Although Joni Ernst hasn't exactly hidden her weird Tea Party ideology before, in a new audio tape that Radio Iowa just released, we do get a glimpse at her unfettered beliefs and let me tell you, they are very scary.

Greg Sargent: Joni Ernst’s hog-castrating ideology, revealed!

Democrats have unearthed new audio of Joni Ernst in 2013, in which she details rather stark views about the relationship of Americans with their government. It doesn’t rise to the level of a Mitt Romney “47 percent” moment, in which he declared nearly half the country “believe that they are victims” and that “government has a responsibility to care for them.”

In it, Ernst claims that we have created “a generation of people that rely on the government to provide absolutely everything for them,” and that wrenching them away from their dependence “is going to be very painful.”

The audio was recorded by Radio Iowa...

In the audio, Ernst came out for a balanced budget amendment, said that would require “severe cuts,” reiterated her desire to eliminate the Department of Education, vowed a “good, hard look at entitlement programs,” and said electing a GOP Senate majority would be a key step towards all of this. She also said we are “encouraging people” to get on food stamps. And then she waxed philosophical:

“What we have to do a better job of is educating not only Iowans, but the American people that they can be self-sufficient. They don’t have to rely on the government to be the do-all, end-all for everything they need and desire, and that’s what we have fostered, is really a generation of people that rely on the government to provide absolutely everything for them. It’s going to take a lot of education to get people out of that. It’s going to be very painful and we know that. So do we have the intestinal fortitude to do that?… “We’re looking at Obamacare right now. Once we start with those benefits in January, how are we going to get people off of those? It’s exponentially harder to remove people once they’ve already been on those programs…we rely on government for absolutely everything. And in the years since I was a small girl up until now into my adulthood with children of my own, we have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do. They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it. But we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything.”

This helps bring coherence and clarity to a number of Ernst’s more draconian policy positions, evasions, and outsized statements. Ernst hascome out for eliminating the federal Department of Education, hasexpressed openness to privatizing Social Security, and supports repealing Obamacare, but has refused to clarify whether she would roll back Iowans’ benefits under the state’s Medicaid expansion. And yet, Ernst has also claimed Medicaid recipients “have no responsibility for their health.”