American Idea Foundation

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Lessons from the Front-Lines: Touring Opportunity Zones & Nurse-Family Partnerships in Charleston, SC

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By: AIF Staff

In late June, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was joined by Senator Tim Scott and Representatives Ralph Norman and Joe Wilson of South Carolina on a visit to the Charleston Digital Corridor, a 92,000 sq. foot workspace and incubator for local businesses based in the center of a burgeoning Opportunity Zone.

The South Carolina site visits, coordinated by the American Idea Foundation, gave current and former legislators a chance to talk with employers and community-leaders about the progress being made in one of the state’s Opportunity Zones.

Created as part of the Tax Cuts & Jobs Act of 2017, Opportunity Zones are a poverty-fighting tool that provides tax incentives for long-term investments in specific Census tracts. Speaker Ryan and Senator Scott have both been long-time advocates of the policy which aims to revitalize economically-distressed areas through capital incentives. Ryan and the South Carolina legislators talked with some of the 37 job-creators headquartered in the Charleston Tech Center about how Opportunity Zones have spurred business growth in a part of the state where poverty has been persistent.

As Speaker Ryan said during the visit: “The big benefit of Senator Scott‘s [Opportunity Zone] legislation is it has brought tens of billions of dollars of capital into the poorest communities of America. That’s money that would’ve never come otherwise. It’s also brought in the private sector and the public sector to focus on getting people out of poverty.”

Senator Scott added: “This has to be a win-win. A win for investors, a win for citizens, and a win for America and so far, so good.” 

While in South Carolina, Speaker Ryan also had the opportunity to meet with the leaders of the McLeod Health Clarendon’s Nurse-Family Partnership, which empowers first-time mothers by pairing them with trained nurses who provide health care and other social services from their pregnancy to their child’s 2nd birthday.  

Ryan had a moving conversation with program administrators and new mothers who detailed the relationships they formed with medical professionals and discussed how the wrap-around services helped their children and families.

As the local paper, The Sumter Item, reported:

 “Since former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has left Washington, he founded the American Idea Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes poverty-fighting programs and policy to help Americans achieve their idea of the American Dream.

“To further those efforts, he visited McLeod Health Clarendon on Friday to learn about the Manning hospital’s Nurse Family Partnership program.

“The program connects expectant, first-time mothers with a nurse, who helps guide them through the physical, financial and emotional journeys that come with pregnancy and motherhood…. The program has been proven to improve health, economic and parental outcomes, and Paul Ryan held roundtable discussions with hospital leaders, nurses and mothers to learn more.”

The Item went on to cover the visit and its importance, saying in part:

“Nurses in a pregnancy and motherhood program at the county’s only hospital know their work goes beyond health care, breaking barriers between provider and patient, outsider and friend. Now, their stories have reached the ears of who was once one of Congress’ top leaders.

“Children played in the next room last week as McLeod Health Clarendon’s private dining room, which had just the day before hosted a reception marking the hospital’s 70th anniversary, hosted a roundtable discussion about the Nurse-Family Partnership program. Attending were mothers, nurses, hospital executives and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

***

“Four mothers took turns telling their story, their nurses by their side, to Ryan. He heard about the mother who was sick her entire pregnancy and had her texts answered late at night. He heard about the nurse who ensured her mothers were signed up for COVID-19 relief payments. And the nurse who started educating a mother’s young sister on how to care for a newborn when COVID-19 put the mom on a ventilator.

“What Ryan learned from the mothers, nurses and program and hospital leaders was why this program works.

“It’s more than health care,” he said.

***

“If Ryan was looking for evidence-based solutions, he came to the right place when he visited the rural hospital in Manning. As Frank Daidone, CEO of the national NFP, put it, McLeod’s program is the most efficiently run and best performing NFP in the country.”

Since 2014, the Nurse-Family Partnership at McLeod Health has served more than 1,000 families in South Carolina and made over 33,000 home visits. It is an example of the impact that the Nurse-Family Partnership program can have in communities around the country. The program is evidence-based, has been expanded under both Republican and Democratic Administrations, and as Speaker Ryan observed on his visit, it is changing lives on a daily basis.

These site visits are the first of many to be conducted by the American Idea Foundation and are premised on the belief that impactful public policies can be shaped by identifying front-line organizations tackling tough issues, validating their efforts through evidence, and showing lawmakers first-hand how they are expanding opportunities to those in need. 

