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By: AIF Staff

This week, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan delivered the keynote address at the University of Oklahoma’s Presidential Speakers Series Spring 2024 event. Talking with over 700 Oklahoma residents and supporters of the University, former Speaker Ryan discussed the challenges facing younger Americans, how they can rise to meet these challenges, and how we can preserve America’s timeless principles for generations to come.

Excerpts from press coverage of Speaker Ryan’s time in Norman, Oklahoma follow.

Norman Transcript: Ryan laments current political landscape, asks for more civility

Former Speaker of the House and 2012 Vice President Nominee Paul Ryan told Norman residents that the U.S. needs more civility in politics as the keynote speaker for the University of Oklahoma’s Presidential Speakers Series.

Ryan told The Transcript that Oklahoma holds a special place in his heart since he married his wife, Janna, who is from Madill.

“I come to Oklahoma a lot because my wife is from Madill and their family ranch is there. I come to Oklahoma every year to hunt and fish in Madill, and I’ve been going to OU games for the last 20 years,” Ryan said….

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He said his biggest concern for young people is that they are witnessing an unprecedented tone as far as political dialogue.

“I think it’s really important that young people, particularly college students, get a sense that politics and political discussion is not just about anger and personality destruction,” Ryan said. “There are bigger issues to talk about, and there are civil discussions to be had….

“I think younger Americans get fed this content 24/7 via social media algorithms that often play on the emotions of anger and fear, and they push people further into illogical corners that dumbs down policy and ratchets up partisanship,” Ryan said.

Journal Record: Ryan: Future depends on Congress

If you’re looking for good news or encouragement, don’t go to Paul Ryan, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and former running mate of presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

While affable and charismatic on the outside, the Republican is a realist and a deficit hawk on the inside. He paints a dire picture of America’s future, and he gives it to you right between the eyes.

The future of Social Security and Medicare, the national debt and the crisis on the border, Ryan has been in the trenches over all those issues. And even though he left Congress in 2015, he says the problems and the dysfunction are the same as they were the day he stepped down. The only thing that’s changed is that the cans have been kicked further down the road.

Ryan was in Norman last week as a guest presenter for the University of Oklahoma’s State of American Politics Presidential Speakers Series.

In an interview with The Journal Record, Ryan said everyone in Congress knows how to solve the border crisis because they’ve all studied it. But the political agendas are standing in the way, just as they were in the 20 years he served as a House member from Wisconsin.

OU Daily: Ryan talks Trump, future of politics in student forum

Alongside lecturing at the Spring 2024 Presidential Speaker’s Series, Ryan held a public forum in the Price College of Business, where he discussed discouragement for young voters, populism’s role in the modern Republican party and the role of college students in the future of democracy.

According to Ryan, young voters are dissuaded from politics due to a lack of representation in both political parties, citing the ages of presidential candidates President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

“Younger voters are going to be drawn more towards younger people,” Ryan said. “Both parties have a problem with both of our tops of the ticket, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are basically 80 or pushing 80. Right now, younger people are seeing what’s out there and are looking for something else.”

Ryan said college students are responsible for decreasing political polarization. He added students should continue community involvement following college and seek diversity.

“It’s your job to try and take the sting out of the coarseness of our political dialogue and bring civility back in public conversations and the way you do that is you drop the phone and go and get yourself involved in civil society,” Ryan said. “Get involved in something out of college, where you’re spending time with people who don’t look or think like you or don’t come from where you come from, and learn how other peoples’ perspectives work.”

Ryan said the modern Republican party utilizes populism dedicated to a single person, Trump. He added personality-based populism is not durable, citing Trump’s potential to receive one more term.

“If your populism is untethered to any core set of ideas and principles, and in our current moment, tied to a person or a personality, that’s not good populism – that’s unhealthy populism,” Ryan said. “It’s not an ideology, it’s not a philosophy, it’s just a person and it’s a very inconsistent person at that.”

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Ryan said the Republican party requires “soul-searching” following Trump’s eventual departure from the public eye. Instead of Trump-related populism, Ryan believes Republicans will need to appeal to the majority of voters, fusing nationalists and traditional conservatives.

