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On the Armstrong Williams Show, Ryan discusses moral relativism & the policy issues animating 2024

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this Spring, Paul Ryan was the featured guest on The Armstrong Wiliams Showwhere he discussed the challenges of moral relativism and polarization in a digitized world and the major domestic and international issues dominating American politics.

The wide-ranging interview, accessible here via The National Desk , featured Ryan talking extensively about the challenges posed by our $34 trillion national debt and the economic conditions heading into the 2024 election. Excerpts of Ryan’s responses, edited lightly for clarity, follow.

The growing problem of moral relativism

“I think the biggest problem is this sort of rise of moral relativism. This notion that there are no fixed truths… And one of the offsprings of moral relativism, which is now ubiquitous in society, is identity politics and this is what concerns me about what our political system these days is.

The political class sees identity politics as the fastest, most sure way to win elections, but it’s at the expense of the long-term cohesion of our country. Identity politics, by definition, means we must divide. We must lump people into categories and into groups so that my group is bigger than their group so I can win this next election. And so that, to me, is a real cultural problem we have in society.

We can fix a lot of this by fixing some of our bigger policy problems. We can reduce the anxiety that gives rise to identity politics if you don’t have a debt crisis, if you have a secure the border, if you make our communities safer by cracking down on crime, and by doing the things we need to do to fix these problems. But at the end of the day, if we as a free, self-determining society – one that is embracing diversity of views and thoughts — can’t agree on just objective facts, which we’re being challenged to do these days because of all this digital moral relativism, that’s going to make it really hard for a free society to exist and this is what the tyrants are betting on.

They’re betting that America and that democracy will relativize itself into self-immolation. Now, I think they’re wrong and I think we will get it back because that’s what we do: We regenerate as a country. We regenerate as a free people because of our free enterprise system and the innovation that comes with it. I think we will have better technology and better successes and stronger economic growth than the tyrants who are betting they can run their countries better than we can run ours collectively together…. I think we’ll get there, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Who do you support in 2024?

“You know the answer to this question. I didn’t support [former President] Trump the last time. I wrote-in a Republican.

The problem for me is I’m in the camp with 70% of Americans who want neither of these people as our presidential choices. I don’t support Biden because of policy, and I don’t support Trump because of character.

I’m not a party leader anymore. When you’re a party leader, you also represent the members of your caucus. You help them in their political futures and careers, and you have to think differently and act differently as a party leader because you operate on a consensus. I’m out of government. This is not a new position for me. It’s one I’ve had since 2020.”

The new meaning of R.I.N.O.

“The definition of RINO is different than what it used to be. No one called me a RINO when RINO meant a moderate Republican because I’m a conservative Republican. Ten years ago, RINO meant if you are a liberal or a moderate Republican, you were a RINO, a Republican in Name Only.

Today, it means one thing and one thing only: Do you pledge fealty to Donald Trump or not? If you pledge fealty to Donald Trump, you’re a Republican in good standing. If you don’t, you’re a RINO and so, I’m proud to have that label if that’s what it means these days. It doesn’t bother me in the least.”

Standing with Ukraine matters

“I am a passionate believer that we need to pass this Ukraine supplemental. It’s a fraction of our defense budget, like 3%, and what are we getting?

We’re helping confront one of our greatest adversaries in Russia. We are not putting a single boot on the ground and this supplemental will help us rebuild our defense industrial base, which definitely needs to be rebuilt for our own sake and survival, while we defend democracy.

And don’t forget, there’s a China angle here as well. If Xi Jinping sees us cutting and running and losing our nerve to defend democracies and defend Ukraine, he’s going to take a run at Taiwan. If he thinks he can outlast us or that we will politically polarize ourselves to the point where we are not defending democracy or defending Ukraine, then he’s going to be more tempted to make moves that are against our interests.

More to the point, back to Putin, if we do not supply Ukraine with the weapons that they need to defend themselves and to defend their democracy, what is to stop Putin from going into some other countries?…

So, we should pass this. I know it’s controversial, but it really shouldn’t be because if we don’t support Ukraine and Ukraine implodes, Putin is going to take more territory. He is not going to stop at Donbas. He’s not going to stop at Crimea. He’s going to go into other countries and then we have a serious problem on our hands.

