Paul Ryan 1986....................Social Security and Medicare..............
One day in November, 1886, a man named Alfred Smith died in lower Manhattan, near the South Street Seaport. He had owned and driven his own horse-drawn truck—the start of a small business—until, as Robert Caro wrote in “The Power Broker,” “his health broke,” and the truck and horses and everything of value his family owned was sold, the money “eaten up by doctors’ bills and medicine.” His wife was left destitute, with a son, named after his father, and a daughter; at the time, “widows who were unable to support their children had the children taken away and placed in institutions,” Caro wrote. “She had heard about the institutions.
Anything was better than that”:
Walking back from the funeral to the small flat, alone except for Al and his ten-year-old sister, Mary, she muttered, half to herself, “I don’t know where to turn.” Mary heard her brother say, “I’m here. I can take care of you.”
The younger Al Smith was then twelve years old. He quit school a few months later, in the eighth grade, after his mother, who had tried to support the children with factory work, fell ill, too. He was a newsboy and a runner for a trucking company and a roller of barrels at the Fulton Fish Market and a carrier of pipes at a pump works in Manhattan’s Fourth Ward, where tenements and brothels were filled with people only marginally less lucky than Smith and his little sister.
He had, Caro writes, natural gifts: a compelling voice, pleasant looks, “a gift for getting along with people that was so highly developed as to be almost genius.” After close to a decade of manual labor, at the age of twenty-two, he caught the eye of a Tammany Hall boss. He would become a state legislator, and then governor of New York, and then, in 1928, the Democratic candidate for President.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/paul-ryans-father-and-al-smiths
This guy is a complete ........................fill in the black, my word is asshole
