Paul Ryan: No, I Want to Help the Poor! Really!
Paul Ryan: No, I Want to Help the Poor! Really! — Daily Intel
Paul Ryan, the celebrated Republican idea man, delivered a speech today entitled ‘Restoring the Promise of Upward Mobility in America’s Economy.’ Upward mobility is a vital concept for Ryan. He is the author of a plan that would, as budget expert Robert Greenstein put it, ‘produce the largest redistribution of income from the bottom to the top in modern U.S. history.’ Upward mobility is Ryan’s constant answer to this objection. In his telling, his plans would make the economy more open and free, making it easier for the poor to rise and the rich to fall. As Ryan says, ‘We believe that Americans are better off in a dynamic, free enterprise-based economy that fosters economic growth, opportunity, and upward mobility instead of a stagnant, government-directed economy that stifles job creation and fosters government dependency.”
Ryan assumes that increasing the role of the market and decreasing the role of government will increase upward mobility — the wealthier people can get, the easier it will be to get wealthy or to fall out of wealth. But he doesn’t argue it explicitly, and for good reason: There’s no reason to believe it. In fact, the evidence all suggests exactly the opposite. Economic mobility is higher in countries with higher levels of equality and lower in countries with lower equality. The correlation is very tight:
Ryan tells a story in which, over the last several decades, the United States has seen lower levels of economic mobility because government has grown too large. But higher inequality and lower mobility have been growing in tandem.
So, what does Ryan have to offer in defense of his promise to ‘restore upward mobility’? He offers a riff about the importance of education reform, without either explaining what such a policy would entail or how it would differ from the very aggressive education reforms the Obama administration has implemented. He praises the role of private charity, suggesting that rolling back government assistance for the poor will encourage the private sector to step in, a decidedly shaky proposition.
Mostly, he talks about welfare reform. There is a consensus that welfare as we knew it did create serious cultural pathologies. Ryan cites the case of welfare reform frequently. To him, it proves that large cuts to programs that help poor people of any kind at all are not only harmless but will help the poor. ‘The welfare-reform mindset hasn’t been applied with equal vigor across the spectrum of anti-poverty programs,’ he says. Thus he proposes enormous cuts — to children’s health-insurance grants, Head Start, food stamps, and, especially, Medicaid, which would have to throw about half its current beneficiaries off their coverage under his proposal.