At the same time, if we support Ukraine, we show that democracy can stand the test of time and that democracies support themselves through thick and thin. Xi will think twice, we will protect NATO, we will rebuild our defense industrial base, and we will keep our troops at home – that’s what supporting Ukraine does today.”

Immigration reform and the reality of the filibuster:

“Every Republican wants to secure our border and I would argue there are some Democrats who want to secure our border, yet you can’t get these bills passed… I was a party to 3 attempts at immigration reform and every single one of them started with first securing the border. The challenge with this issue is it’s not a fiscal piece of legislation so you can’t use reconciliation, so it’s subject to a filibuster, which means it must get 60 votes.

Another way of saying it is it has to be bipartisan because it’s almost never that one party has the House, the Senate, the White House, and 60 votes in the Senate. It almost never happens. It happened once for the first year and a half of Obama’s presidency, and so that means you must make it bipartisan. Every one of these attempts at immigration reform, which starts with border security, falls down for various reasons because both parties can’t agree on the details of the legislation.

So, to secure our border, to do it legislatively, you have to pass a bill out of the House. The House Republicans did that with H.R. 2. It secures the border. The Senate has a filibuster, and it can’t pass a bill that does this.

If we do two issues in the next handful of years, we’re going to have a great century in America: Fix our immigration laws, which starts with securing our border, and get our debt under control by reforming our entitlement programs. We have yet to get the political consensus between both houses of Congress and the White House to get those things done and those are haunting us.  Those issues are big problems that have got to get solved and that have haunted us for decades.”

At Mackinac Policy Conference, Ryan discusses the state of politics & public policy

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By: AIF Staff

Mackinac Island, MI – Earlier this week, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was a keynote speaker at the 2024 Mackinac Policy Conference, hosted by the Detroit Regional Chamber of Commerce. In a fireside chat moderated by former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr. and attended by Michigan’s business, community, philanthropic, and elected leaders, Ryan touched on the biggest challenges facing America in the 21st century.

Bemoaning increased partisanship, expressing concerns about the direction of the country, and acknowledging short and long-term economic issues like the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and persistently high interest rates, Ryan outlined solutions to get our nation back on track.

Drawing on experience gleaned during two decades in elected office, Ryan shared a pragmatic and optimistic message, in keeping with the Conference’s theme of “Bridging the Future Together.”

Two recaps of Ryan’s conversation are accessible here:  

Excerpts of Ryan’s comments, edited lightly for clarity, follow.

Working with poverty-fighting organizations on evidence-based solutions

“I teach Economics at Notre Dame and I’m on the Board of their Poverty Lab, which is called “LEO”, the Laboratory of Economic Opportunity. And what my foundation does is we go find what we think are really interesting poverty programs, then we seed fund them so that they can [conduct] a randomized control trial [with] Notre Dame economists who track and measure that poverty program over the length of 1-3 years, run a trial on it, and see if it proves to be really successful.

We’re building mechanisms to try and scale and replicate those poverty [fighting] successes across the country and NPower is one that we’re working with. It is here in Detroit and there are NPowers all around the country where they are getting disaffected youth… and underprivileged kids into tech jobs and providing them with the curriculum they need to become good tech workers in this tech-centered economy. There are a lot of interesting poverty programs out there like this….

The last law I wrote when I was in Congress, and Patty Murray (D-WA) was my partner on it, was called the Evidence Act. It allows all the federal data on poverty programs to be released to researchers so that we can measure the effects of our poverty policy….

The question is: Can we get at the root causes of poverty, to break its cycle, to really reignite upward mobility in America, to get people fundamentally and fully out of poverty?

There is so much now that we can learn through economics, through data, and through research practices, and we think there’s a real unlocking moment in front of us. So, I’m really confident we can have a step function increase in getting at poverty because if we apply our resources to practices and procedures that we know work and scale and replicate those, I think we can make a huge difference.

