In a Capitol Hill speech billed as a repudiation of the tone of the 2016 election, House Speaker Paul Ryan apologized for his own past rhetoric about poor people of color.“There was a time when I would talk about a difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ in our country, referring to people who accepted government benefits,” he said. “But as I spent more time listening, and really learning the root causes of poverty, I realized I was wrong. ‘Takers’ wasn’t how to refer to a single mom stuck in a poverty trap, just trying to take care of her family. Most people don’t want to be dependent.”Later, in response to a question from a Capitol Hill intern, he went further, saying of his past characterization of low-income Americans: “I was callous and I oversimplified and castigated people with a broad brush. There is a lot of that happening in America today.”For several years — as he has pushed policies to slash Medicaid funding, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other social programs — Ryan has repeatedly referred to poverty as a “culture problem” among people in “inner cities,” where “generations of men [are] not even thinking about working.”His most recent poverty plan takes a punitive stance, punishing people who can’t find a job by a certain mandated deadline by reducing their benefits. While Ryan did express a willingness in Wednesday’s speech to evolve on policies like criminal justice, he offered no changes to this economic model other than more respectful rhetoric regarding the poor.When speaking about the 2016 presidential election, Ryan similarly focused on tone over content lamenting the state of political discourse “from both sides,” but declining to call out any candidate or any policy directly.“Our political discourse, it did not used to be this bad, and it does not have to be this way,” he said. “We don’t have to accept this, and we can’t enable it either…We should demand better from ourselves. We should demand better from one another.”
Source: Paul Ryan Apologizes For Calling The Poor ‘Takers’ | ThinkProgress