By: AIF Staff
Houston, TX – Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan joined Ambassador David Satterfield at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy for a wide-ranging conversation on the economic, fiscal, and geopolitical forces shaping the United States.
Talking with over 300 members of the Rice University student body and broader campus community, Ryan offered his perspectives on foreign policy, the challenges of sustaining economic growth amid rising debt and international competition, trade, the RISE Pilot project and efforts to reform the social safety net, and Artificial Intelligence. The conversation also explored the rise of populism, combatting polarization, and the policy choices facing the next Congress as leaders navigate an increasingly complex domestic and global environment.
Video of the full Baker Institute event is accessible here and a recap of the event from Rice University is accessible here. Excerpts of Ryan’s responses, edited for clarity, follow.
The current state of the American economy
“The economy has had a lot thrown at it and it’s remarkably durable right now… I think it’s being levitated a lot by our data center build-out. You’ve got the hyperscalers putting about a trillion dollars into data centers…
But the big question you’re asking is, are we heading into a debt crisis? What’s our fiscal situation look like?… And the answer is we don’t have the fiscal space. We’re running big deficits, 6% of GDP, in a time of low unemployment and decent economic growth.”
With Putin deal, Trump ‘practicing foreign policy with no morality’
“What’s running through my mind with this Putin diesel deal is we are now practicing foreign policy with no morality. This is what’s happening right now…
It’s hard to wrap your head around this Putin diesel deal and see it as anything other than a rejection of the things that this country has stood for 250 years. We’re for freedom. We’re for liberty. We’re for democracy… It’s kind of like we’re going from, you know, the shining city on the hill to might makes right and the victor gets the spoils.”
The failure and fatigue of grievance-based populism
“Both parties are going to the voter with grievance-based populism, which means they are playing identity politics. They are playing to people’s anxieties and concerns and fears. They’re exploiting them. They offer overly simplified solutions to those problems that don’t actually solve the problem… What happens with this kind of populism… is it doesn’t bring the goods. It doesn’t solve the problems… The country is going to be so fatigued from bitter partisanship, from the pendulum swinging and reactionary moment after reactionary moment and eventually, they will think… I’m going to go with somebody that’s actually a proven fixer.”
The 20th century social contract vs. 21st century demographics
“We have settled on a consensus in this country that we believe in our social contract… The problem with this is these programs were written in the 20th century in ways that are totally unsustainable in the 21st century. They’re demographically driven. They’re pay-as-you-go…
We just doubled the amount of retirees in this country within one generation. With the boomers retiring, we went from 40 million retirees to 77 million retirees and have fewer workers following in their footsteps.”
Addressing the upcoming Social Security cliff
“Knowing what to do is not the problem. Knowing how to do it is not the problem. Having serious politics to get to these solutions is the problem…
I do still believe you can date stamp any Social Security reforms. You can grandfather the existing retirees to prevent them from having any changes in their lives… so long as we pass laws that affect Gen X, my generation on down, say from age 60 and below, so that when we retire, we are going into a system that’s designed a bit differently so that it can cash flow, so that it can be solvent… You have to means-test the benefits more… You have to raise the retirement age to reflect longevity.”
Taxing our way out of a debt crisis is mathematically impossible
“I think you can get more revenue in the federal government without sacrificing economic growth, but you do that through tax reform. You don’t do that through bad tax policies that actually slow down economic growth… There’s no way—it’s a mathematical impossibility that you can solve this through taxes. You simply cannot. The math doesn’t add up. So if you think you can just tax your way out of this problem, it is mathematically impossible.”
The risk of losing reserve currency primacy
“The challenge we will have in the future is if the world ends up concluding that we’re not going to get our act together, that we’re not going to pay our bills, that we’re going to monetize our debt and going to just print money to pay off our debt, that’s when the worm turns on us. It’s at that point when we could lose our primacy as the world’s reserve currency, which is an exorbitant privilege, an enormous benefit to our country.”
Trade as a positive-sum game vs. protectionism
“When Trump picked a fight with every single country, he basically embraced the view that trade is a zero-sum game with nothing but a winner or a loser… I totally disagree with that worldview. Trade is a positive-sum game. That’s how life and economics work. There are win-win situations…
But what Liberation Day did was it isolated our allies and pushed more of our allies to China…But not only that, it’s also really bad economics. It’s bad economics because you make our own industries less healthy and you crank up prices on your consumers.”
The fight between tyranny and democracy will define the 21st century
“There’s going to be a fight in the 21st century for other countries in between tyranny and democracy. China is going to run around the world with tyranny in a box saying: ‘Here’s your smart surveillance system for your streets… Here is your monetary system with the digital RMB so you can surveil your citizens and their and their spending habits and their money. Here is tyranny in a box…’ America can lead the world in saying here’s what freedom looks like. Here’s what privacy looks like. Here’s what liberty looks like.”