“None Of Ryan’s Ideas Are New”: Stop Calling The GOP The Party Of New Ideas
Paul Ryan, the perennial media darling and the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 2012, has released an anti-poverty plan that has been widely hailed by a group of conservative policy enthusiasts known as the reformicons. According to Ross Douthat, The New York Times‘s house reformicon, the plan represents new and exciting conservative thinking, reflecting the “growing contrast between the policy ferment on the Republican side of the aisle and the staleness and/or small-ball quality of the Democratic Party’s ‘what comes after Obama?’ agenda.”
The problem with this argument is that none of Ryan’s ideas are new, and many of them are the antithesis of exciting.
Yes, the Ryan plan contains some ideas that are genuinely good. Its calls for major criminal justice reform are salutary — mass incarceration is fiscally wasteful as well as wasteful of human lives, and seeing an endorsement from a prominent Republican public official is reason for cautious optimism. It’s easier to propose cuts to corporate welfare in white papers than in the congressional sausage-making process, but to do so is unobjectionable. And proposing reforms to local regulations such as licensing requirements are at least defensible in some cases. None of these ideas are new, but originality is overrated — there is the potential basis for agreement here.
The core social welfare proposals of Ryan’s plan, however, fail both the originality and goodness tests. The plan does, at least, avoid the direct, savage cuts to discretionary spending that were a hallmark of Ryan’s previous budgets. Ryan’s proposal entails converting a great deal of federal anti-poverty spending into block grants to state governments, which would be free to experiment with those funds. There is, to put it mildly, nothing novel about this idea. Going back to conservative southern Democrats in the New Deal, conservatives have advocated giving states more discretion about how to use federal money.
But more to the point, in addition to being very old, the block grant idea is terrible. As the economist Max Sawicky notes, spending through block grants has the effect of creating disincentives for states to spend adequate money on poverty, while also undermining the political basis for maintaining the programs. In addition, giving the states discretion has tended to involve withholding spending from the “underserving” poor, who tend to be overwhelmingly people of color. The intrusive paternalism the Ryan plan encourages is also unattractive.
The notion that “let them eat states’ rights” is a new and exciting idea is particularly perverse given some other recent developments. To the widespread applause of Republicans, a panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals read the Affordable Care Act as not providing subsidies to people purchasing health insurance on federally established exchanges. According to defenders of the decision, this was not a drafting mistake; they say Congress intended to only make the subsidies available on state-established exchanges, but were surprised by how few states went along.
As a reading of the ACA, this argument is absurd — clearly Congress anticipated that some states would not establish exchanges, which is why the federal backstop was created. Virtually nobody involved in creating the ACA believes that the law was designed to create federal exchanges that wouldn’t work. It is fair to say, however, that some Democrats were surprised by how many states proved unwilling or unable to establish their own exchanges.
But consider the implications of this. The latest conservative legal argument against the ACA boils down to: “you screwed up — you thought the states actually wanted to provide people with health care!” And the Supreme Court re-writing the ACA in 2012 to make it easier for states to reject the Medicaid expansion has also been a catastrophe, with Republican statehouses inflicting easily avoidable pain and suffering on millions of people to prove their anti-Obama bona fides.
So — why is devolving anti-poverty policy to the states supposed to be a great idea again?
Indeed, the experience of the ACA is a compelling repudiation of the idea that giving states more discretion over social policy is a good idea — or that Republicans at the state level genuinely care about helping the poor and the needy. Many statehouses are opposed to federal anti-inequality measures in principle, and even less hostile ones have proved administratively inept. Anti-poverty policy in the U.S. needs more federal intervention, not less.
By: Scott Lemieux, Professor of Political Science, College of Saint Rose in Albany, N.Y; The Week, July 30, 2014
“Paul Ryan’s Stale Ideas On Poverty”: Retreaded Idea’s Surrounded With The Language Of Innovation
Paul Ryan is counting on this: Because he says he wants to preserve a safety net, speaks with concern about poor people and put out a 73-page report, many will elide over the details of the proposals he made last week in his major anti-poverty speech.
