NBC's Curry Rips Ryan Budget | Restoring Liberty

In an interview with Congressman Paul Ryan on Tuesday’s NBC Today, co-host Ann Curry slammed the Wisconsin Republican’s proposed budget: “Where is the empathy in this budget?…Do you acknowledge that poor people will suffer under his budget? That you have shown a lack of empathy to poor people in this budget?” [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump]

Curry cited a left-wing non-profit group in condemning the plan: “…the Center of Budget and Policy Priorities….says 62% of the savings in your budget would come from cutting programs for the poor. That between 8 and 10 million people would be kicked off of food stamps. That you would cut Medicare by 200 billion, Medicaid and other health programs by something like 770 billion.”

Curry failed to make any mention of the organization’s clearly liberal agenda. The Center of Budget and Policy Priorities mission statement reads: “The Center conducts research and analysis to help shape public debates over proposed budget and tax policies and to help ensure that policymakers consider the needs of low-income families and individuals in these debates. We also develop policy options to alleviate poverty.”

Ryan dismissed the slanted figures:

So, not only do I take issue with a lot of their analysis and their numbers, spending in all of these programs still increases under our budget. You have to remember food stamps quadrupled over the last decade. So what we’re saying is we have to bring spending to a more sustainable rate of growth. And we can’t keep spending at the pace we are on, otherwise we will have a debt crisis.

In response to Curry’s declaration that the poor would “suffer” under the budget proposal, Ryan pushed back:

Quite the contrary. Our poverty rates are the highest they’ve been in a generation. One out of six people are in poverty today. The President’s policies are not working and we’re advancing pro-growth policies to get people off of welfare on to work….We just don’t agree that throwing more money at failed programs works. We want to reform these programs so that they actually achieve the result of getting people on their lives of self-sufficiency.