For Immediate Release: Thursday, April 7, 2011
Contact: Phoebe Silag or Karen Conner, news@epi.org 202-775-8810

Social programs have successfully reduced poverty rates for children and seniors and provided all Americans with a strong social safety net.  The proposed Republican budget for Fiscal Year 2012, which House Budget Committee Chair Paul Ryan unveiled Tuesday, would dismantle social programs.  In Paul Ryan’s budget would undermine economic security, policy analysts Rebecca Thiess, Ethan Pollack and Andrew Fieldhouse explain how the plan, if enacted, would eliminate Medicare as we know it, shift the responsibility for Medicaid to already-strained states, fast-track cuts to Social Security and weaken the food stamps and Pell Grants programs.  In hobbling social programs, the Ryan budget would put the gains the United States has made in health and economic opportunity in the last century at risk, at a time when a strong economic recovery has yet to take hold.