The Wisconsin Republican congressman is certainly aware that one of the biggest political difficulties he and his conservative colleagues face is that many voters suspect them of having far more compassion for a wealthy person paying taxes than for a poor or middle-income person looking for a job.
So Ryan gave a well-crafted address at the American Enterprise Institute in which the centerpiece sounded brand spanking new: the “Opportunity Grant.” The problem is that this “pilot program” amounts to little more than the stale conservative idea of wrapping federal programs into a block grant and shipping them off to the states. The good news is that Ryan only proposes “experiments” involving “a select number of states,” so he would not begin eliminating programs wholesale. Thank God for small favors.
Ryan surrounds his retread idea with the language of innovation. “The idea would be, let states try different ways of providing aid and then to test the results — in short, more flexibility in exchange for more accountability,” he declared. “My thinking basically is, get rid of these bureaucratic formulas.”
Who can possibly like those “bureaucratic formulas”? The phrase is another disguise. Among the programs Ryan would block grant are food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP). Food stamps are one of our most valuable initiatives because people are automatically eligible for them when they lose a job or their income drops sharply. Studies have amply documented how important food stamps are to the well-being of children.
For the economy and for the disadvantaged, curtailing SNAP would be devastating. While providing nutrition help to families in desperate need, food stamps also offer an immediate economic stimulus at moments when the economy is losing purchasing power. Economists call such programs “automatic stabilizers.”
Ryan’s block grant would not be nearly as responsive to economic changes. If Congress would have to step in, its reaction would be slow. And the history of Ryan’s own budgets shows that increasing spending for poor people is not exactly a priority on his side of politics.
Food stamps aren’t the only programs that get wrapped into the grant. Housing vouchers go there, too, which could lead to more homelessness. So does money for child care. Ryan says there would be rules barring states from using funding from his Opportunity Grant for purposes other than helping the needy. But it’s not clear from his outline how he’d stop states from using their new flexibility to move spending away from the needy indirectly by substituting block grant money for existing expenditures.
Ryan might reply: You just don’t trust the states! And my answer would be: You’re absolutely right, there are some states I don’t trust to stand up for their poor people. I’d point specifically to the 24 states that are depriving roughly 5 million Americans of health insurance because they refuse to participate in the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act.
In his speech and report, Ryan movingly described two hypothetical Americans, “Andrea” and “Steven,” and how much they could benefit from intense counseling by a case worker. There may well be something to this, but it’s expensive. How much would states have to cut basic assistance to the poor to hire additional case workers?
And by the way, one of the programs Ryan would eliminate to pay for an undoubtedly positive part of his plan — a roughly $500-a-year increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for childless workers — is the Social Services Block Grant, which helps pay for the kinds of interventions he wants for Andrea and Steven.
There is such a hunger for something other than partisanship that the temptation is to praise the new Ryan for being better than the old Ryan and to leave it at that. It’s good that he moved on the EITC and also that he embraced sentencing reform. I also like his suggestion that we re-examine occupational licensing rules.
But forgive me if I see his overall proposal as a nicely presented abdication of federal responsibility for the poor. “Experimenting” with people’s food-stamp money is not something we should sign onto.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, July 27, 2014
“The Big Problem With Paul Ryan’s New Poverty Plan”: Accountability Is Only Required Of Poor People
Today, Rep. Paul Ryan is unveiling his latest idea to change the federal government’s poverty programs. For someone who is constantly saying how concerned he is about poverty, Ryan’s previous budgets have relied an awful lot on slashing benefits to poor people. But this time, he promises that his proposal doesn’t cut benefits, but merely reorganizes them. Some parts of the proposal might be worthwhile. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that it’s still driven by the longstanding conservative desire to limit the help we give to the poor.
The centerpiece of the proposal is a consolidation of multiple separate programs into a single block grant that would be given to states; they could decide how to dispense the money, and the federal government’s job would essentially be reduced to oversight. States would choose whether or not to participate.
