COMMENTARY | According to Yahoo News, on April 3, President Obama gave a press conference in which he discussed the Paul Ryan budget proposal that I wrote about two weeks ago here. For those who may not be aware of Paul Ryan or the 2013 budget plan he released in March, he is the Republican who leads the House Budget Committee. He also released a budget proposal last year that was well presented by the GOP (television ads were bought to try to generate support for his plan) but widely disliked by the public and even some members of his own party, who were wary of the political repercussions. President Obama said his budget is radically conservative, and referred to the plan as “thinly-veiled social Darwinism.” This year, however, amid the anti-Obama, anti-government spending fervor that is being kindled by the tea party and political puppet masters such as Grover Norquist, Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is receiving much more support from the public and the party establishment. While his budget does seek to drastically reduce our overwhelming budget deficit, it does so almost entirely at the expense of the disadvantaged and those low on the socio-economic ladder. In this way it is a form of social Darwinism, but so are all conservative economic principals. The basic concept behind the economic ideology is that freedom enables people to be successful and make their own decisions, and if you make the wrong decisions you must suffer the consequences, which will teach you not to make those mistakes again. So I don’t think the president is wrong, but I think using the term “social Darwinism” was a poor decision. According to estimates from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) 62 percent of the cuts in Paul Ryan’s budget would be for programs the directly go to aid low income households, which stunts the ability for upward socioeconomic mobility, a key aspect of the American dream. The CBPP also estimated that 37 percent of the benefits from decreased tax rates would go to the Americans making more than $1 million. The bottom line of Paul Ryan’s budget plan is that it does relieve some of the huge burden placed on our economy by our ballooning debt, I just believe that, ignoring the effects on income inequality and social stratification, which are two concerns often called “class warfare” by conservatives, the fact is that such a drastic reduction in money circulating in the economy would weaken an economy that is already struggling to recover at a slow pace.