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AIF Press Release: Ryan discusses key tax policy issues & the implications of divided government

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this week, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan took part in a conversation with Public Private Strategies and the Niskanen Center about the implications of the midterms on key tax policies.

As part of the discussion moderated by Katie Viletstra Wonnenberg of Public Private Strategies, Ryan talked about reforming pro-growth programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit so they promote upward mobility and incentivize work. Ryan also detailed how bipartisan consensus could be found in divided government and outlined the need to reform our social safety net so it better supports Americans in-need.

Excerpts of the panel discussion follow.

Ryan’s long history working on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC):

“I have spent basically my entire adult life [working] in tax policy and on poverty policy like the EITC and those types of reforms. I chaired the Ways and Means Committee before I was Speaker, which obviously has this jurisdiction, so it’s an issue I’ve been involved in for a long, long time. It’s an issue that I still work at Notre Dame, at my foundation, and at the American Enterprise Institute where I’m a fellow so it’s something that is very near and dear to my heart.”

An example of Evidence-Based Policymaking working:

“Republicans and Democrats have very different opinions on how the safety net should be designed, what kind of incentives should exist, how programs should be structured and designed, and all the rest. I decided, let’s go down this evidence path and I created this Evidence-Based Policymaking Commission. Senator Patty Murray was my partner on it. I made it very bipartisan and we passed the Evidence Act into law and what we were trying to do was be one of the innovators with evidence-based policymaking… where we just use evidence to guide what we do, how we design programs, where we place money, and that is sort of post-partisan and non-partisan….

“The best example I can give is MIECHV, a women’s and early childhood intervention program. The Nurse-Family Partnership program, [which is part of MIECHV] was started under Bush, Obama continued it, and Trump reauthorized it. Why?

“Because it had really good data, evidence, and analytics that showed this program works extremely well. Going down the path of producing evidence using randomized controlled trials, using evidence, peer reviews, and all of the rest, I think can really be the secret sauce to how you can get things done with whomever is running Congress, but particularly in a divided government because one side is not going to be able to completely dominate the other side. The way to split the difference on the sort of partisan and ideological divides is through very clear evidence….”

How advocates can use evidence-based policymaking to advance sound policies:

“I think evidence-based policymaking and using evidence is the way to go. If people are coming in the door to talk to the new chairman of new committees, like the new Ways and Means Chairman in the next session, you have got to have evidence. You can’t just make an emotional appeal. You can’t just make a partisan appeal and an ideological appeal. You’re going to need to make an evidence-based appeal and bring people from both sides of the aisle with you to say: ‘Hey, we’re just following the evidence. This is proven to work. This works really well.’”

Reforming the EITC & CTC to promote work and upward mobility:

“There is a concern on my side of the aisle, among my sort of ideological brethren, that if you do not have work as a component of the benefit, you have a serious problem and you’re going to create people who are stuck in a cycle of dependency where they’re not going to have upward mobility.

“On my side of the aisle, talking with people who spend time in the poverty space, having work tied to benefits is extremely important. So, in the Child Tax Credit debate, there was a lot being proposed that severed the connection to work and that is where you’re going to have a problem with my side of the aisle.

“When you’re dealing with a Republican or conservative or whatever you want to call the person, you do not want to disincentivize work. You want to encourage work, because work works. Work creates upward mobility. Work gets people out of poverty. The last thing a person on my side of the aisle would want to sign up for- and I think this speaks to the Senator Joe Manchin point — was if you [reform the program] in such a way that severs the connection to work, you’re going backwards.”

Empowering states to experiment and scale evidence-based strategies:

“I think federalism is going to make a big difference. You’ve got to give states the ability to go out and experiment and come up with some new solutions and then contrast and compare them to one another.  This is what we did with welfare in the 1990’s. I do think if you give states big enough waivers with a lot of their money to experiment with these ideas, you’re going to find some successes that can be scaled and replicated later on.

“That’s basically what my foundation worked on. We built a clearinghouse of scalable, replicable poverty solutions that can be expanded out. I’m actually excited. I think we’re on the cusp of a new form of poverty, fighting with evidence-based policymaking and proven scalable solutions that have just great track records of success. It kind of gets the partisanship and the ideology out of it.”

How to address inflation and prevent a debt crisis:

“I’m really worried about this. I’m worried we can lose our dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, which means we will not be able to afford the social contract that we have right now, let alone do more.

“Here’s where people may not like the answer: You’ve got to work on the big entitlements. If you want to free up fiscal space for other things that government is supposed to do like safety and security, you have to work on the health care entitlements, specifically Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. You’ve got to get these things under control because they themselves will just chew up the rest of the budget and you literally cannot mathematically tax your way out of that. If you try, you’re going to kill the economy, you’ll slow down the economy, slow down wage growth, slow down productivity and jobs.

