Shocker: Congressional liberals not too interested in Paul Ryan's poverty ideas

I give credit to Paul Ryan for his willingness to sit down and talk with anyone, and to work with anyone who is willing to be serious about solving problems. And I really give him credit for trying to tackle the issue of poverty, when most Republicans won't bother because they figure there's nothing to gain politically by doing so.

But I hope Ryan wasn't too surprised when members of the Congressional Black Caucus gave him the cold shoulder in their meeting with him on Wednesday. Their goal is not to change the status quo concerning poverty as much as to continue mastering the art of benefiting from it politically. That's how most of them got to Congress, after all, so when someone like Ryan comes along and suggests a radically different approach that might actually make a difference in the problem, what do you expect liberal Democrats to do? When Ryan said a few weeks ago that behavioral pathologies in the urban community have to be addressed in order for the problem to really be solved, the usual suspects jumped all over him and screamed racism. That is what they do. They weren't about to give that up just because he came to them looking for common ground and cooperation. CNN reports:

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But Wednesday's session on Capitol Hill didn't bridge the gulf between Ryan's philosophy of addressing poverty and that of the black caucus - whose members defend many of the current federal anti-poverty programs that Ryan's proposed budget would cut. The black caucus chair, Rep. Marcia Fudge, an Ohio Democrat, stood next to Ryan after the closed-door meeting and thanked him for coming. But then she said bluntly that the meeting "didn't get a whole lot accomplished." She said while the black caucus and Ryan both are concerned about poverty, "we just disagree on how we address the problem."

It's worth asking: The Democrats' approach to the problem is pretty much what it's been since Lyndon Johnson was in the White House, which is to pump billions of dollars into programs that aid nonprofits and Democratic constituency groups while breeding dependency and hopelessness among poor people, and doing nothing to reduce poverty in the slightest. Maybe Congresswoman Fudge and other Demcorats could go beyond simply stating that they "disagree on how we address the problem" and attempt to make a defense of why this same-old approach should be continued in the face of decades of evdience that it is an abysmal failure in every way. Then again, they're not going to answer that question unless someone puts the pressure on them to do so by asking. Apparently the media would rather focus on personality conflicts and manufactured racial controversies than the fact that so many people - a great many of them minorities - continue to suffer in poverty while politicians double down on "solutions" that have never solved anything.