Ryan discusses stress tests on American democracy, Biden’s opening months, and conservative proposals to promote work and family formation

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – In May, former Speaker of the House and American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan was a featured speaker at a virtual event hosted by Yale University’s William F. Buckley program. During the hour-long conversation with Yale University students and alumni, Ryan shared his opinion on President Biden’s first 100 days in office and how legislators can expand economic opportunities through pro-growth policies.

To watch Speaker Ryan’s full remarks, click here, or check out some notable excerpts (edited lightly for clarity) below.

Passing internal and external stress tests of our democracy

“We are tearing each other apart internally with polarization, that’s how democracy is being stress-tested from within, and we have existential challenges from near-peer or peer competition from the likes of China and Russia. We’re getting hit from both sides as a democracy.

“We have to prove that our democracy, our self-governing experiment can outperform these ubiquitous tyrannies like China in the 21st century. There are serious challenges that we have no choice but to overcome because this great experiment of self-government could be realistically displaced by the end of the century by the likes of China, who aim to prove that they’re better, stronger, and nimbler. I don’t think that’s going to happen but that’s the narrative that China would like the world to buy into. I believe we’re going to win this thing, but the faster we get families intact, get people out of poverty, get economic growth going and keep innovation going in this country, then we’re going to overcome these real challenges of democracy. Not tearing ourselves apart from within is the first step.”

Expanding economic opportunities in America’s heartland

“We have a lot of Opportunity Zones in Wisconsin and in the Rust Belt.  There are about 9,000 in America, many of which are in the Rust Belt. [Opportunity Zones] mean you have an incentive to take an investment and put the capital into these dilapidated, poor areas. You keep your investment there for at least 10 years and you don’t pay a capital gains tax on it, so it’s an enormous economic incentive for both rural and inner-city America to receive these kinds of investments. I think that it’s one way in which government can really revitalize certain areas. In the First District [of Wisconsin], I know all the spots that have Opportunity Zones. It’s exactly where you drive by whether you’re in Racine, Kenosha, or Janesville and it is areas that are in dire need of economic development, good jobs, and good investments. There is a tool now [in Opportunity Zones] to do that and we’re just starting to see the fruits of that labor so I think that’s an area where the government could do a lot.

“Another area is skills training and education, getting skills to the person who is from South and Central Wisconsin. We need to do a better job of getting people the skills they need to get good jobs and that means making two-year schooling and associates degrees easier to achieve…. I think there are a lot of techniques we can employ to make sure that people actually get the degree and are not just stuck with debt, but they can also get a good job afterwards… This is how you get innovation into the parts of the country that have not seen it for a long time. If you want Silicon Valley in the Midwest, that’s how you do it.”

A conservative reform debate: Promote work or family formation

“There’s a big debate between conservatives: Should we focus on family formation or should we focus on work?

“I spent my early days on welfare reform when we did it back in the mid-1990 and then I worked on renewing welfare reforms throughout my career and our emphasis was on promoting work. We believed that by promoting work, you’re actually helping families the most. My close friend Mitt Romney has a Child Support Allowance which is more focused on family formation incentives, and there is a debate about this right now in the conservative movement.

“I think, if you have to pick among the two, you could influence one’s work more through government policy than you can influence family formation. A tax credit is going to matter more in terms of moving a person from welfare to work than it is going to move a person to have more children. So, I think you’re going to have more positive policy effects on work-focused policies than on family formation policies.

“At the same time, you don’t want to disincentivize [family formation]. You don’t want to have a marriage penalty and you don’t want to disincentivize child formation. I believe you can build on the existing policies and I would not necessarily erect new policies. I would refine the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit to work better at promoting these laudable goals of keeping families intact, helping families pull themselves up by getting people to work and by getting parents to work. So, I really do think in the debate among conservative reformers, the emphasis on work is really important.

“Right now, you’ve got Biden-economics that is basically attempting to pay people not to work which is the worst of all worlds because people’s skills will atrophy, the economy will have labor shortages, small businesses will go under and as a result, that will lower economic growth and that will lower job creation and that will lower wages.

