“The Right’s New Clothes”: So Far, It’s Hard To Find Evidence Of Any Fundamental Rethinking
Are conservatives interested in new ideas, or are they merely infatuated with the idea of new ideas? Are they really reappraising their approach, or are they trying to adjust their image just enough to win elections?
One way to look at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference is as a face-off between the “No Surrender” cries of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and the “Let’s Try to Win” rhetoric of such politicians as Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis). Seen in this light, Republicans truly are having the internal debate that Ryan called “messy,” “noisy” and “a little bit uncomfortable.”
But Ryan may have revealed more than he intended when he downplayed conservative divisions. “For the most part,” Ryan insisted, “these disagreements have not been over principles or even policies. They’ve been over tactics.”
In which case, this is not an argument over ideas at all, but a discussion of packaging.
Christie was quite direct on this point. “We don’t get to govern if we don’t win,” he said. “Let us come out of here resolved not only to stand for our principles. Let’s come out of this conference resolved to win elections again.”
To which Cruz had a ready reply: that Republicans are better off saying what they actually think. With Cruz, at least, you get the unvarnished right-wing gospel, preached without equivocation.
Cruz’s purity bumped his standing in the annual CPAC presidential straw poll up to 11 percent from 4 percent last year, and he took second place. But the hearts of the younger conservatives, the most visible part of the CPAC crowd, were with the unapologetic libertarianism of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Paul won the poll with 31 percent. Christie came in fourth at 8 percent. Ryan received just 3 percent.
No doubt there’s intellectual ferment among the right’s leading thinkers and some of its politicians, often reflected in the pages of the conservative journal National Affairs. Conservatives seem keen these days to acknowledge the need for some kind of social safety net. And while many on the right still deny or dismiss the problem of growing economic inequality, many are at least grappling with the crisis in upward mobility.
But so far, it’s hard to find evidence of any fundamental rethinking. Conservatives want to say that they’re devoted to more than the well-being of the wealthy, but their tax and regulatory policies remain focused on alleviating the burdens on the “job creators,” i.e., the rich. They say they want to do better by the poor, but the thrust of their budgets is to reduce assistance — sometime savagely, as in the case of food stamps — to those who need it.
Ryan no longer refers to social programs as a “hammock” for the idle, but he still wants to cut them. And he cited Eloise Anderson, a Wisconsin state official, to tell a story in his CPAC speech — it got more attention than he now wishes — about “a young boy from a very poor family” who “would get a free lunch from a government program.”
The young man “told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch, one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him. This is what the left does not understand.”
Ryan didn’t understand that this was a made-up story. After reporting by the Wonkette blog and The Post’s Glenn Kessler, Anderson admitted that she had never spoken to the boy. She picked up the story from a TV interview. Worse, she then twisted a tale first told by supporters of government nutrition assistance that had absolutely nothing to do with school lunch programs.
But what’s most troubling here is that it did not occur to Ryan to check the story because it apparently didn’t occur to him that most kids on free lunch programs have parents who do care about them. They just can’t afford to put a nutritious lunch in a brown paper bag every day.
Ryan was so eager to make an ideological statement about family structure that he was not bothered by the implicit insult he was issuing to actual families of children on the lunch program. A little more empathy could have saved Ryan a lot of trouble. He apologized for the factual error but not for the insult.
Ryan certainly doesn’t sound like Ted Cruz, and one can hope that the visits Ryan has been making to poor neighborhoods will eventually move him to reconsider his attitude toward government programs. But for now, I am inclined to respect Cruz for giving us his views straight and not pretending he’s manufacturing new ideas. If conservative rethinkers such as Ryan have more than rhetorical and tactical differences with Cruz, they have yet to prove it.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, March 9, 2014
“The Hammock Fallacy”: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Report, Like His Famous Budget Plan, Is A Con Job
Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue. So when you see something like the current scramble by Republicans to declare their deep concern for America’s poor, it’s a good sign, indicating a positive change in social norms. Goodbye, sneering at the 47 percent; hello, fake compassion.
