Brooks’s rhetoric and focus have been embraced by many key Republicans, none more passionately and visibly than House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan. Ryan visited urban centers of poverty as the vice-presidential nominee in 2012, and he has embarked on an extended tour of such areas since that election. A laudatory recent profile of Ryan by Buzzfeed’s McKay Coppins describes some of those visits. Coppins’s piece has been ripped by many liberals, as has Ryan himself in recent days. Ryan’s dedication to finding conservative solutions to the problem of persistent poverty took a hit for his clumsy comments about pathologies in the inner city, which many people take as a code term for areas of minorities.
I know Ryan, and I’m sure that his problem was ham-handed language, not racial bias. And I also believe that he genuinely wants to find ways to relieve poverty and help people move up. But Coppins in his piece noted that Ryan’s recent budget was in direct tension with Ryan’s goal of constructing policies to help the poor. Ryan said, “I’ve got two roles. I’m chairman of the House Budget Committee representing my conference ... and I’m a House member representing Wisconsin doing my own thing. I can’t speak for everybody and put my stuff in their budget. My work on poverty is a separate thing.”
Therein lies the problem. There are and can be conservative ways to approach joblessness, social dysfunction, and poverty—including things that many Democrats and liberals could embrace. That has happened before, with, for example, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a conservative idea to enable the working poor to have a chance to come close to a living wage without putting all the burden on employers. It could happen now through a revamping of tax incentives and disincentives for working families, where now if a second person in a family with children wants to work, the marginal tax rate can approach 90 percent or more. With the cost of child care that comes when two parents work, that can mean an effective tax rate on work of more than 100 percent. And the idea of rerouting some government funds now used to finance programs run by government agencies to those run through communities and private organizations is a sound one.
It may well be that over time, having more programs run by community groups (many already are, of course) will not only help people more but cost taxpayers less. But the fact is that providing a safety net to those who need it costs money—including providing housing help; food stamps; and help with child care for single parents who work and two-parent households where both work. And the fact is that the Ryan budget is in direct contradiction to the goals represented by those policy options. Ryan moves to balance the budget in 10 years with no additional revenues, without any changes for the next 10 years in benefits for Medicare or Social Security recipients, and with increases in military spending. It repeals the Affordable Care Act—while keeping every dollar of the Medicare cuts that are in the act. It cuts $732 billion from Medicaid, block-granting the program; cuts food stamps (formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) by $125 billion; and cuts discretionary domestic spending, which includes most of the existing programs to alleviate or ameliorate poverty, by several hundred billions.