Congressman Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House budget committee, ripped Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty proposals.

“Democrats have made clear that we welcome any constructive ideas that can reduce poverty, but we oppose any plan that uses the sunny language of reform as a guise to gut successful poverty-fighting efforts,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “The fundamental problem with the proposal Mr. Ryan laid out today is the total cognitive dissonance between it and the Republican budget he authored earlier this year. It’s a case of policy and political schizophrenia on steroids. The core idea of the Ryan proposal is not a new idea at all: it’s nothing more than a block grant gussied up with some bells and whistles. If you look at the block grant proposal in the context of the Ryan-Republican budget, it would dramatically slash the resources available to help struggling families. Mr. Ryan would merge 11 programs, including SNAP,  into a block grant. While he claimed today that he intends to do that in a deficit neutral manner, his very own budget would cut that collection of 11 programs by 20 percent compared to current law, amounting to $300 billion in cuts, the biggest single cut being to SNAP.”