It involves the public sector and nonprofit sector and private sector so what we’re trying to do with our poverty lab at Notre Dame and with our foundation is find those bright lights that are out there and making a huge difference. We want to find out what their secret sauce, determine is it repeatable and if so, replicate it.”

Balancing free speech rights on college campuses

“I think Ben Sasse probably got it right at the University of Florida. He’s the President of the University of Florida. Ben’s a good friend of ours. He basically said: Free speech, we respect, but if you are infringing on other people’s rights, you’re going to be held accountable. If you’re going to take away space from other people to freely assemble and prevent other people from going to class or stop people going to the library, you’re going to be removed and you’re going to face the consequences of the law. There are places on the campus to practice free speech and you can do it all you want, but as soon as you start infringing upon other people’s rights, that’s when you’re breaking a law and that’s when you’re going to be held accountable.”

Combatting misinformation in Congress and in business

“If you’re a leader these days, you have got to design new mechanisms and tactics to try and suss all of [this misinformation] out so that you can call balls and strikes and so that when political decisions are potentially being made on misinformation, you have a good BS detector….

The foreign policy stuff is actually easier [when it comes to misinformation] because you can bring members into a SCIF, where we have these secure facilities for clandestine briefings. You can get briefings from the Intelligence Community, and they will tell you what actually happened and what didn’t happen. If somebody’s a total conspiracy theorist, they just won’t believe them, and we’ve got people like that but that’s what they’re going to do. You can, on foreign policy at least, get people to attend real, classified briefings to give them real information to help them make better-informed decisions. You don’t have that domestic policy. You’ve got constituents and people in their information cul-de-sacs being fed an algorithm which further feeds your biases and reinforces your beliefs and places you in your sedentary position against others. That’s a real challenge for a 21st century democracy.

I think the key thing, as a leader, is to make sure that you call it all out. You do everything you can when you see this stuff developing to find out what the truth and the facts are and then call it out and you just have to design a specific tactic to do this…. When you see some weird conspiracy theory popping up in your ranks, just know it’s going to potentially bleed into legislation and form positions, so you better get it in its infancy. If you let these things fester and go on because you’re too afraid of taking people on, you’re going to have a serious problem on your hands.”

One positive thing that President Biden has done

“He built NATO up. He formed a very good alliance to help Ukraine. I can nickel and dime the specifics of his Ukraine policy – I think he was too little, too late on a lot of things like F-16s and ATACMS, but I think he did a good job of stitching NATO back together and building up our allies to confront Russia.”

The best policy of the Trump Administration

“His fiscal policy on regulations and taxes. His fiscal policy on the tax side. Judges, too. I think he put up some pretty good judges.”

Rising stars in American politics & the legislative ‘brain drain’

“In terms of soberness and the politics of working across the aisle to solve serious problems in our states, I would say Glenn Youngkin. He’s Reagan-esque in that he intentionally ran an inclusive campaign, not one based on identity politics – which is wrong and both parties are playing it these days. [Glenn Youngkin] ignored identity politics and won in a blue state as a problem-solving, can-do kind of leader…. And he’s crushing it.

I don’t know your Governor [Gretchen Whitmer] well, but she seems to be pretty popular and is definitely a star in your party.

On my side, I think there are some young people in Congress that are pretty impressive. These are names you wouldn’t likely know: Laurel Lee, Randy Feenstra, Bryan Steil, though one of our best guys just left, Mike Gallagher.

What I’m worried about in Congress is the great policymakers are looking at the place and saying: “I’m going to do something else with my life. I can be more productive, so I’m not staying here.”

A lot of the young, bright, up-and-coming, workhorse legislators are leaving because Congress is giving them a bad taste in their mouths. I’m personally, as a fan of the institution, quite worried about who’s leaving and who’s coming to replace them in Congress.”

The next steps in the Israel-Palestine conflict and in Rafah

 “Biden, obviously, is under tremendous political pressure from the progressive base of his party. I think he’s made some huge mistakes lately on this. I think [Biden] should have gone faster to get this thing done, instead of nickel and diming [Israel]….

