In The News

Los Angeles, CA – Earlier this week, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan was a featured panelist at the 2024 Milken Institute’s Global Conference. While there, he spoke with Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi and Akiko Fujita in a wide ranging interview on Yahoo! Finance. Recaps of Ryan’s comments can be found below, and excerpts of his responses follow.

• Article: Former Speaker Paul Ryan on GOP ‘nihilists’ and Trump’s economic plans
• Article: Ryan says he’s not voting for Trump: ‘Character is too important’  

On Mike Johnson, the foreign aid supplemental, and the Motion to Vacate:

“With a tight margin like this, who you have a few nihilists who are not interested in seeing their team succeed but building a brand for themselves, this is the kind of behavior you’re going to get. If Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene does this… she’s not going to succeed because [Democratic House Leader] Hakeem Jeffries, rightfully so for the institution’s sake, said they are going to table this. So, this won’t succeed, but it’s a nihilistic approach that some of these members are taking and it makes the place ungovernable.

But even knowing it was potentially going to cost him his job, Mike Johnson still did the right thing. I’ve always said you can’t be good at these jobs unless you’re willing to lose them. You fight for the institution. You do what you think is right, and that’s exactly what Mike Johnson has done.

He’s new to the job, but he’s scaled the learning curve very fast. I’m very proud of him. He’s a smart and decent man who tried his best to bring his team around, irrespective of the fact that he knew they were going to come after his job and threaten him like they just did his predecessor, he went forward anyway and passed this package. That’s what leadership looks like. It may cost him the job in this next term, but he did it anyway and that, to me, is heartening. Our institutions still work.

We have leaders stepping up and doing the right thing, not every time, but in this case, that’s what happened and shame on people who think they should vacate a speaker for a policy disagreement, for simply doing his job.”

On whom he is voting for in 2024:

“I understand the binary argument. It’s a reasonable argument. I just don’t agree with that argument. Character is just too important to me. It’s a job that requires the kind of character that [Trump] just doesn’t have. Having said that, I really disagree with Biden on policy. I wrote a Republican in last time and I’m going to write-in a Republican this time… I don’t know who yet.”

On the dysfunction in Washington impacting business decisions:

“It adds to the “uncertainty tax.” There’s a lot of uncertainty about who is going to be President. There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the tax code is going to look like after 2025. This creates a lot more of that uncertainty. In this case, it is: Are we supporting our allies? What is the war in Ukraine going to look like? This affects agricultural markets and affects a lot of things with respect to supporting Ukraine and Israel. So, just getting the [foreign aid supplemental] through took 4-5 months and that creates a lot of uncertainty and so, [the dysfunction] just adds to the uncertainty tax.”

On a lack of Presidential leadership on the debt:

“Trump and Biden are both promising that they are not going to do anything about this. Not only are they promising not to do anything about this, but they are also demagoguing those who are offering solutions. They are running against these people, trying to scare seniors by going after people who are proposing these reforms.

You have to reform these entitlement programs to prevent their insolvency and to prevent their bankruptcy. Medicare and Social Security go bankrupt within a decade and that hurts current seniors. Proposing to do nothing about that, like Biden and Trump are doing, hurts those seniors. And so, leaders in Congress, it’s bipartisan with both Democrats and Republicans saying we have to do something about this, but the two guys running for President are demagoguing on this. That to me is very frustrating. It’s kind of scary, because we are walking ourselves into a very predictable debt crisis and that’s bad for everybody. Everybody gets hurt under a debt crisis. The economy suffers, seniors suffer, people living on the safety net suffer so the smart thing to do, knowing bankruptcy is coming, is get over this.

Let’s pass reforms that are phased in, which don’t affect current seniors, and which stop bankruptcy from ever happening. This is what a serious government would do. This is what serious politicians would do, but that’s not we have right now.”