“Some kind of fusion of those policies and ideas hopefully will manifest itself into a coherent philosophy that is capable of speaking to the needs of the country and is capable of winning the hearts and the minds of a majority of the country,” Ryan said. “But that’s not going to happen until we’re through this moment and this moment is built around the guy.”

To watch Ryan’s full address at Oklahoma University, click here.

By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Last week at the Bipartisan Policy Center, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan joined a panel of experts from the private and public sectors to discuss the future of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

The event, which was the latest in a quarterly series hosted by the American Idea Foundation, featured a wide-ranging conversation between Ryan and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, moderated by BPC President Margaret Spellings, and remarks from Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman.

Former Speaker Ryan and Dimon discussed how to improve poverty-fighting policies like the Earned Income Tax Credit and how to better utilize technology to administer these credits. Ryan touched on his past work to advance pro-growth reforms via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and his ongoing efforts to expand the use of evidence-based strategies to fight poverty.

Excerpts of Speaker Ryan’s remarks follow. Video of the event is accessible here. 

Why expanding economic opportunities for working families, via policies like the EITC, matters:

“This is a bipartisan issue. The EITC, which was originally a Milton Friedman idea called a “negative income tax” going back in the day, has had bipartisan roots and it has been proven to be very effective. When I was Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, I worked feverishly to expand the EITC and a couple of reforms, which we can get into, have yet to materialize, but if you are pushing for a society that is known by upward mobility and you’re striving for equality of opportunity, the best tool that we’ve had in the arsenal is the EITC….

“You don’t think of Congress as this bipartisan place. Most people who watch the news don’t see it that way, but the EITC is [bipartisan], so let’s keep it that way and let’s figure out how we can make it better.”

On the future of the EITC and the need for technological innovation to improve its effectiveness:

“When I was Ways and Means Chairman, I was not a fan of the lump-sum concept of it where you wait until the end of the year and get a lump-sum. I would rather have it embedded in the paycheck itself so that each pay period you have that higher pay so you can budget more accordingly. It’s impressive that people can pay for one thing [using a lump-sum EITC payment] but it would be better if it was embedded in your paycheck, and you had higher wages that you could recognize. It really demonstrates the “make work pay” notion.

“The reason that we couldn’t fix this when I was running the Committee in charge of this is technology. The IRS and the Treasury literally did not have the technology to be able to do this and as we toyed with the idea, we could have converted it to a Social Security credit but that would have eviscerated the program. So, by now, surely technology can solve this problem and as you look at the digitization of money and the digitization of benefits – and there’s a longer conversation to be had here – I think that’s the key because you can do two things:

1. Make sure [the EITC] goes to who it needs to, like the 300,000 people in Maryland who qualify for it but don’t get it. I mean, technology could help solve that.
2. If we have program integrity problems, which are waste, fraud, and abuse, technology can clear a lot of that up and fix a lot of the administrative difficulties that we have….

“There are a lot of things that technology can do to make [the EITC] work better and make it work for cheaper and so that’s something to me that Congress should wrestle with. It is not that controversial, and it will help shrink the score of what it takes to expand this. We have a lot of expiring provisions in tax law in the next session of Congress and there is when you’ll have a churn of tax policy where you probably have an opportunity to make some of these expansions.”

A bipartisan consensus on the need for a social safety net, the debate centers on how best to deliver it:

“There’s a consensus in America. You don’t see it when you turn on the television at night because you have these entertainers in Congress… but we agree on the social contract which was litigated and debated in the 21^st century. We want health and retirement security for all Americans. The government is going to provide this, and the question is: How does the government do that? But we all agree on the social contract, and we all want a safety net under which people can get back on their feet. Let’s have a good debate about how this works but we have a remarkable consensus in this country about the social contract of health and retirement security and we all want faster economic growth.”

The role of the American Idea Foundation in advancing evidence-based strategies:

“What my Foundation does is we work with economists at the University of Notre Dame who run 75 randomized controlled trials a year on what we think are successful poverty programs around America. We find out what works so we can then scale and replicate. Government can do that too.