“I think the fight that we need to have right now is to focus on getting people to work and getting people skills so they can have great jobs. We should focus on upward mobility and that, in my mind’s eye and in this debate that is occurring within conservatism, is where the focus ought to be versus solely focusing on family formation. The point being, there is a good, rich debate in the conservative movement about how best to keep intact families, how best to grow wages and build the escalator of upward mobility and keep ourselves safe and keep ourselves free.”

Biden’s first 100 days & a misalignment with center-right voters

“I would argue that the person who made Joe Biden the President is a unique voter and it’s a voter that you can fairly well extrapolate from states like Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia or Pennsylvania. It is the voter in the suburban, Congressional district that typically votes for Republicans. The suburban, college-educated, typically white-collar voter was the margin of difference in those key battleground states that gave Joe Biden the presidency and he did legitimately win the presidency. This [type of] voter voted for Joe Biden for two reasons.

“Number one, they didn’t like Donald Trump. They didn’t like Donald Trump’s personality. They didn’t like him on Twitter. They more or less liked the policies but not the man. Number two, they liked the person in Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a nice person. They thought Joe Biden was going to be a centrist who was bringing people together, a consensus-builder. And so, they voted for that.

“My argument in this first 100 days — and look, the reason I think these suburban voters are really more center to center-right is because down ballot they voted for Republicans for the Senate and they voted for the Republican for Congress, but not for President – is the voter that basically made Joe Biden the President, that gave him the Electoral College, that voter is not getting what they voted for. For one reason or another, President Biden has decidedly focused on unifying the Democratic Party and not unifying the country. He is not bringing the country to the center, which is what I think that voter was hoping for and thinking they were going to get in a Biden presidency.”

Missed opportunities for bipartisan consensus

“The first 100 days was determined by two occasions in which President Biden had a glorious opportunity to reach across the aisle, reach consensus, and be a common-ground, consensus-making President.

“Number one: COVID-19 [legislation] where 10 U.S. Senators from the Republican ranks offered Joe Biden a deal, a cooperative agreement, a joint exercise, and that COVID relief package would have been more than sufficient for addressing the needs for COVID and the economy…. I think President Biden had a chance of getting a real good bipartisan win, which would have been good for the country, but he chose not to do that and went with the progressives.

“Number two: Infrastructure. He rolled out his infrastructure bill which is again, a massive blowout of spending. The most generous reading of the bill is about 1/3rd of it is infrastructure and 2/3rds of it is not even infrastructure spending, [coupled] with what we would consider horrendous tax policies, low-growth tax policy which would reignite inversions where corporations move overseas and where we would lose capital and wages would actually be depressed as a result of this. Again, a group of Republicans in the House and the Senate went to the Administration and said: “We want to work with you on infrastructure….” And again, they’ve walked away from this, and tried to go on another reconciliation route where it’s just one party….

“In the first 100 days, I think what the President has done is outsourced the policymaking, the politicking, and the policy design to the progressive wing of the Democratic party, which is the dominant, loud wing of the party.”

Self-determination and promoting opportunity are the American way

“I think the best tool for fighting poverty is free enterprise. Free enterprise applied to the problem of poverty in not only people, but also policies and ideas is a wonderful way in which we can actually break the cycle of poverty, get at the root causes of poverty, and reignite this beautiful notion of upward mobility.

“The idea of a government built upon equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome; a government based on natural rights and natural law where we have a pluralistic society where we are free to pursue our dreams and where the condition of our birth doesn’t determine the outcome of our life, that’s the kind of country I enjoy living in. That’s the kind of country I want to continue living in. That’s the kind of country I think the center-right movement has got to improve its game to be able to deliver and to offer the kinds of services and government that I would argue a center-right country would like to have.”

On “The Strategerist” Podcast, Ryan talks about leadership, finding common ground, and reflects on his time as Speaker of the House

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this Spring, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was featured on the President George W. Bush Center’s The Strategerist podcast. During the wide-ranging conversation, Ryan reflected on President Bush’s time in office, shared his advice for the next generation of American leaders, and offered perspectives on his time in Congress.

Ryan also touched on the work being done by the American Idea Foundation to promote evidence-based public policies that expand economic opportunities and alleviate poverty. On the podcast, whose name comes from a 2000 Saturday Night Live skit featuring Will Ferrell, Ryan elaborated on some of the solutions he outlined in an interview entitled: Keeping the American Dream Alive, which was featured in the most recent edition of the Bush Center’s online magazine, The Catalyst.