On the notion America can tax its way out of a debt crisis:

“You can’t tax your way out of this problem. The numbers are just so big. You can’t cut the Pentagon and you can’t raise a bunch of taxes and come close to solving this problem. The drivers of the debt are these entitlement programs, namely Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

Now, the good news about all of this is: 1) it’s totally within our control as a country to solve these problems; 2) you can solve these problems without affecting current seniors; and 3) we have learned a lot since we started these programs in the 1930’s, the 1960’s, and the 20^th century on how to deliver these benefits. We have got to modernize these programs so the next generation can still have a good safety net and can still have health and retirement security, but you have to reform these programs on a go-forward basis and that can be done.

Raising taxes doesn’t even come close to solving the problem. Can you get a higher revenue line without doing damage to the economy? Yes, I think you can but that’s more of a tax reform question, but if you do what Biden is proposing which is to have effectively a 50% capital gains tax, that’s going to hurt small businesses with a giant tax increase. That’s going to kill economic growth.  

Here’s the last thing I’ll say: You can’t solve this without a growing economy so if you’re going to play with taxes, you have to be careful and do it in a way that keeps the economy growing. You can’t take your eye off the ball which is spending and it’s the way these programs are designed. You can fix them on a go-forward basis without affecting current seniors. If you start soon, you can dodge a debt crisis.

It’s the most predictable economic crisis we will have ever had in this country and frankly, we’re not doing anything about it. That is really disappointing.

On the extension of the TCJA and the need to extend Section 199-A for small businesses:

“Let’s look at what expires: It’s the individual side of the code. It’s not the corporate side of the code, so it’s all those tax crates on families. If you raise those tax rates, you’re going to hurt economic growth.

I could see a deal where the top rate goes up to 39.6% from 37%, which is kind of a rounding error on the numbers, but I can’t imagine either Biden or Trump in divided government, which is what I expect we’re going to have, allowing those tax cuts to expire.

The thing that is not getting covered much is something we call Section 199-A. It’s kind of an obscure provision but when we lowered corporate rates to be commensurate with the rest of the world and to be globally competitive – which was working — we also lowered the tax rates on what we call pass-throughs, sub-chapter S corporations, sole proprietorships, and LLCs which are about 80% of American businesses. They got a corresponding rate decrease so that they were on par with corporations.

Now, think of the person in Janesville, Wisconsin who owns the Ace Hardware competing against Home Depot. Do we want to let that person’s tax rates go back up to above 40% when Home Depot’s is at 21%? I don’t think we want to let that happen but that is what happens if you let Section 199-A expire, which Biden is proposing to do. I think that’s devastating to small and medium sized businesses. It’s really bad for economic growth. I think they need to extend Section 199-A and I think they will extend it because raising taxes on all these small businesses across America is not good economics.

On Trump’s second term economic agenda & why it’s preferable to Biden’s:

“Well, across the board tariffs are not good for the economy. Fighting China is good and necessary, and both of these guys are going to fight China. I think that’s fairly bipartisan. If you look at the House Select Committee with Raja Krishnamoorthi and Mike Gallagher, they put together a Venn Diagram of bipartisan China policy that I think either Administration is going to be effective and committed to fighting China. But I think a 10% tariff across the board is terrible economic policy. It’s a 10% tax on American consumers, making our businesses less competitive so I don’t think that’s good policy but Biden’s proposing this massive tax increase on medium and small-sized businesses. So, is it any wonder I don’t like either of these guys?

I’m a person who is saying, I’m not for Trump but his economics are better than Biden’s. If you’re asking me which is better? I think Trump because he’s better on taxes. I don’t like a lot of the tariffs and that can be done by a President, but I think he’ll be better on regulations and taxes.

The problem with Biden is he went left. He wasn’t the moderate the swing state voters in Wisconsin thought they were getting. They got this progressive. He’s got ideologues in the executive agencies killing energy production, proposing big tax increases so that’s not a very attractive economic agenda.”

By: AIF Staff

Dallas, TX – In late March, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan spoke at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Faith & Learning about how to integrate faith-based principles into public life. During the conversation moderated by Dr. Elizabeth Kincaid, Ryan discussed how he developed central tenets of his faith, how he sought to legislate from a philosophical framework which was consistent with Catholic Social Teaching, and how he used his prudential judgement to assess various public policy debates.  

