Republican Paul Ryan, chairman of the House budget committee, recently gave a big speech on the grand theme of "Saving the American Idea."

That idea, the Wisconsin congressman said, is equality of opportunity. He accused President Obama of sowing class resentment, and the Democrats of "moving away" from equality of opportunity and "toward an insistence on equality of outcome."

"Class is not a fixed designation in this country," Ryan said. "We are an upwardly mobile society, with a lot of movement between income groups."

That is certainly the American idea. It’s the principle our country was founded on: With plenty of hard work, anyone can climb up in the ranks.

Trouble is, Republicans have been doing everything in their power to subvert that.

They’ve shown hostility toward efforts to spur mobility, like union organizing and raising the minimum wage. They’ve opposed funding preschool for poor kids and Pell grants that help talented students who aren’t rich attend college.

And "justice for all" isn’t only about mobility. If we have a nation in which the top sliver has an inordinate portion of gains and everyone else lives on scraps, that offends American values, too — even if we all have a shot at joining the elite. Polls show Americans are disturbed by the extreme income inequality we have now.

People working hard and playing by the rules shouldn’t be poor in a country this prosperous. On this count, Republicans fail even more miserably. The GOP budget approved in the House this year imposed deep cuts in programs such as food stamps, Medicaid and jobless benefits. In poverty prevention and equal access to health care and educational opportunities, we rank near the bottom of industrialized nations, a new report by the Bertelsmann Stiftung foundation of Germany indicates.

If your kid is sick and has no health insurance, that doesn’t help mobility, either. Countries such as France, Denmark, Canada, Sweden and Germany all have better social safety nets, which create more upward class mobility. A good measure of that is if a child is likely to exceed a parent’s earnings. Only in Italy and Great Britain does that happen less than in the United States.

One way governments can help improve the prospects of poor children is to increase the social mix within schools, or invest in early childhood education, the German report says. Compared to other nations, we’re not doing much of either.

This was not the American dream. For Ryan and his party, who have too long ignored Americans on the bottom rung, what it should be is a wake-up call.