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:
- Detroit Regional Chamber: MPC 24: A Conversation with Paul Ryan & Harold Ford Jr.
- Michigan Advance: Ryan talks misinformation, polarization, and pitfalls of Democrats & Republicans
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.”