With over 150 students and members of the wider SMU community in attendance, Ryan touched on how faith informed his efforts to reform the tax code, strengthen the social safety, and modernize our criminal justice system. The full discussion is accessible here and selected excerpts, edited slightly for clarity, follow. 

Making an impact while staying true to your beliefs:

“In Congress today, we have legislators and entertainers. If you turn on the TV tonight, you’ll probably see an entertainer on TV tonight…. But if they’re in session and you drive to the Capitol and walk around, the legislators will be in those rooms, sleeves rolled up, working. They will be legislating, negotiating, compromising and the carnival barkers, the entertainers, will be on TV getting hits and clicks. So, be a legislator!

What a legislator does is she listens to the other side, absorbs input, tries to put herself in someone else’s shoes to see what their perspective is and what they’re all about. She filters that through her principles that she’s already thought through and then comes up with a conclusion to try and bridge the gap.

The Founders gave us a country that requires negotiation and compromise, that expects and insists that different people, from different places, with different backgrounds, from different parties and with different philosophies figure out how to bridge the gap… and tackle our challenges. The more you’re able to have that as your mindset, the more successful of a legislator you will be. You might not be entertaining, but you’ll get more done and you’ll make a bigger difference if you do it that way.

The entertainers might get famous and rich, but the legislators will have an impact on society. So, figure out what you believe in, what your principles and policies are, debate based on fact and reason, not emotion, and then listen and empathize with the other side. If you do that, you can be a better policymaker.”

How students can strengthen their communities:

“This Saturday or Sunday, put the phone down and go get involved in a civic organization. Go get involved in a charitable organization, get involved with people that aren’t like you and that get you outside of your comfort zone. Get involved where you can bring your talent and your personality and make a difference working with somebody like the Big Brothers Big Sisters or anything like that.

Get involved in your community and by giving, you’ll get more back in return. You’ll also build this muscle memory by putting yourself in civil society and not focusing on social media. You will build inside yourself a muscle memory because it feels good to do this. You’ll make it contagious and you can spread it to other people. I would say: Find that thing you can do with other people, that doesn’t involve any electronics, and that gets you involved in helping other people in their lives.”

Applying Catholic principles to the question of life:

“Life is such a high principle, especially in Catholic Social Teaching, that wherever you can protect life, you protect life. As a practicing Catholic, we believe life begins at conception and so, you want to protect life whenever you can. Now, in a civil society, you realize lots of people don’t agree with that, so you don’t have to be a stick in the mud and be axiomatic and insist on your way or the highway. You can work to find common ground.

We were just talking about Glenn Youngkin, the Governor of Virginia, because I think his Foundation helps here [at SMU]. He found common ground with the Virginia legislature last session and did a ban after 15-weeks. He [worked to] find common ground and get incremental steps towards protecting life and he brought people along.

I come from the school of persuasion politics, not cram and jam politics or the my way or the highway approach, and that means you work to persuade people or at least find where you have the Venn Diagram of overlap and that’s, I think, a pretty good approach on the life issue.

Breaking polarization fatigue and solving America’s pressing problems:

“What I think is going to end up happening is we, as Americans, are going to get so sick of nothing getting done and we’re going to be tired of polarizing each other that we’re going to be tired of [these types of politicians].  

I mean, Joe Biden’s slogan is: “I’m not Donald Trump.” Donald Trump’s slogan is: “I’m Trump.”

That’s it right there. There’s really no agenda underneath it. There are no solutions, there is no Contract with America. There’s none of the “I’m going to solve these problems so vote for me and I’ll get it done.” No, it’s none of that stuff.

We’re going to get tired of this and that’s the great thing about the regenerative power of democracy throughout America’s history. I think polarization fatigue will set in and these problems are going to start piling up. We will realize that it’s going to be really ugly if we don’t fix these problems – and I can tell you, a debt crisis hits the poor and the elderly the first and the worst – so I think we are going to get through this.