Listen to Ryan’s interview on The Strategerist by clicking here.

On the styles of a successful leader:

“I think there are two styles: There’s intimidation or motivation. There’s inspiration or fear. I’m a big believer in motivating through inspiration and motivation and I have always sort of felt this way….

The best way to organize and motivate people is to get people to pre-agree to a course of action, to agree to an agenda, to agree on a policy course that we are going to implement and run on. And then, if people elect us, we will hold ourselves accountable for doing it. That’s what we did [when I was Speaker of the House] and that made it so much easier to run Congress because I could hold people accountable for keeping their own word that they had made to their constituents. So, when it came time to pass tough legislation and to do difficult things in the majority, we were able to point to the fact that you ran on this and we all agreed we were going to support this agenda and now is the time to execute this piece of this agenda.

It’s the best way to organize and motivate people: Make them a participant. Make people participate in the formation of the idea so they have a stake in it. Stakeholder-legislating, common vision, and getting people to agree to a common vision at the beginning of the process so that the process actually occurs when there is demand for the process, that’s basically my whole theory.”

On what being Speaker of the House really entails:
“It’s a combination between school principal, warden, and traffic cop. It’s very much a management job and it has a great policy meaning. I mean, you decide what goes to the [House] floor and how the floor works and what Congress works on. You’re also basically like a conductor of the symphony because you’re sitting at the rostrum telling these committees to get those bills going through those committees and to get these bills going on the track and then you’re building the pipeline to the floor.

You want to choreograph, over a two-year period, all the various legislation that’s going to happen and you have to choreograph every committee and all the members who are moving that process through based on your timeline. Then events and circumstances blow it up and you have to adapt to things like a terrorist attack or some natural disaster and you have to just bob and weave.

And then, you have to go deal with the other governments. And then you deal with the enemy, which is the Senate! The Democrats are adversaries!  That’s the joke we always say, and sorry, it just had to be told because you told me you were Senate staff. We always say that the Democrats are our adversary and the enemy are those guys in the Senate but you just have to deal with the Senate and have to get Congress working to get things done.

You also manage a lot of people. Everybody, basically, has their hopes and their aspirations and their ambitions in Congress whether it be the bill that they want to champion or the amendment they want made in order or the committee they want to get on. It all goes to the Speaker’s office and you have to do all that so you can basically manage people. If somebody does something wrong, you’re the enforcer. I regrettably had to ask four or five people to leave Congress and on a day’s notice. You have to discipline. You basically have to guard the institution and preserve the institution and run the institution and keep the institution’s prerogatives going.

And so, when I took over from John Boehner, we knew each other very well. I didn’t really need a policy brief from John but what he basically said was: “You’ve been a Committee Chair of two committees. You just think about getting your legislation passed and that’s what a Committee Chair thinks like. Now your job is to preserve this institution and most times you want to advance your party’s goals and you want to advance the legislation that your party cares about and you want to keep your majority but at all times, your job is to preserve this institution and you have got to start thinking like that.” It was literally the last thing he said to me as he left the office and then I had to get the office repainted to get the smell of smoke out.”

On serving as Speaker under Democrat and Republican Presidents:

“I think if I went from a conventional Democratic President to a conventional Republican President, it would have been much more similar, but it was just radically different, dramatically different. With President Obama, I ran against the guy in the last election so he felt like I definitely had reasons for not liking his program but we actually had a pretty good relationship. We had mutual respect for one another. We personally liked each other but I pretty much disagreed with him on about 80% of what he was trying to do and we had very big conversations about what those were. We would try to quickly figure out what is it that we could do and [identify] what we agree on and then we did those things.

I actually tried to do criminal justice reform with [President Obama] at the end but it was just too tight and trade was the other thing. He just started too late on trade but I really tried to get that through. There are a couple things that we really agreed on and that we worked very well together on. He just started the effort too late on trade and we couldn’t get over the finish line, but there were things that I passed with him like Puerto Rico legislation and the CURES Act, which is the cancer research legislation. And then, when we disagreed, we just sort of fought it out and then negotiated and got agreements like on omnibus appropriations. I got the ban on crude oil exports lifted and I had to give him something to get
that and it was fairly run of the mill adversarial….

