This previous weekend, in my own congressional region, Speaker of your home Paul Ryan and sc Senator Tim Scott hosted a presidential candidate forum titled “Expanding Opportunity.” This name reflects the longstanding attempt of House Republican leaders to frame the inequality debate as you for which, as Ryan noted in 2014, Democrats focus on “equality of results” while Republicans give attention to “equality of opportunity,” which their preferred policies are supposedly more prone to produce. Speaker Ryan experimented with make a similar assertion at Saturday’s forum, noting: “We now have actually a safety internet that is built to get individuals dropping into poverty whenever that which we actually need is a safety internet that is built to help get individuals away from poverty.”

I wholeheartedly reject the assertion that trickle-down economic policies would do more to advance equality of opportunity than a middle-out approach while I disagree with the Speaker’s attempts to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, which partially equalize outcomes by preventing seniors from falling into poverty.