"Republicans have never particularly warmed to the American social contract that governed most of the past hundred years. Its central elements, enacted during the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, assumed a level of collective national responsibility for the well-being of the elderly and children, the two groups who could not benefit directly from employment, through such programs as Social Security, Medicare, funding for schools and for college grants and loans.
"The logic behind these programs wasn't simply humanitarian. It was also economic: Bolstering the purchasing power of the elderly increased economic activity and enabled the adult children of the elderly to invest more in their own children. Enabling more people to get good educations straight through college created a more productive workforce. A similar dual logic — both humanitarian and Keynesian — informed the programs that aided the poor and unemployed, such as Medicaid and food stamps..."
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"If you can get past the fuzzy math and sheer indifference to the poor, it's possible to discern a coherent conceit in the Ryan plan: that the burden of maintaining a modern welfare state has become too great to bear. You can see this most clearly in Ryan's proposals to transform health care, which is both the primary source of our fiscal crisis and the primary vehicle for Ryan's government downsizing.
"Everybody agrees that the combined costs of three health care initiatives — Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act — are together creating a long-term financial responsibility our society is not prepared to meet. But Ryan's proposed solution to this problem is to give up on the programs, replacing them with less ambitious alternatives or nothing at all...
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