With Trump, it was like four times the job because in his particular case, he was short-staffed and under-manned and then the staff that he brought on were so new and so green. He didn’t bring a lot of people who had been around or who had done these things, so we were the most experienced people in
government at the time….

We felt, and I felt, the deep obligation and this is one of the reasons why the day after the election, I felt obligated to do a press conference just showing that the government was still here and it had three branches. People didn’t expect the 2016 election to turn out the way it did, I personally didn’t either but we’re just going to  work it out and we wanted to kind of calm the country down. And so, we sent some staffers over there…. and we tried to get them help right away to get the government up and running. And so, we were much more involved in day-to-day things with the Trump Administration on policy and planning and execution in addition to running the legislature.

We had a pathway to executing our agenda which we called “The Better Way” and I produced this giant Gantt chart that was almost the size of this table. I figured President Trump has been in the construction business and has been building skyscrapers so he knows what a Gantt chart is, which is a workflow chart with the entire agenda that we ran on. And so, we brought it over there at the White House…. and it’s the only time I think I had [President Trump’s] undivided attention for three hours. Knowing now what I know, I’m amazed…

And so, with President Trump, the exciting activity was the ability to get our agenda passed. We passed around 1,172 bills, which is double what we typically pass and half of them made it into law through the Senate… Obviously, the President drove me nuts sometimes with just the things he does, but nevertheless it was a remarkably productive time.”

On how America can positively respond to a globalized economy & why the Biden infrastructure plan would hurt economic competitiveness:

“It’s technology, it’s education, it’s lifelong learning and it’s getting an economy that continues to produce good, high-growth jobs in cutting-edge industries, which we’re working on [in Janesville] and we’re doing in Wisconsin. We have got to stay ahead of it. Globalization is here: It’s bringing like a billion people out of poverty and done right, we can still have the best jobs [in America]. We can still have high school educated people work in manufacturing and get great jobs. And frankly, we were starting to see those policies that were put in place in 2018 and 2019, before the pandemic hit. take hold. I think we had some really good policies put in place. More are needed, but our agenda [under President Trump] was working….

We fixed job training a lot. We consolidated and streamlined job training, giving it back to the states so they could focus on their economic development strategies and allowed states to build those programs out. I think there needs to be another wave of job training reforms. I think there are tech-enabled reforms that can occur and make our economy work much better.

[I think you] shouldn’t pass the Biden infrastructure tax. It’s horrendous and what I mean is that President Biden will take us back to being the worst tax code in the industrialized world for businesses. We were the worst and in 2017, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made us one of the best and this will literally, technically, economically, and statutorily bring us back to the worst and that will just drive more inversions. It will drive businesses overseas and it will slow down wages and productivity. So, I think you need to make sure you don’t do that.

I think there are some things that you need to make permanent in the tax code, like full expensing for plant and equipment that will increase productivity, increase wages, and increase living standards. We were beginning to see that for the Janesville-type person and for the blue-collar industrial worker, they were starting to see true living standard increases, where wages increase faster than inflation. And then we got hit with the pandemic so I think we had a good plan in place and I would go back and accelerate that.”

On the state of the Republican Party:

“The state of the party is good. We had a great election down-ballot in 2020 but we lost the presidency. I mean, we also should’ve won the Georgia [Senate elections]. We didn’t. I think Trump blew that one for us, but we did far better in the Senate than we expected. We did really well in the House, which we didn’t expect. I think we’ll get the House majority in 2022 partly because of history and partly because of Biden’s overreach and the progressive agenda, so I think we’ll get the majority because of that. On paper, we’re strong but philosophically, I am greatly worried. We cannot be a cult of personality or a party built around any personality — let alone Donald Trump, but any personality. We’ve got to be an ideas party and the problem is we’re sort of a reactionary party right now.We’re basically playing cultural war, reactionary politics which is kind of like cotton candy and it gives people the sugar high for the moment. It gives immediate satisfaction but it’s not a coherent vision and agenda. It’s not based on a moral code or a coherent philosophy. Now having said that, there are lots of Republicans who have that coherent philosophy but it’s not what we’re really identified with as a party and we’re just going to have to go through some growing pains to get there.”