Social Darwinism returns.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye

This year marks the I fiftieth anniversary of Michael Harrington's great and influential book, The Other America, which brought the "invisible poor" to the attention of the nation.

What a different time we live in now, compared with the "affluent society" of the early 1960s.

Americans were in such a generous mood, so confident in their own futures and such believers in eternal economic expansion, that Harrington's book could prompt Presidents Kennedy and Johnson to undertakethe War on Poverty and actually talk about eradicating all hunger in America.

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Today, the wealthiest in our society have a larger share of the national wealth and income since any time since the Great Depression.

And the poor are not invisible anymore.

Instead of denying that the poor exist, Republican leaders boldly argue for rolling back the programs that combat poverty, saying "dependency," not hunger, is the real problem.

They have moved from attacking welfare queens to taking on public school teachers and other unionized members of the middle class--arguing for a kind of go-it-alone society that abandons any sense of responsibility to children, the elderly, the poor, or even workers with the decent wages and benefits won by the labor movement's struggle to build the American Dream.

Congressman Paul Ryan, star of the Republican Party, in his first, infamous budget plan, targeted Medicare--the most successful antipoverty program, along with Social Security, in the history of the nation. Thanks to these two programs, we no longer have mass poverty among the elderly in America.

At Ryan's town hall meetings, where he tried to sell his budget back in his own district, large gatherings of grandmothers in tennis shoes came out carrying signs to tell him exactly what they thought of his plan.

It's obvious, even to Republicans, that attacking Medicare is bad politics.

So Ryan redrafted his budget plan, backing off the Medicare cuts.

In order to make up the money elsewhere, the new Ryan budget focuses on food assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other programs that have had a profound effect on alleviating poverty.

Picking on grandma was a political loser--so Ryan trained his sights on an even more vulnerable segment of the population.

No one has done a better job of shining a light on the immorality of Ryan's budget than the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The bishops wrote to Congress to explain that "a just framework for future budgets...