We will muster the stuff we need to muster to say: I’m going to reward the politician who is a unifier. I’m going to go for the politician who is inspiring, who is not trying to divide us, who is offering solutions. It may not be the perfect solution. It may not be the most conservative solution, but it’s a solution.”

For more on Speaker Ryan’s visit to SMU, check out an interview he did with the SMU Campus Daily, accessible here. 

By: AIF Staff

Earlier this Spring, American Idea Foundation President and former House Speaker Paul Ryan served as the keynote speaker for Oklahoma University’s 2024 Presidential Lecture Series. While on campus, Ryan spoke with local media outlets, met with students, and was a featured guest on Conversations with the President, a podcast hosted by OU President Joseph Harroz Jr..

In the podcast interview, Speaker Ryan discussed his experiences as the leader of the legislative branch from 2015-2019. He shared advice for students, talked about transitioning out of politics and pursuing other meaningful vocational efforts, and detailed how current OU students and recent graduates can positively impact their communities. Excerpts of the podcast, edited lightly for clarity, follow. Listen to the full interview by clicking here.

Ryan offers advice to OU students

“Scale new learning curves, that is a key piece of advice. Always be hungry for learning. Always be hungry for knowledge. And whatever you do, have a good attitude.

I tell this to my kids; I tell this to our interns and new staffers. If you’re coming out of college, you’re bright, ambitious, and I assume you’re hardworking. These are things you must have and often are taken for granted. The difference-maker is: Do you have a good attitude? Are you hungry and is there no task beneath you?

The knock on this current young generation who are coming out of college is they feel “entitled.” They feel like they should automatically arrive at success because they saw it on TV and this should automatically happen for them. The people who think like that are not going to do as well as those who are hungry and ambitious, who have a good attitude and have humility. Oklahomans have humility… so you’re already off to a good start! Lastly, I would say that you have two ears and one mouth, so use them in that proportion.”

***

“The best advice is put the phone down, get out of the social media mediums, and do what you can to grow civil society, which is the space between ourselves and our government, where we live our lives and where we actually relate to each other. Do whatever you can to try and bring civility back to our spaces through your interactions. Get to know and be friends with people who are not like you, that’s really important.”

Ryan on a possible “third act” to his career  

“The third career is either to become the Ambassador to Ireland when I’m in my 70s, because I’m an Irish Catholic guy, or to do some [more] public service. I’m not saying I want to run for anything, but just another round of public service after doing business and philanthropy.”

Ryan on the biggest changes in American politics

“It’s deinstitutionalized in a lot of ways. I hate saying this. I mean, I spent 25 years in the Capitol building, 5 as a staffer and 20 as a Member. I have such a deep affection for the institution.

The quickest way to describe it is: 10 years ago, the people that came to Congress were Tom Cole-types, Stephanie Bice-types. These were policy people who wanted to go do policy things, who wanted to effect change. They wanted to pass legislation. They wanted to make a difference. They wanted to represent their constituents and do what the Founders intended.

But what happened in this new digital age that we are in, which started about 10-12 years ago, is we have a new wing of both political parties that are ascendent. I call them the entertainment wings of the party. These people have realized they can come to Congress and get famous really fast. If they’re provocative, if they’re entertaining, if they can be good on social media or on cable news, they can build themselves into a household name.

In the old days, if you wanted to succeed in politics, you had to be good at legislating…. It was a meritocracy that you scaled, and the unit of measurement was policy and persuasion. That’s not how the entertainment wing works. Their units of measurement are entertainment and provocation….

This has brought a new crop of people to Congress who are not there to play the team sport of legislating and compromise, negotiating and advancing principles. It’s brought a new crop of people who are there to be famous, to entertain, and that means they have to one-up the last person who did the same thing. It’s why voting against rules – and I know that’s an inside baseball thing – is now an ordinary thing, but it was unheard of when I was there just five years ago. The motion to vacate, which was there for just extreme circumstances, is [now] done because someone doesn’t like a bill that came to the floor which a majority of Congress supported. You see a degradation of the standards and I’d say the quality [of representation]. It’s a bit of deinstitutionalization.”