And the big new poverty report from the House Budget Committee, led by Representative Paul Ryan, offers additional reasons for optimism. Mr. Ryan used to rely on “scholarship” from places like the Heritage Foundation. Remember when Heritage declared that the Ryan budget would reduce unemployment to a ludicrous 2.8 percent, then tried to cover its tracks? This time, however, Mr. Ryan is citing a lot of actual social science research.
Unfortunately, the research he cites doesn’t actually support his assertions. Even more important, his whole premise about why poverty persists is demonstrably wrong.
To understand where the new report is coming from, it helps to recall something Mr. Ryan said two years ago: “We don’t want to turn the safety net into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” There are actually two assertions here. First, antipoverty programs breed complacency; that is, they discourage work. Second, complacency — the failure of the poor to work as much as they should — is what perpetuates poverty.
The budget committee report is almost entirely concerned with the first assertion. It notes that there has been a large decline in labor force participation, and it claims that antipoverty programs, which reduce the incentive to work, are a major reason for this decline. Then come 200 pages of text and 683 footnotes, designed to create the impression that the scholarly research literature supports the report’s claims.
But it doesn’t. In some cases, Mr. Ryan and colleagues outright misstate what the research says, drawing outraged protests from a number of prominent scholars about the misrepresentation of their work. More often, however, the report engages in argument by innuendo. It makes an assertion about the bad effects of a program, then mentions a number of studies of that program, and thereby leaves the impression that those studies support its assertion, even though they don’t.
What does scholarly research on antipoverty programs actually say? We have quite good evidence on the effects of food stamps and Medicaid, which draw most of Mr. Ryan’s ire — and which his budgets propose slashing drastically. Food stamps, it seems, do lead to a reduction in work and working hours, but the effect is modest. Medicaid has little, if any, effect on work effort.
Over all, here’s the verdict of one comprehensive survey: “While there are significant behavioral side effects of many programs, their aggregate impact is very small.” In short, Mr. Ryan’s poverty report, like his famous budget plan, is a con job.
Now, you can still argue that making antipoverty programs much more generous would indeed reduce the incentive to work. If you look at cross-county comparisons, you find that low-income households in the United States, which does less to help the poor than any other major advanced nation, work much more than their counterparts abroad. So, yes, incentives do have some effect on work effort.
But why, exactly, should that be such a concern? Mr. Ryan would have us believe that the “hammock” created by the social safety net is the reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty. But the evidence says nothing of the kind.
After all, if generous aid to the poor perpetuates poverty, the United States — which treats its poor far more harshly than other rich countries, and induces them to work much longer hours — should lead the West in social mobility, in the fraction of those born poor who work their way up the scale. In fact, it’s just the opposite: America has less social mobility than most other advanced countries.
And there’s no puzzle why: it’s hard for young people to get ahead when they suffer from poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and lack of access to good education. The antipoverty programs that we have actually do a lot to help people rise. For example, Americans who received early access to food stamps were healthier and more productive in later life than those who didn’t. But we don’t do enough along these lines. The reason so many Americans remain trapped in poverty isn’t that the government helps them too much; it’s that it helps them too little.
Which brings us back to the hypocrisy issue. It is, in a way, nice to see the likes of Mr. Ryan at least talking about the need to help the poor. But somehow their notion of aiding the poor involves slashing benefits while cutting taxes on the rich. Funny how that works.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, March 6, 2014
“Full Stomach, Lying Mouth”: Paul Ryan’s CPAC Speech Was Based On A Lie
Paul Ryan’s CPAC speech yesterday was almost comically offensive even before it became clear that it was based on a lie.
By now, you’ve probably heard about the speech itself, in which Ryan denounced the left for offering people “a full stomach— and an empty soul.” Discussing the moral squalor of free school lunch programs, Ryan retold a story he heard from Eloise Anderson, a former single mother on assistance who became a hero to the right by calling for the abolishment of welfare (She’s now a member of Scott Walker’s cabinet). It was about a boy Anderson had ostensibly met who didn’t want a free government lunch. “He wanted his own lunch—one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’,” said Ryan. “He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.”