“You’ve got to have economic growth. If you want an escalator of upward mobility, we need to obviously have a better design for safety net programs to allow people to get on the escalator of upward mobility. But you have to deal with these big earned entitlements and get them under control….

“We know how to do it. We just never had the politics to do it but if you care about discretionary spending, or even the safety net and mandatory spending, you’ve got to get these big things under control this decade if we’re going to have a chance of getting out of a debt crisis and so, looking for new revenue, frankly, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s our spending that is really going off the charts.”

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On The Armstrong Williams Show, Ryan discusses upward mobility, civil society, and “democracy’s moment”

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Last weekend, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan joined The Armstrong Williams Show for a wide-ranging conversation about President Biden’s economic agenda, the importance of standing for democracy and our Founding principles, and the need to help Americans rise out of poverty.

Excerpts of Speaker Ryan’s responses follow.

On the importance of civil society:

“Let’s not think that Washington solves every problem. Let’s remember we ourselves in our communities, in our churches, in our civic institutions and our local governments, that’s really where we live our lives. That’s really where we need to reinvigorate our activities.”

Using evidence & data to expand upward mobility:

“One of the last things I did as House Speaker of the House was pass a law called the Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, which to make a long story short, we can now look at data, real data on federal poverty programs and on education programs at the federal, state and private sector levels, and we can find out what works and what doesn’t.

In education, it’s become really clear what works and what doesn’t work. The problem is entrenched special interests are preventing us from going with what works, but it’s not for lack of knowing. So, the good news and this is a good news, bad news story is we’re developing the ability to measure effective policies focused on getting kids off the streets, getting good educations in every corner of this country, restarting upper mobility and getting people out of poverty.

“This is what we spend our time on at my Foundation. We are learning what works and what doesn’t work. The question is: Do policymakers follow the data and do local governments, state governments and federal governments put the money into ideas, policies, and reforms that are proven to work or do they keep paying for status quo policies? That’s the question.”

On the stress tests facing our democracy & the global response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

“I think our democracy is being tested internally and externally. These are the big 21st century tests that we have to go through. I think we’ll get through them, but they are tests.

You can look at specific instances in recent history and show where democracy works. Internationally, democracy in Ukraine is working, and I like to look at the glass of life as being half-full, not half-empty but we’ve got some pretty strong tests coming in front of us. And you know, that’s going to be the big challenge in the 21st century: Democracy versus authoritarianism.  I think this is the classic struggle in the 21st century….

I think Putin thought he could get away with it… and that the democracies were too self-absorbed and too polarized to do anything about it. [He thought] NATO was past its prime. After he invaded, what happened?

Democracy completely came unified to Ukraine’s defense. NATO is expanding and Finland and Sweden are joining NATO. The point I would make is: Democracy will push back when it’s back is against the wall. When free people are faced with an existential challenge to their freedom, they’re going to be the most powerful force in humankind.”

Assessing Biden’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

“I actually think President Biden’s done pretty well on this. I mean, here and there I would have done things differently. I would have been faster on weapons deployment and the rest but I think he’s done a pretty good job, all things considered.

What he has done is he’s built a very good coalition, particularly after getting the Germans and French to give up their oil and gas to the extent they have. It’s a pretty impressive accomplishment. So, he’s built a pretty good international coalition of democracies. That’s been good.

He’s gotten through Congress good packages that are helping the Ukrainians defend themselves and keep their civil society and the government going… I would have done a few things differently, but generally speaking, I think they’ve handled it pretty well.”

Congress is working & bipartisan opportunities for pro-growth reforms exist:

“We had one of the most productive sessions of the legislature since Reagan’s first term and of all those bills we passed, about 80% of those bills were bipartisan and got big bipartisan votes. We attacked the opioid epidemic. We worked on getting cures for cancer. We overhauled the way the Veterans Administration works. We did criminal justice reform. You name the issue, we probably tackled it. And then there were things we did on our own, like tax reform, which was a big accomplishment and achievement of my own that I’ve worked on for 20 years as a Ways and Means Committee member. That was a huge collaboration with other Republicans.

But if you look at all those bills that passed in that term, which you would think was a pretty controversial time, over 80% of them were bipartisan. A lot of what happens in Congress is under the radar. Bipartisan bills that get passed, that fix a lot of problems, and that are very overwhelmingly bipartisan, they get no attention. And so, it doesn’t surprise me that the average member of the public who’s not spending their day watching Congress thinks it’s always fighting and it’s always terrible and It’s all polarization with nothing getting done. When in fact, there’s a lot of stuff that does happen.”