This sounds reasonable until you start to think about how it would play out. In practice, it’s likely that the states most eager to sign on would be precisely those that aren’t too happy about the ways the federal government provides benefits now. The devil would be in the details; what if a state decided to take its entire block grant and devote it to giving lectures to poor people on why they should get married? There could be a lot of needs going unmet while states implement their ideologically-driven visions of how poverty ought to be addressed.
Ryan’s plan assumes that the same Republican states that rejected the federal government’s offer to insure poor citizens through the expansion of Medicaid — in other words, who would rather see poor people go uninsured than get coverage from the government — are now going to be spectacularly committed and creative in working to help those same poor citizens through their time of need. Color me skeptical.
Ryan insists his plan would hold funding for these programs constant, not cut them. But it’s more complicated than that. Conservatives have long advocated block-granting of poverty programs, always with the justification that states will better deliver assistance to poor Americans if they aren’t hamstrung by requirements from Washington. But there’s little evidence that block granting accomplishes anything other than making it easier for these programs to be cut in future years or simply whittled away by inflation. As Jared Bernstein points out, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, which we used to call “welfare,” was block-granted in 1996 and has since then seen its value slashed by 30 percent in inflation-adjusted terms.
One of the real dangers of Ryan’s approach is that it would render the programs unable to deal with economic downturns unless Congress stepped in and supplied more money, which would be unlikely as long as Republicans control at least one house. So for instance, right now the food stamp program is an entitlement; if you meet eligibility standards you’re entitled to food stamps. The program can never run out of money in a given year. When the Great Recession hit, millions of Americans found themselves newly out of work and thus eligible for food stamps.
But under Ryan’s program, food stamps would be part of a block grant whose total amount is fixed. If and when another recession hit, states would be flooded with people who needed assistance, but they’d have the same limited sum of money they got at the beginning of the year. So they’d either have to turn people away or find a way to rob Peter to pay Paul, taking money out of other poverty programs to meet the increased need for food.
(There’s a brief discussion of inserting a provision into the plan to account for this kind of eventuality, but it seems neither particularly well thought-out nor nearly adequate to address what could be a major need.)
Ryan’s plan would also require “accountability” from those receiving assistance, in the form of time-limited benefits and work requirements (how you satisfy those requirements when people can’t find work is its own sad story). This too is a hallmark of the Republican approach to poverty programs, in which poor people have to jump through hoops to demonstrate their moral worth to get benefits. “Accountability” is something that is required of poor people, and only poor people. Farmers who get government subsidies don’t have to be “accountable.” Nor do government contractors who waste huge amounts of taxpayer money. Only the poor are forced to pee in a cup or account for their time or endure a hundred other petty humiliations, so we can be sure that if they get any government assistance they have proven themselves to be morally upstanding enough to deserve help.
That isn’t to say there’s nothing worthwhile in Ryan’s proposal. As he writes in a USA Today op-ed, “Right now, you have to go to a bunch of different offices to enroll in a bunch of different programs, often with different paperwork requirements and eligibility standards. Under the Opportunity Grant, you could go to one office and work with one person.” As anyone who has tried to apply for assistance knows, the paperwork requirements seem designed to hold down enrollment by making it as difficult as possible to apply. Streamlining that process would be terrific.
While this plan isn’t going to become law (at least not any time soon), it does serve a political purpose of showing that Republicans are thinking about poverty, and Ryan isn’t the only one in his party trying to revive “compassionate conservatism.” We can give him credit for addressing the issue. If only there was more reason to believe his ideas would do much to help Americans who are struggling.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Published at The Plum Line, The Washington Post, July 24, 2014
“Paul Ryan’s Glossy New Poverty Plan”: Not Much Doubt What The Effect On Poor People Will Be
Every year or so Paul Ryan comes up with a glossy new plan to deal with poverty or spending on social programs. The plans never go anywhere, but they’re not really intended to: They’re designed to make the Republican Party (and Mr. Ryan himself) appear more thoughtful than it actually is on these subjects.
