Republicans and the Poor

Ezra Klein writes today about Republican Party priorities:

I’m not saying that congressional Republicans don’t care about poor people.

I’m not sure why you wouldn’t say that, but whatever. Onward:

But they really care about rich people. So far, the policy agenda they’ve pushed has been a mixture of very expensive tax cuts for the very wealthy and very deep cuts to a lot of programs that focus on the very poor. It’s . . . curious.

….Now they’ve moved onto deficit reduction, or at least spending cuts, and their priorities in the 2011 budget are telling. Their cuts are coming from non-defense discretionary spending. That’s a category of spending, as you can see here, that tends to focus on services to the poor, the jobless and children. Among other cuts, they’ve proposed slicing more than $1 billion off Head Start, $1.1 billion off the Public Housing Capital Fund, $752 million from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, and $5.7 billion from Pell Grants. I could, of course, go on. Democrats have tried to widen the cuts out to other categories so their impact falls less heavily on the disadvantaged, but so far, Republicans have refused. If we’re going to cut spending, we’re going to do it on the backs of the poor.

In other words, congressional Republicans don’t care about poor people. But then, that’s hardly anything new. They never have before, so it’s hardly surprising that they still don’t.

UPDATE: And the GOP assault on Medicaid is about to gear up too. Jon Cohn has details here.