This could have been over with sooner and the last thing we should do, as a country, is incentivize terrorist groups to use civilians as human shields. We don’t want to reward that.

Obviously, I have a pro-Israel slant here, because I think it’s extremely important that we not reward terrorists for taking civilian hostages and using them as human shields because if we reward that behavior, we’re going to get more of that behavior.

I know that Michigan is seen as a state where this [Israel-Palestinian conflict] is a big issue. It’s a big issue everywhere. I think this will be done by the time the election rolls around. I think Bibi Netanyahu knows he’s got this kind of a timeline on his hands. I think he’s getting a lot of pressure from the Biden [Administration] to get this thing done. It’s a doable operation. It’s a finite piece of land. I think they’ll get it done by the election.”

On the Federal Reserve’s continued independence & Powell’s performance

“We always told [Fed. Reserve Chair Jay Powell] that we have your back. Your independence is sacrosanct to the dollar and to our monetary policy. You have to change the Humphrey-Hawkins law to change and compromise the independence of the Federal Reserve.

Now, the Federal Reserve can make their own mistakes to compromise their independence but that’s on them. For a president to be able to effectuate Federal Reserve policy, the Humphrey-Hawkins act has to pass [Congress]. You can’t use reconciliation for that. It takes 60 votes. In other words, it ain’t going to happen.

The law governing the Federal Reserve is not going to change. You are not going to have the kind of votes you would need in Congress. [Former President Trump] might jawbone them, and he might complain, but that’s about all he can do….

[Powell] got us through COVID really effectively. He set up a lot of facilities that were really important to prevent a deflationary spiral but then he was late on inflation… Jay was late. You could identify a handful of reasons why he was late [on inflation], but he was late, and I wish he would have talked more about…fiscal policy….  The last Biden stimulus, meaning the final Covid bill, was unnecessary. We were already coming out of COVID and there was a political moment where [the Biden Administration] shoved a lot of spending out the door. Even Keynesian economists on the left, like Larry Summers and Jason Furman, were telling us… this is going to create inflation. Jay knew it was going to create inflation. He was told and he did it anyway.”

On Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week, Ryan talks trade policy, monetary policy, & fiscal policy

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By: AIF Staff

Los Angeles, CA – Talking with David Westin on Bloomberg’s Wall Street Week from the 2024 Milken Institute’s Global Conference, former House Speaker Paul Ryan says the next President could very well face a debt crisis. He says neither President Joe Biden or Donald Trump are doing enough when it comes to getting new trade agreements signed and neither are taking our debt seriously enough.

Video of Ryan’s conversation on Bloomberg TV’s Wall Street Week and excerpts from the interview follow.

The 3 biggest economic policy challenges facing policymakers in 2024-2025

“Number one would be tax policy. What’s the tax code going to look like? What’s tax policy looking like in the future? Number two, I would say tariffs. Number three, I think it’s reasonable to assume the next president is quite possibly going to face a debt crisis. You don’t know when that is or exactly what form that takes place, but a lot of fiscal policies are on the line – tax policy, trade policy, debt policy, and therefore, interest rates.”

The impact of the 2024 election on the future of the US tax code

“It’s more likely than not we are going to have divided government. I feel good as a Republican that we’re going to take the Senate just because the map is so good for us.

The House is basically a tied House right now, so that’s kind of a coin toss which depends on who’s going to win the presidency. My guess is it’s most reasonable to assume divided government because Biden or Trump won’t run the table.

And the law that I worked on quite a bit, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a lot of it expires in 2025 -not the corporate side, not the corporate rate, not the territorial system, but the individual side. If Republicans are in more control [of government], that means we extend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and if Democrats are more in control, they will do everything they can to let most of it expire.

If [Democrats] get their way and if they have all of Congress, [Biden] is actually proposing about a 44.6% capital gains tax, which if you add state taxes on top of that you’re at 50% — that’s economic nihilism…

If it’s divided government like I think it’s going to be, we will probably split the difference where maybe the top rate goes up, [the rest of the] individual rates stay the same, hopefully we get a little expensing back in place and Section 199A, which was really important for those medium and small-sized businesses, hopefully that gets extended.”

