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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRyan's *Making* Love to the Poor, But He's Still *In* Love With Rand
from the NY Mag's Daily Intelligencer:
1. It is certainly true that Ryans new proposals represent an important step away from the political extreme he has occupied his entire career. All of Ryans previous proposals amounted to simplistic Randian exercises in upward redistribution. His poverty proposal contains signs of serious engagement with, and even concern for, the problem of poverty. The most interesting (not to say the best) element is his proposal to create an army of paternalistic bureaucrats to judge recipients of means testing. Much of the recent intellectual energy on the right and left has converged on the idea of consolidating poverty spending together into a simplified, universal grant. Ryan would go in the opposite direction, empowering social workers to devise custom plans for every recipient. Jamelle Bouie and my new colleague Annie Lowrey make the case against this idea; Reihan Salam makes the case for it. I agree with the former, but Ryans case is at least a serious analysis.
2. There are genuinely sound policy ideas in Ryans plan. Unfortunately, those ideas are all beyond his reach. Ryan correctly notes that rigid job-licensing requirements, set up by incumbents to insulate themselves from protection, deny low-wage workers potential jobs. (The most notorious, but hardly unique, example is Utahs requirement that you spend $18,000 to obtain the training to legally braid hair.) Likewise, Ryan endorses a relaxation of mandatory minimum sentences, joining a bipartisan effort to ratchet back several decades of rigid get-tough sentencing laws. Unfortunately, since these laws are written at state and local levels, Ryan has no plan to actually change them. Still, he deserves credit for identifying a genuine problem.
3. Ryans worst proposal is to convert numerous anti-poverty programs from defined benefit levels for beneficiaries to chunks of money for states to use as they see fit. Ryan promises that the money could only be spent on the poor, but Bob Greenstein who has spent a career studying the issue explains how the promise is impossible; states would use the funds to replace other funding on the poor, which in turn would be redirected toward non-poverty spending.
The idea of letting states decide how to spend federal anti-poverty money has long divided the parties. Republicans assume that states will act in the best interest of their poorest citizens. Democrats assume the opposite. The trouble for Ryan is that, over the last few years, the United States has conducted a vast experiment that has proven his assumption wrong in the most horrifying way possible. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts allowed states to opt out of accepting Medicaid money to give health insurance to their poorest citizens. The money is, essentially, free. Washington would pay 90 percent of the cost of enrolling a person in Medicaid, and the remaining 10 percent would be made up, or more than made up, by the reduced cost of sick uninsured people showing up at the emergency room. In a display of almost fanatical indifference to the well-being of their most vulnerable citizens, nearly every Republican-controlled state government has eschewed this free money. Not only have state-level Republicans failed to display deep concern for the poor, they seem to actually enjoy subjecting them to intense physical and financial distress . . .
Citing this evidence, NBCs David Gregory asked Ryan yesterday why anybody should trust state governments not to screw their poor citizens. Here is Ryans reply in its entirety. Read it carefully theres nothing even approaching a substantive response:
read more . . . specter of the Ryan Plan and 'I know what you did last election': http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/07/paul-ryan-still-paul-ryan.html
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