Ryan on foreign threats to democracy

“Our adversaries are definitely out to undermine us. Our adversaries – China, Russia, Iran, and a little bit North Korea, though they aren’t as good at it – are trying to do two things. They are trying to demonstrate to the world that their form of government – tyranny, autocracy, dictatorships – is better than democracy. Their form of government is faster. It’s leaner and meaner where one guy makes a decision and things get done. I think that’s wrong, and I think they’re wrong, but they want to prove that.

The other thing they want to prove is they’re trying to get us to hate each other inside of our countries. They’re trying to hyperpolarize America and democracy so that it renders itself incapable of solving big problems. They want to get us so wrapped around the axel, so conflicted and polarized that we can’t reach consensus and make decisions to solve our problems, to put our best face forward, to defend our national security, to grow our economies. They believe that we will relativize ourselves into self-immolation in the 21^st century because of this massive polarization….

The whole debate about TikTok is a good example where they are trying to, from the outside, stir up the public. “Russian bots” is a phrase we use all the time, the Russians have entire buildings full of people whose goal is to inject poison into our public discourse online and get us stirred up and hating each other.

We’re doing a pretty good job on our own, but they are adding accelerant to it. It’s clearly an attempt by illiberal regimes to try and show that democracy doesn’t have the stuff that it takes. Now, at the end of the day, I think we’re going to win this thing. I think the advancement that comes with innovation, free enterprise, private property rights means we’re going to lead on technology. We are going to win the race on quantum computing and win the race on AI, so long as we don’t regulate it to death, and I think we’re going to win at the end of day but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Ryan on the journey to being Speaker of the House

“After we lost the 2012 race when I ran with Mitt [Romney] for Vice President, I went back to being the Budget Committee Chair. I wrote all of our budgets back in those days. My goal was really to become the Chair of the Ways and Means Committee which oversees the issues I’m very passionate about: poverty issues, entitlement reform, tax reform, trade, welfare reform. So, I achieved that and in early 2015, I became the Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.

I reached the goal that I had set for myself in Congress to work on those issues that fell within the Committee’s jurisdiction and then, this may sound a little familiar, a House Freedom Caucus member filed a motion to vacate against John Boehner. If that sounds a little familiar it’s because it’s happening again now, in real time. It happened recently with Kevin McCarthy and so, John Boehner, under that circumstance… he decided to leave and the next person in line, and this will sound a little familiar as well, was Kevin McCarthy. I was nominating Kevin [for Speaker in October 2015] and I was supporting him to do the job. It turned out he didn’t have the votes for it, and I became the consensus candidate.

I got drafted into the job. The good thing about my particular situation was I was able to set the terms for taking the job. [I told my colleagues that] I’ll do this, if two things happen: 1) We have an agenda that we compile that’s based on our principles, we run on that agenda and take it to the country so that if we win, we earn the right to put int in place. I wanted mine to be a substance-driven Speakership and a policy-driven Congress, not fighting about politics but fighting for policy. And 2) I had a young family and I wanted to be home on weekends. The Speaker is expected to raise all the money for [House Republicans] and it’s a big on-the-road job. I wanted to be home on weekends and I learned that it was very difficult to do that. I was basically on the road in Wisconsin on Saturdays, on the road every other weekday, and I was basically home on Sundays.

At the end of the day, why I just did two terms as Speaker and I didn’t want to do any more is because I had kids in high school, who I was only seeing on Sunday. If you have high school kids, you want to get to know them and for them to get to know you before they’re off to college and on with life.

I’m a Catholic. We do guilt really well and I was just feeling very guilty about not being around for them. We had a tremendously successful session that last session – criminal justice reform, tax reform, opioids, the cancer moonshot, all those things got done. I felt like that was a good note to retire on so I retired in the beginning of 2019.”

To watch or listen to Speaker Ryan’s speech at the University of Oklahoma, click here.