Both Trump & Biden ‘standing still’ on trade

“I don’t know who’s going to be the president, but Trump’s promising a 10% tariff across the board, which is a giant tax increase on American consumers.

Everybody is going to fight China. A Biden presidency is going to fight China. A Trump presidency is going to fight China. The question is, what about the other countries?

The frustration for me is neither of these two presidents want to do trade agreements. We should have done TPP (the Transpacific Partnership) in my opinion. It’s a very good China policy but neither Trump nor Biden are proposing any trade agreements. Trump is proposing across the board tariffs. Biden is not proposing that, but he’s also not proposing to get new agreements and to get new markets for our products and our goods and services.

And if you’re standing still on trade, you’re falling behind because all the other countries are going around the world getting their own preferential multilateral and bilateral trade agreements, leaving us on the outside looking in. So, you can’t just stand still on trade. But unfortunately, that’s what we’re doing and that’s what, frankly, both these guys are proposing to do.”

Lacking Presidential leadership on the debt & the safety net

“I’m a fan of neither of the guys who are running for president because both of them are demagoguing the issue. In their primaries, they campaigned against people who propose solutions. They’re demagoguing entitlement reforms. They’re basically saying they’re not going to do anything and doing nothing, by the way, makes Medicare go insolvent, makes Social Security go insolvent, and hurts today’s current seniors.

Fixing this problem shores up the finances for these programs so that current seniors can get the promises that are due to them and then solves it for the next generation, so we don’t have a debt crisis.”

Avoiding a debt crisis & acting like the world’s reserve currency

“We’re already on track to spend more in interest payments than we are for national defense and regrettably, none of these guys who are running for president are proposing to do anything about it.

There are good people in Congress that are proposing solutions. There’s bipartisan support for a Fiscal Commission but you have neither Trump nor Biden saying they’re going to do anything about it. So, I think the next president has a reasonable chance of having a debt crisis on their watch…

If the world concludes that America is not going to get its fiscal house in order, that we’re going to get these entitlements under control, then they’re going to conclude that we are going to monetize our debt and there goes dollar dominance. That’s an exorbitant privilege which benefits us greatly.

We’re not acting like a world’s reserve currency. We should be and this, for me, is the biggest fiscal challenge the next president is going to have to confront. I wish I could say somebody has a plan for this but neither of them do. That’s what’s so frustrating for me.”

Stablecoin legislation could help address our fiscal challenges

“I think stablecoin legislation would be a good step in the right direction. It could be helpful, and it could be done this year, but I don’t see anything other than that on the horizon.

Stablecoins are digital and private sector dollar-backed currencies. It’s not cryptocurrency because it’s tethered to the U.S. dollar. They have to have dollar-backed assets. They have to have treasuries or cash to back them. There’s not a law that governs [stablecoins] right now, so they aren’t really deployed…

Reps. Patrick McHenry and Maxine Waters are working to put a deal together and Senator Chuck Schumer is in talks with them, so I think there’s a reasonable chance they could get a deal on stablecoin legislation and that means you have a legal framework to get stablecoins deployed.

[If you have a law governing them] you would go from a couple of hundred billion dollars of stablecoins to maybe trillions. Right now, stablecoins are like the 16th largest buyer of bonds, bills and notes among all sovereigns.

If you actually regulate stablecoins and have them deployed, that does two things: It gets the U.S. dollar more deeply ingrained in the oncoming digitization of currencies, and that’s a good thing. And it creates new consumer demand for our bonds because they have to have those to back up the stablecoins. So, [it would mean] more demand for treasuries and more use of a digital dollar throughout the system, which would help better entrench the dollar. It’s a win-win situation for America.

I think it’s a no brainer. I’m hopeful. I’m cautiously optimistic Congress might do that this year. There are good talks happening and that’s one thing you could do on the margins to improve demand for our bonds and [strengthen the] dollar.”