The one he released today is somewhat better than previous efforts, in that it doesn’t propose massive cuts in overall spending (unlike his House budgets), and would even increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, one of the government’s most successful anti-poverty programs. Democrats have also embraced a larger credit, although unlike Mr. Ryan, they would pay for it by raising taxes on the rich rather than slashing federal nutrition programs that Mr. Ryan thinks are a waste of money.
But the lack of seriousness in the plan is demonstrated by its supposedly big idea: It would combine 11 of the most important federal poverty programs into something called an “opportunity grant” that would be given to the states to spend as they see fit. The eliminated programs would include food stamps, what remains of the welfare system (known as Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), Section 8 housing vouchers, and low-income heating assistance, among others.
This technique should sound familiar. Members of Mr. Ryan’s party have spent years promoting the idea that states can do things better than Washington. As Rick Santorum repeated endlessly in 2012, “Cap it, cut it, freeze it, and block-grant it to the states.” Mr. Ryan’s running mate that year, Mitt Romney, would have turned all of Medicaid into a block grant system dumped onto the steps of 50 state capitols.
Putting programs like food stamps into a block grant means they could not be expanded on a national basis during economic emergencies, when unemployment or poverty soars. If a state were to have a budget crisis, perhaps due to tax cuts, social spending would be the first to go.
The broader problem is the sharp division between the states, which exposes the gap between Mr. Ryan’s attempt at high-mindedness and the petty grievances of the Republican majority. The proponents of these consolidation ideas know that while blue states would shoulder their responsibilities and protect their poorest residents, many red states would not. If Washington were not in the anti-poverty business, Republicans would have an opportunity to reduce spending on social programs in about half the country.
The attitude of red states toward social spending has been made brutally clear by their reaction to the Affordable Care Act. In 36 states, lawmakers refused to set up health care exchanges, putting the insurance subsidies for poor people at risk if a recent court decision is upheld. And only 27 states, including the District of Columbia, have agreed to expand their Medicaid programs. The effect on lowering the number of uninsured people in states with expanded programs is clear, but lawmakers elsewhere don’t care.
In Florida, the Republicans who rule the state have not created exchanges or expanded Medicaid, and have offered nothing to the 760,000 state residents with no insurance. The state has even banned volunteers who were helping poor people sign up for the federal exchange. The president of the Florida Senate, Don Gaetz, summed up the prevailing attitude perfectly this week: “As long as I serve in the Senate, I will never support the state of Florida serving as the instrument by which individuals and businesses are forced into a federal mandate to purchase a health insurance product they may not want.”
Mr. Ryan would never say so, but the real effect of his plan is to turn over a series of highly successful federal poverty programs into the hands of Don Gaetz and other anti-government ideologues. There’s not much doubt what the effect on poor people would be.
By: David Firestone, Taking Note, The Editorial Page Editors Blog; The New York Times, July 24, 2014
“The Koch-Tested, Koch-Approved Version”: Paul Ryan’s Faux Populism Isn’t Going To End Poverty Or Reduce Inequality
Paul Ryan’s fellow Republicans are quick to dismiss Elizabeth Warren as too radical, too progressive, too populist.
But Ryan is trying—a bit clumsily, but trying all the same—to borrow a page from the Massachusetts senator as he seeks to remake himself in anticipation of a potential 2016 run for the Republican presidential nomination. He’s talking about poverty, about inequality, about shifting the focus away from meeting the demands of corporations and toward meeting the needs of Americans.
Mitt Romney’s running mate is abandoning Romneyism for populism—or what former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has referred to as “Paul Ryan’s Faux Populism.”
Instead of repeating the Mittnomers of 2012—“Corporations are people, my friend”—Ryan is suddenly informing fellow conservatives, “There’s another fallacy popular among our ranks. Just as some think anything government does is wrong, others think anything business does is right. But in fact they’re two sides of the same coin. Both big government and big business like to stack the deck in their favor. And though they are sometimes adversaries, they are far too often allies.”
