This is a blog post written by a long-time Wisconsin reader of my own site who, against daunting odds, pulled herself out of a crappy minimum wage job, chronic poverty, a bad relationship, and an assortment of major health issues (both hers and her daughter's) and put herself in college, where she's doing quite well and has, I hope, much more of a future before her - at least, if Wisconsin doesn't cut the programs on which she and her daughter depend. I thought this was important to share:

See that low-income-program-cuts graph?

Daughter is on SSI – Supplemental Security Income. My tuition is covered by Pell Grants, with secured loans and grants making up the rest. We both are on Medicare-Medicaid. We live in low-income housing. We get Food Share.

We got into all of these programs WHILE I WAS WORKING FULL-TIME, just so you don’t think I’m some low-life slacker.

So. If Paul Ryan has his way (poor people are not suffering enough) I will be homeless. Maybe my daughter will be too, I don’t know. I’ll have to quit school, but all that – homeless, out of school – will be moot, because without health insurance I’ll be dead. My prescriptions run well over $500 a month. I get one of them, the $350/month one, through low-income support programs that the pharmaceutical companies run, so their drugs will be covered on some federal insurance programs. Do you think that will continue when Medicaid gets cut? I don’t.

But rich people will pay less in taxes.

I’m taking it pretty personally. You would be too, if somebody thought you didn’t deserve to be alive.

Now send this to every Republican voter you know. You never know, one might accidentally learn something.

Just to be clear, it's only living off the government when you do it, not when our Electeds do it. Are we clear now?

To avoid a government shutdown at the end of 2011, Republicans succeeded in their campaign to cut the federal Pell Grant program by effectively kicking up to 100,000 low-income students off the rolls.

Last week, Arkansas constituent Kelly Eubanks, a college student who has two jobs and two children, confronted her Congressman, Rep. Steve Womack (R), at a town hall meeting over his attack on the program she now relies on. But instead of any explanation, Womack lashed out at Eubanks, telling her to pay her own way by “joining the military” like he did. After refusing to answer her question, he finally just asked her to “be quiet and listen.” Blue Arkansas reports:

According to Kelly and a handful of other witnesses, Womack happily retorted that it wasn’t the federal government’s job to pay for education (he’s doing this in a college town mind you) and then quickly added that he paid for his education by joining the military, apparently suggesting that the mom of two do the same and totally oblivious I guess to the fact that it was, in fact, the federal government that paid for his education then. Well Womack tried to skirt the rest of Ms. Eubanks question and she proceeded to try and get him to address the discrepancy she pointed out. Well at this point, according to Kelly and several other people that were in the room, Womack blew a gasket.He skirted the rest of my question and I called him out on it.. he ended up getting pissed off.. and screaming at me.. “are you going to be quiet and listen”, [Eubanks said.]According to Kelly, some of his aides came up and tried to get the mike from her, but she held her ground and kept her cool, insisting her congressman answer her question.

Oh my goodness. They do get testy when they're held accountable!

I have a secret hope. I hope that on Paul Ryan's Judgment Day, I get to watch from a teeny crack in the door while stifling squeals of glee at his fate. This is a man who loves that authoritarian "We Can't Afford It" line while sucking up everything he can from the public coffers. Don't forget, Paul Ryan is the guy who saved his survivor's Social Security benefits to go to college. Ah, but what's good for the goose isn't so great for the gander, it seems.

Think Progress has the transcript:

LOWE: I come from a very middle-class family and under President Obama, I get $5,500 per year to pay for school, which doesn’t come close to covering all of the funding, but it helps ease the burden. Under your plan, you cut it by 15 percent. I was just curious why you would cut a grant that goes directly to the middle- and lower-class people that need it the most.

RYAN: ‘Cause Pell Grants have become unsustainable. It’s all borrowed money…Look, I worked three jobs to pay off my student loans after college. I didn’t get grants, I got loans, and we need to have a system of viable student loans to be able to do this.

The second concern I have is, in the health care bill — people don’t know this — for budgetary gimmickry reasons, the administration and Congress at the time, took over the student loan industry. So they had the federal government, the Department of Education, basically confiscate the private student loan industry.

Paul Ryan loves student loans. Loves. Via TNR:

Ryan is a fervent ally of the college lending industry. In 2007, he was one of only 71 Republicans to vote against the College Student Relief Act, which would have cut the interest rate on many student loans, including the FFEL program, in half. Inside Higher Ed notedthat the bill would cut “deeply and directly into lenders' profits.” The bill passed the House 356-71, but stalled in the Senate.

And of course, the Affordable Care Act ended the profiteering by our favorite bankaneers by taking them out as middleman, so they're a little bit flushed over that and looking for their favorite stooge to punish students, it seems.

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The Washington Post Sunday Outlook section had an article from the President of American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Brooks, making the conservative case for why wealthy people shouldn't be taxed very much, and why it was so nasty for President Obama to make arguments about fairness in his criticisms of the Ryan budget, which radically lowers taxes for the richest 10 percent of Americans while raising taxes on everyone else, ends the guarantee of health care and nursing home care for seniors and those with disabilities, forces the average senior citizen to pay more than $6,000 in out-of-pocket medical expenses, and cuts money for food stamps, health care for children, Pell Grants, and education funding by at least a third.

Brooks' argument boils down to the idea that if you are rich, it is probably because you earned the money by working harder and being smarter than most other people, and that this kind of merit doesn't deserve higher taxes; that in fact we should reward merit. He goes on to say the kind of redistribution us lefties support "for the sake of fairness, it weakens free enterprise, lowers opportunity and impoverishes us in many ways."

It is an interesting, if very familiar (conservatives in America have been making it for about 230 years), argument, and it is important to discuss because it goes to the heart of what conservatives in this country believe. Brooks does a good job of including some nuance in his argument, acknowledging for example that luck might have something to do with becoming wealthy, and that government had some modest role to play in a modern society, but essentially, he is very open about what conservatives believe: if you are wealthy, it is almost always because you deserve to be; if you are poor or working class, that is probably what you deserve as well.

I want to first make the case why the argument itself is wrong, and then move to a broader discussion of how this basic argument exposes how modern conservatism has gone so deeply off the rails.

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