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

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 1/3^rd 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.”

By: AIF STAFF

Washington, DC – Last week, American Idea Foundation President and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan joined Texas Congressman Dan Crenshaw on his podcast, Hold These Truths, to discuss how the federal government can better lift Americans out of poverty. Speaker Ryan detailed the work that the American Idea Foundation is engaged in to promote evidence-based public policies and to scale programs with demonstrated track records of improving outcomes.

The entire podcast is accessible here and some notable excerpts from Speaker Ryan and Rep. Crenshaw’s conversation follow.

Civil Society, not Socialism, is the way to expand economic opportunity:

“My argument is that free enterprise is the best weapon against poverty and that’s a timely conversation, given the fact that we have this sort of fetish with socialism. We have, and young persons have in particular, this sort of romantic attachment [and] fashionable [view toward] the idea of socialism. But when you actually scrape below the surface of socialism, you realize it is just basically conformity with no choices, enforced poverty, and misery….”

“The American creed and the American Idea is the most revolutionary thing we’ve ever had as human beings. It is the one thing that ran contrary to all other ways that societies had previously organized themselves – which was mostly through the coercion or collectivism. The progressive left is trying to pull [our nation] back toward the same old tired ideas of collectivism and socialism, which created a lot of rot and problems.”

“To have a free society like we designed — a Constitutional republic, it does require morality. You know, Washington basically said in his farewell address: We built a system of natural law and natural rights and a Constitutional republic with individual rights, which sort of requires a moral society and moral country. And so, it’s important that we, as individuals, keep civil society big and growing so that we can keep ourselves tethered to truth and to individual moral codes and so that we can enjoy the gifts of freedom that this country has given us and that you fought for in the Navy SEALS.”

Promoting policies that create opportunities for all Americans to succeed:

“The question is: Do we have a country that is wired to produce or promote equality of opportunities or do we want to change this country to promote equality of outcomes, which is really socialism and which is antithetical to our founding creed and to our Constitution?

“I would argue strongly that promoting equality of opportunity is the goal of America and that is the goal of our government in our society. We should maintain that and not substitute it for equality of outcomes because the kind of government you have to have to [achieve equality of outcomes] is radically different than what we have….

“We can strive for a system of dynamic upper mobility, where we promote the equality of opportunities, so everybody gets a shot at living the best version of their life and rising to wherever they want to go and wherever they can go, limited only by their God-given talents and their own efforts. That’s the kind of society we want to achieve. That’s what America is wired for. And so, there are lots of techniques and programs and policies that can do that but they also must respect the inherent dignity of each individual person. They must respect the dignity of local government, of local people and communities.

“De Tocqueville did a great job of looking at how America was so successful and unique by having a civil society where you had local, connective tissue where people helped each other because we respected people having more control of their lives and [we respected that] communities could do more with each other and [we respected] that civil society made people better people because they help each other voluntarily and by choice.

“And so, going into tax credits and tax policies and all of these things, all of these policies have proven to be effective because they capture this dynamic which enables people to make better lives for themselves, to help each other to rise and to rise up the income scale, to pursue this beautiful notion of upward mobility where you can be better off than your parents.”

A lifetime of learning how to best fight poverty in America & using evidence to achieve progress: 

“I spent some time as a young guy staffer going through public housing projects like Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor homes in Chicago and seeing how the poverty-industrial complex and the War on Poverty actually backfires in so many amazing and bad ways. Then I spent years running around the country with my friend Bob Woodson, learning about poverty, thinking about poverty, exploring poverty, and getting out of Janesville and Kenosha, Wisconsin where I’m from, and learning about poverty in poor, rural areas and in poor, inner cities. I did it for a number of years to just educate myself, to understand this issue better, to come up with better solutions that will get at the different types of poverty….

“What I learned in my career as a policymaker is that there are areas that have only known poverty for many generations, where poverty was passed on from one generation to the next. And in a lot of places, the problem is bad government policy.

“What I also learned in my career as a policymaker, not just in Washington but also touring the country studying poverty, is we are measuring [poverty] in the wrong way. When I was head of the Budget Committee, I did a year-long study commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty and I wanted to learn if we spent trillions on lots of different [poverty-fighting] programs, what are we getting for it?

“We concluded, after running the numbers, we spent about a trillion dollars a year on anti-poverty programs. The federal government has a little less than 100 programs and we never measure success based on results or outcomes.

“We measure success based on input and effort: How much money are we spending on the programs we have? How many people are on those programs? And we never studied evidence or outcomes or asked is it working? Are we getting people out of poverty? Are we breaking the cycle of generational poverty? Those questions weren’t even asked. And so, what we tried to do is switch the debate to a results-oriented debate.

“And as I got into this fight, I found myself in a bunch of ideological clashes that were left versus right…. And we basically had stalemates. So, I decided: Let’s go use the field of economics, which is something I’ve spent my career on, and see if we can get past the stalemate by using something that is a little less ideological, which is the field of evidence.”

Outcomes should drive spending decisions on fighting poverty;

“I’m a confident conservative, I believe our principles work. I believe in work. I believe in incentives and helping families. All those things work to get people out of poverty. If you have your high school diploma and if parents are staying together raising their kids, statistically, that helps keep you out of poverty.

“I’m a person who believes in submitting these programs to a raw, clinical analysis, an economically rigorous analysis and I think it will validate our principles. And that will make it easier for us to have policy fights that are settled by data and evidence versus ideology and partisanship…

“My hope is we start measuring success in the War on Poverty based on outcome and results, not based on inputs and dollars, so that we can actually transition dollars from ineffective, wasteful programs that are counterproductive to efforts that actually get people out of poverty. My hope is we start breaking the cycle of poverty by going at root causes of poverty. That’s the whole goal.”

Simplifying poverty-fighting efforts so they are easier to use and access:

“I believe you can collapse the various poverty programs into a radically simplified version of what they are. A version that is so much easier to navigate for an individual and you can do it so it’s designed in the right way, so that it’s not complex, and so it doesn’t have benefit cliffs that stop you from advancing in life.

“These benefit cliffs actually make it harder to incentivize the right kind of behavior like savings, personal responsibility, work, family formation, things like that. There are tools in front of us like the EITC and the CTC, I think that can be used to do that….

“The point of it all is I believe that there are new techniques to fighting poverty, that give us better tools, that encompass our principles, and that make good on the American Idea. I really do believe with technology, with digital money, programmable money, and with the kinds of technologies that are out there now, we can design a safety net — a property safety net, that truly helps people make better choices in life and become the best versions of themselves and not have a cohort of dependencies… “We want to give you the best chance at the best life that you can have for yourself and [we want to] give you equality of opportunity so you can make the most of your life. That’s the tool we want to equip you with so that you can stand on your own two feet and be proud of what you can achieve and have a life where your kids can do even greater than you did. This is the whole American Idea in a nutshell.”