It is hard to argue with Ryan’s reasoning. Populists and progressives have warned for more than a century that corporations are “boldly marching, not for economic conquests only, but for political power.” The author of those words, former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Edward Ryan , asked in 1873: “Which shall rule—wealth or man; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?” Elizabeth Warren confirmed Ryan’s worst fears when she addressed Netroots Nation last week and declared, “The game is rigged and the rich and the powerful have lobbyists and lawyers and plenty of friends in Congress. Everybody else, not so much.”
And now, Paul Ryan is on-message, announcing as only a career politician can, that “our country has had enough of politics.” He’s proposing to “reconceive the federal government’s role in the fight against poverty.” And he is even ripping corporations, decrying the way in which big government has become “a willing accomplice” of big business.
Ryan explained last week at Hillsdale College’s Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship session that “crony capitalism isn’t a side effect; it’s a direct result of big government.”
Grab the pitchforks!
But don’t look for Paul Ryan on the front lines of actual fights to reduce inequality or address injustice.
The House Budget Committee chairman, who on Thursday released an “anti-poverty proposal” that rehashed decades-old schemes to scale back anti-poverty initiatives and regulatory protections for low-income Americans, offers scant evidence of a serious determination to solve the problems that have got Americans up in arms. If Ryan was serious, he wouldn’t be proposing, as his “Opportunity Grant” plan does, to “consolidate” existing federal programs to aid the poor into block grants to the states—an approach that would allow Republican governors who have already shown a penchant for undermining healthcare, food-stamp and education initiatives the “flexibility” to do even more harm.
Congressman Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat who serves with Ryan on the Budget Committee, nails it when he warns about a proposal that “uses the sunny language of ‘reform’ as a guise to cut vital safety-net programs.”
So if the congressman is not worried about developing a serious response to the problem of inequality, what is on his mind?
Ryan is worried about solving his own problem: an association in the public’s mind with the failed messages of the 2012 Romney-Ryan campaign.
Last week’s populist speech at the Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship and this week’s poverty speech at the American Enterprise Institute begin the roll-out of Paul Ryan Version 2.0. Next comes the August publication of Ryan’s 2016 campaign book, The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea, complete with its epic cover shot of Americans reaching out to touch a triumphal Ryan. Then there’s the bus tour.
Yes, the bus tour.
So Ryan is campaigning. To the extent that it is possible he will do so in populist style and with populist rhetoric about crony capitalism and fighting poverty.
But don’t be confused.
This is still the same Paul Ryan who went to the floor of the House in 2008 and rallied Republicans to support the Wall Street bailout. This is still the same Paul Ryan who opposed regulation of the big banks. This is still the same Paul Ryan who supported and continues to support) the free trade deals demanded by multinational corporations. This is still the same Paul Ryan who has peddled Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare “reforms” that would turn sound programs into vehicles for steering federal funds into the accounts of Wall Street speculators and health-insurance corporations.
This is still the same Paul Ryan who during the current election cycle has padded his campaign committee and “leadership PAC” accounts with almost $9 million in donations—with Wall Street securities and investment interests and the health-insurance industry giving most generously. And this is the same Paul Ryan who, when Congress took its August break in 2013 jetted home to Wisconsin via Arizona—where he was a featured speaker at the annual retreat for billionaire donors organized by the Koch brothers.
The other featured speaker was then–House majority leader Eric Cantor, for whom the ensuing months did not go well. Cantor’s Republican primary defeat—at the hands of a critic of “crony capitalism”—provided an indication that the American people are increasingly agitated. And increasingly disinclined toward the sort of insider politics practiced by career politicians such as Ryan.
Ryan got the signal.
He is rebranding himself.
He has downloaded some populist rhetoric to go with his “kinder, gentler” talk about poverty.
But Paul Ryan’s populism is not the real thing. It’s the Koch-tested, Koch-approved version.
By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 24, 2014
Share This Blog
Unknown Feed- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
mykeystrokes.com 