just sort of an inarticulate way of communicating,” CBC member Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Wis., said during a conference call with reporters today. “We want to challenge his assumptions about that and really raise with him a couple of very specific proposals.”

“We are happy that representative Ryan wants to engage in this conversation, and we’re not going to let him get away with sort of a sleight of hand on this,” she said. “We know how to crunch numbers as well.”

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) will meet next week with members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to discuss strategies for alleviating poverty.

The closed-door meeting has been in the works since last month, when Ryan stirred controversy by saying poverty is caused largely by a “tailspin of culture,” particularly in inner cities, where “generations of men [are] not even thinking about working or learning to value the culture of work.”

CBC leaders denounced the remarks and later invited Ryan to meet the group to discuss ways Congress could help the poor become more prosperous. Ryan was quick to accept, and the much-anticipated gathering is slated for Wednesday of next week, just a few hours after Ryan is scheduled to hold a Budget Committee hearing on the same topic.