Paul Ryan Assures Fox He's Still Working Hard to Make Life Worse for the Poor and Elderly

Last week, Congress passed a two-year budget deal to avoid the world’s tiniest shutdown. In it, Democrats got some non-defense spending increases while Republicans got a massive increase in military spending. And, right on cue, House Speaker Paul Ryan’s reaction to this was Paul Ryan’s same reaction to literally everything—that Congress needs to keep trying to gut the welfare state.

“We’ve got more to do on entitlements, on mandatory spending,” Ryan said in a Fox Business interview on Tuesday morning. “We added more Medicare means-testing in this particular bill. So we think we’re making progress on that but what we have to make sure is we don’t hollow out our military.”

In case you did! not! get! it! Ryan kept hammering the point: “We have to get our other partners in government to be willing to do the kind of entitlement reform that we’re willing to do in the House.”

Ryan even went back to complaining about how, while the House passed an Obamacare repeal bill—which would have left 23 million people uninsured—his counterparts in the Senate would not help a guy out by voting to pass it too.

Harping on about supposedly out-of-control entitlements is an interesting position to take for someone who just passed deficit-exploding tax cuts for the rich, but that’s Paul Ryan and the GOP for you. As long as they’re in power, they will never end their quest to cut programs for poor people.