Washington, DC – Last week, the President of the American Idea Foundation and former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, took part in the 2019 Kemp Leadership Award Dinner and shared his thoughts on the importance of expanding opportunity and upward mobility. Speaker Ryan was a long-time aide to Jack Kemp and was the inaugural recipient of the Kemp Leadership Award in 2011.
At the event, Speaker Ryan took part in a panel discussion with Senators Tim Scott and Marco Rubio that was moderated by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. Excerpts of Speaker Ryan’s remarks follow:
On promoting effective public policies via the American Idea Foundation:
“The American Idea Foundation is meant to be not redundant but complementary to the Jack Kemp Foundation, to promote the ideas that Jack taught me, and to advance the ideas that drew me to public service in the first place.”
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“What we’re working on at the American Idea Foundation is to complement these efforts and to go into the poverty-stricken areas of America and work on making sure that these ideas are actually realized: to make sure that opportunity zones are tools of revitalization, not regentrification; to make sure that social impact bonds are being effective; to make sure that this new Evidence Act that we have to use economic incentives and data and analytics is actually occurring, so that we can actually, number one, move the needle on poverty.”
“Number two: The American Idea Foundation is working to prove that free enterprise is the best possible weapon against poverty and socialism that ever will be and use those stories and narratives to re-educate the youth of America, who for some bizarre reason have this historically ignorant, emotional attachment to socialism these days.”
On Jack Kemp’s impact and pursuing a vocation in public service:
“I was a young guy coming out of college in 1992 and the Berlin Wall had just come down. It was not hard to convince young people at that time that socialism was really bad idea. We had tens of millions of people teeming out of Eastern Europe who were my age saying the same thing and I was enamored with economics at the time and in particular, I was enamored with Jack Kemp’s supply-side economics…. So, I went and worked for Jack Kemp at Empower American on economic policies.”
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“I thought at the time that my goal in life was to become an economist. I thought it was going to be a couple years in Washington working at the feet of a guy I really admired in Jack Kemp, then go to graduate school — hopefully at the University of Chicago, and then maybe be the Chief Economist at RW Baird in Milwaukee one day…. It really was Jack that taught me that this is an amazing vocation…. I just couldn’t resist it, so I stayed with it…. It was Jack’s infectious enthusiasm and seeing public service is a wonderful vocation that frankly grew me into this.”
On advancing solutions to promote the American Idea:
“We wanted to execute an agenda and the horizon that we were shooting for was a stronger, more prosperous country, where we reinvigorated upward mobility and the American Idea, which is that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. It is a beautiful vision. America is the only country ever founded on an idea. It’s a “natural law” idea where, as Jimmy said, our rights come from God and nature’s God, before government and pre-government. But there are a lot of people in America who don’t see it or think the American Idea is there for them.”
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“I worry the conservative movement as I understand it, which is a Jack Kemp classical-liberal, inclusive, aspirational movement has got a challenging future. And if we don’t reinvigorate the conservative movement in a way that is inclusive, like you do with your recruitment of women, that speaks to people who are non-traditional Republican voters like these gentlemen do, then we will be a minority movement for a long time and the left will win by default.”