Divided government means predictability and non-inflationary policies:

“My biggest fear is they’re going to pass this Build Back Better Bill, which is very bad for inflation. All that bill will do is make American businesses less competitive. It will slow down economic growth and cost us jobs and crank up prices and inflation with all that spending. So, [the Biden Administration has] bad tax policy that puts Americans at a competitive disadvantage and has really inflationary spending policies.

Divided government is going to give us the ability to make sure that that doesn’t continue to happen… In this case, divided government is a good thing because divided government will give us predictability that we won’t put bad policies in place. We won’t pour gas on the inflation fire.

In this case, divided government is a good thing and it gives us stable, predictable government. Because when we get — and I think we will get, the majority in the House of Representatives and I think we have a really good chance to get the majority in the Senate, that means we’re not going to go off to the left and I think that’s going to be good for the economy.”

On ‘Kudlow,’ Ryan discusses balancing the budget, stopping inflationary economic policies and strengthening the social safety net

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Yesterday, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan talked with Fox Business’ Larry Kudlow about how our nation’s growing debt will have real economic consequences for Americans over the short-term and long-term.

On Kudlow, Ryan reflected on the pro-growth economic policies passed during his time as House Speaker and his efforts to promote upward mobility. In discussing the looming insolvency of our entitlement programs and the need to get ahead of it, Ryan foreshadowed a forthcoming project with the American Enterprise Institute focused on modernizing our nation’s social safety net for the 21st century.

Ryan’s full conversation on ‘Kudlow’ is accessible here and excerpts follow.  

How can we have a pro-growth, balanced budget?

“This is what I’m working on at the American Enterprise Institute, today, putting together a plan to do this.

Everybody forgets – probably not you, Larry – but most people forget about growth. You have to have a growing GDP and you need pro-growth policies: pro-growth regulatory policy, pro-growth tax policies, and sound money policies from the Fed, but that’s another conversation.

But you’ve got to deal with these entitlements and for the big three entitlements, we’re at the beginning of the boomer retirement so we haven’t even seen the big bulge of boomers retiring.  And so, we have to pass entitlement reform once and for all in this country if we’re ever going to get this under control.

You can’t tax your way out of this problem. Frankly, you can’t grow your way out of this problem. Growth helps a lot but you have to reform these entitlement programs.

Right now, they are open-ended defined-benefit programs that grow far faster than our ability to pay for them. Medicare is already more than half bond-financed. The Medicare HI Trust Fund goes bankrupt in 2030, Social Security goes bankrupt in 2035, and across the board benefit cuts kick in right then and there. Not to mention the fact that I think our reserve currency status will be put in great peril and be in jeopardy. Meaning, the sooner we get a handle on this problem, the better off we’re going to be.”

How can leaders alter our debt trajectory & save these critical programs?

“If you think we’re a polarized country today, wait until the day comes where we can’t actually finance our social safety net or can’t fulfill the social contract and we have to cut these programs in real-time for real people who have organized their lives around these benefits.  

I always quote my late mother-in-law: “A stitch in time saves nine.” If you pass the right reforms now that are phased out over time, you can really dodge this debt bullet and get the debt under control.

By the way, in the House, when we had the majority, we passed budgets in the House of Representatives that balanced the budget and paid off the debt. We did it for 8 years.

When I first was a Chairman of the Budget Committee, we passed [balanced budgets] and subsequent to my chairmanship, Tom Price & Diane Black passed budgets that actually laid out how to balance the budget and how to have a pro-growth budget.

Tax reform, entitlement reform, and spending caps can get you to a balanced budget and fulfill the mission of these programs – health and retirement security, upward mobility, a social safety net built toward work. Those things can be done and we can still have these things that we’ve come to a consensus that we want in America in the 21st century but you have to reform these programs to get there. “

How can we expand upward mobility?

“I really believe that you can rework our safety net to focus on upward mobility, helping people who cannot help themselves and getting people into lives of self-sufficiency by having work requirements.

“It does work. We are proposing a dramatic overhaul of our safety net at AEI that we’re going to release later this Fall to do just this, to show how you can have a very good, vibrant safety net that gets people up and on in life and helps them find work.

“Skills and work – it totally works. We have experimented with these ideas for 30 years. We now know what does and doesn’t work. We have so much data and analysis. There have been hundreds of randomized controlled trials from economists on what works and what doesn’t work in poverty and we do know that work works. Encouraging work is the way to get people out of poverty.” 

*Note: Ryan is a member of the board of Fox Corporation*