“The last time I was here with Patty Murray, a progressive Democrat Senator from Washington state. We wrote the Evidence Act five years ago. The five-year anniversary was just a week ago. Why I think we’re really on the cusp of something good here is the Evidence Act says that the federal government has to open up its data so that the world, the private sector, the economists and the researchers can look at what does work and what does not work.

“The government, until just very recently, never did this. We would measure success on anything the government does by effort, by how much money are we spending, by how many programs are we creating. We did not look at outcomes and did not look at results. The Evidence Act is turning government to do that and what you invariably find out when you’re measuring yourself on Key Performance Indicators and results like the private sector always has done, you will then get us towards this “results-oriented governing,” which requires the integration of the private sector so we get the best practices.

“We’re kind of on the cusp of a new wing of social science with Evidence-Based Policymaking. We are skating to where the puck is going — I’m a Wisconsin guy so we talk in hockey analogies – but skate to where the puck is going to be, which is: What does work? What are the best practices? Forget about the old-school, government and press release effort [to fighting poverty]. Let’s make sure we are results and outcome based, and I think using the best technology, the best ideas, and testing them via randomized controlled trials and pilot projects can get us to that answer.”

Breaking up the monopoly on poverty-fighting by utilizing RCTs, pilot projects & private-sector innovation:

“[People] used to throw this idea out there which is: The War on Poverty is the government’s responsibility. It’s not yours, just pay your taxes and they will handle it. That didn’t work.

“My point is: Why don’t we decentralize this and make it competitive? Let’s have the private sector and the not-for-profit sector participate with all their sophisticated technology and help us solve these problems and you can do that in government.

“The point is, if you bring private sector know-how to help us deliver government goals like fighting poverty and delivering government benefits, we can save money and get to the goal faster, but it does require a big political leap of faith for some people who do not think these things should be inherently non-governmental. We still have that problem, so the answer, I think, is let’s try some randomized controlled trials in discrete ways. Let’s do some regulatory sandbox type of ideas to see if [a solution] does work and if this can be proven and built out….

“Let’s start with some tests. You can do them in a state. You can do it in a county. You can do a randomized control trial. You can do a pilot project. Let’s do that, build it out, and take it from there.”

Utilizing Evidence-Based policymaking strategies & private sector know-how:

“The good thing that BPC and other institutes do is they have all this evidence and data. We are actually in the world doing evidence-based policymaking and if we know what works and what doesn’t work, we can get past the ugly politics and get to just executing these proven things that we all now have consensus on.

“You have to accept that the private sector is going to have a big role in this. Why? Because the private sector knows how to do this. They have technology; they’re digitizing; they’re innovating constantly so let’s put that to work and put that intellectual capital toward delivering these government services. Some people are still stuck on this 20^th century notion that this is all government and the government is supposed to solve poverty and supposed to deliver health care. It hasn’t. It doesn’t do it well. So, in this 21^st century world that we live in with technology and how ubiquitous it is in our lives, let’s use the people who know how to do it to help deliver on these goals.”

Impact of America’s broader fiscal challenges on future economic growth:

“We have tremendous challenges. Our dollar as the world’s reserve currency is under duress even though we are probably the healthiest looking horse in the glue factory. We are in serious trouble of losing that privilege because our debt is out of control. We’ve discussed this here quite a bit, but we don’t have the kind of economic growth we need.

“Economic growth does not solve every one of our problems, but you can’t solve any of our problems without economic growth.

“The good thing is we know the dials that we can turn to get [faster economic growth]. A lot of it is about getting people in the workforce, getting people equipped and so if we can focus ourselves on upward mobility and the skills and tools that they need to live their best lives in a society focused on upward mobility, we can get that bogey.“And so, to me, it is about the things I described. It is about the digitization and the rebuilding of our safety net so that it works in the 21^st century to get people working. It is getting the incentives right. It is getting not only our tax policy right but then getting our debt under control. You have to reform entitlements if you’re going to stop this debt crisis and if you’re going to be able to get these programs working the way they’re supposed to in the 21^st century.”