Ryan’s words would have been nasty even if the underlying story were true. Do parents whose kids get subsidized school lunches not care for them? Does Ryan really think their souls are empty? Last night, however, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler reported that the anecdote Ryan used was actually ripped out of context from the bestselling book “An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny.” The book is about the friendship between author Laura Schroff and Maurice Mazyck, whom Schroff met when he was begging on the street. At one point, she made him school lunches every day and left them with her doorman to pick up on the way to school. In a heartbreaking passage, Mazyck asked her to put them in a brown paper bag like the ones all the other kids had.
Anderson’s communication’s director now admits that she never actually spoke to Mazyck, though she appropriated his story when she testified last year at a congressional hearing chaired by Ryan. As it happens, Schroff and Mazyck have partnered with an organization called No Kid Hungry that, among other things, works to connect poor children to free school meals. “[A] simple inquiry would have determined that the person telling the story actually is an advocate for the federal programs that Ryan now claims leaves people with ‘a full stomach and an empty soul,’” writes Kessler, describing it as a story “too good to check.”
That in itself is telling, since even in it’s apocryphal version, it’s not that good of a story. After all, it’s not as if liberals think that free school lunches are better than homemade ones. The argument for free school lunches are that they are better than no lunch at all. The implication of Ryan’s “full stomach…empty soul” line is that he disagrees. He just knows better than to say so outright, and so he needs to hide behind an imaginary poor child.
By: Michelle Goldberg, The Nation, March 7, 2014
“Paul Ryan And The Brown Bag”: Once Again, The Congressman Just Doesn’t Get It
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) covered a fair amount of ground in his speech this morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but there was one story in particular that stood out.
“This reminds me of a story I heard from Eloise Anderson. She serves in the cabinet of my friend Governor Scott Walker. She once met a young boy from a poor family. And every day at school, he would get a free lunch from a government program. But he told Eloise he didn’t want a free lunch. He wanted his own lunch – one in a brown-paper bag just like the other kids’. He wanted one, he said, because he knew a kid with a brown-paper bag had someone who cared for him.
“That’s what the Left just doesn’t understand.”
I’ve read this a few times, hoping Ryan had some other subtle subtext, but I’m afraid the congressman really is as confused as his anecdote suggests.
The child may have wanted a lunch in a brown-paper bag, but – and I hope Ryan pauses to really think about this – his family is poor. The boy “didn’t want a free lunch,” but – and this is key – he didn’t want to be hungry, either.
It’s true that Republican policymakers could take away that free lunch the child received at the school, but that doesn’t mean the boy’s family will suddenly have more money to pack a healthy lunch in a brown-paper bag.
What’s more, it’s also true this kid may come from a struggling family, but it doesn’t mean he lacks “someone who cares for him”; it means he and his family lack the resources needed to send him to school with a good meal. Robert Schlesinger added, “A kid with a brown paper bag does have someone who loves them; but the kid without the brown paper bag, the one whose parent either won’t or can’t – because they’re working hard to get ahead and give themselves and their families better lives – deserves a society that loves and cares for them too.”
That’s what Paul Ryan just doesn’t understand.
In the same speech, the Wisconsin Republican added:
“The reason [Democrats[ keep talking about income inequality is because they can’t talk about economic growth. They have spent five, long years in power, and all they have to show for it is this lousy website.”
That’d be a good point, just so long as one overlooks the Recovery Act that ended the Great Recession, the millions of new jobs, health care reform that brought coverage to millions, the rescue of the auto industry, Wall Street reform, the end of the war in Iraq, counter-terrorism successes, the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and student-loan reform, among other things.
Oh, and the health care website was fixed a few months ago.
Other that, though, Ryan’s on strong ground.
Update: In the school-lunch anecdote, I falsely assumed Ryan had the basic details of the story right. He didn’t: “Via Wonkette, the school lunch story appears to have been recycled from a story and altered beyond recognition in the process. The original story had nothing to do with a child turning down a free lunch. It’s about a kid, Maurice, who met a private benefactor, Laura, asking to literally have his lunch placed in a brown paper bag.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, March 6, 2014
“Warmed Over Reaganism”: Paul Ryan’s Poverty Trap; Stop Taking These Lame Makeovers Seriously!
McKay Coppins already told us that there’s a new Paul Ryan who really cares about poverty and the poor. Now Robert Costa has the details on the newest new Paul Ryan, who just released a report on poverty that is 204 pages long, which proves that he really cares about the poor, because when was the last time a Republican wrote that many words and sentences about them?
Last seen handing out neckties to poor kids, Ryan is now talking up his report, “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later,” which enumerates roughly 100 federal anti-poverty programs that Ryan tells Costa “have actually created a poverty trap.”
Now, Ryan’s plan does one positive thing: It makes Sen. Marco Rubio look kind of lazy and insincere. Because Rubio gave a much-heralded speech on the anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s declaring a War on Poverty, but it was only a few thousand words, it wasn’t 204 pages, and since then, he basically dropped the issue. Ryan says his report will provide the basis of his next budget. But the basic Ryan-Rubio message is the same warmed-over Reaganism: We fought a war on poverty and poverty won, so let’s give up.
But seriously, how many times are we going to be told that there’s a “new” Paul Ryan who really, really, really cares about the poor – and whose budget proposals consistently slash programs designed to help them. All that’s different about Ryan’s approach now is he’s telling the poor that cutting their programs is good for them, because it will free them from “the poverty trap.”
Also, how many generations of Republicans are going to rely on Bob Woodson’s self-promotion? Like Coppins, Costa tells us Ryan is looking to Woodson’s Center for Neighborhood Enterprise for new ideas about fighting poverty. But it’s been generations now that Woodson has been reassuring Republicans, with zero evidence, that unfettered capitalism can heal the inner city. Can’t they even trouble themselves to find a new Bob Woodson?
In fact, Think Progress found that buried in Ryan’s report, beneath the dark warnings about a “poverty trap,” are findings that actually, even by GOP standards, a lot of anti-poverty programs are doing a lot of good. From the Veterans’ Health Administration to the Earned Income Tax Credit, Ryan’s report identifies at least 16 major programs that in fact help the poor and are a good bet for government. You wonder whether he even read his own report.
And in several of the areas where Ryan found fault with programs, the Fiscal Times found that the economists behind the studies Ryan cited say he misrepresented their data.
To be fair, Ryan actually makes three good points. One, he supports the once-bipartisan, now-GOP-questioned Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps low-wage families out of poverty (but even better would be if he called for a major expansion). The EITC is actually a huge part of the story behind the “47 percent” Ryan’s running mate Mitt Romney slurred in 2012. Ryan doesn’t acknowledge the dissonance, but his EITC support is welcome.
Ryan’s second fair point is that federal anti-poverty programs are a sketchy patchwork of mostly uncoordinated initiatives that would certainly work better if anyone put time into pulling them together. But Ryan merely criticizes that patchwork in order to rip it apart, proposing to slash rather than coordinate the services that help poor people, admittedly inadequately.
The third is more complicated, and if taken seriously, subverts Ryan’s entire message. He complains, correctly, that too many anti-poverty programs are “means-tested — meaning that benefits decline as recipients make more money — [so] poor families face very high implicit marginal tax rates. The federal government effectively discourages them from making more money.”
Of course, the alternative to means-tested programs in other industrialized nations is universal programs that essentially set a floor for income, nutrition and health below which families can’t drop. Social Security and Medicare are rare American examples of universal program – ones that Ryan has repeatedly tried to gut (while most Republicans and even some conservative Democrats endorse “means testing” them). A guaranteed family income and a genuine national health insurance program could eliminate means-tested programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and Medicaid – but Ryan and his GOP allies (and lots of Republicans) would never consider those notions.
Nor will they consider the other guaranteed anti-poverty program: a hike in the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would lift almost a million Americans out of poverty immediately – but Ryan’s party is opposed to it. Indeed, more Republicans are coming out every day saying there should be no minimum wage at all.
There is, indeed, a poverty trap in the U.S., and the media fall into it again and again: taking seriously the warmed over Reaganism of conservatives like Paul Ryan, and pretending there’s something in it that will help the poor.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, March 4, 2014
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