Paul's Poor Poverty Plan Gets an F

       

     Paul Ryan reminds me, certified nerd that I am, of the cool kids in high school.  They were always pretty—even the boys—they dressed better than everyone else, and they spoke a language you could only understand if you were one of them.  And they loved talking to themselves.

            Of course, they were all about appearances.  For the most part, they had nothing original to say.  They never did their homework, and, instead, always tried to rely on what they’d learned by watching TV or going to the movies.

            On Tuesday, Ryan and several of his Republican House colleagues chose a drug rehabilitation facility in Anacostia to unveil a 35 page report authored by his “Task Force on Poverty, Opportunity and Mobility.”  The report says that it is the “beginning of a conversation” about poverty and what to do about it.

            The problem is that we’ve had this vacuous conversation before.  It depends on assumptions that Ryan’s cool kids make about a world beyond their bubble of privilege, a world that they’ve never seen and don’t understand.  In it, they recycle pious moralizing about poor people without once looking at their own moral shortcomings. And it degenerates into farce once those assumptions are challenged.

            The basic assumption behind the report is that people are poor because they are lazy.  If poor people would only just get jobs, the report reasons, then they wouldn’t be poor.  Therefore, the solution to poverty is to incentivize the poor to start working by cutting off public assistance if they’re not actively employed, looking for work or training for a job. 

            It’s ironic that in the section of the report that addresses expanding vocational education, the report notes that “Industries critical to our economy . . . have vacant jobs to fill but not enough qualified applicants to fill them.  This is not due to a lack of willing applicants, but rather a lack of applicants who possess the right skills for the job. (Emphasis added)

            It might have been a good idea if Ryan had given the report to a proofreader to look for internal consistency before issuing it.  It can’t simultaneously be that most people are lazy bums who are looking for ways to defraud the beleaguered taxpayers—can anyone say “welfare queen”?—and that they are “willing” to work and would do so if they had the proper training.

            But that’s not all.  Like the good policy wonks the cool kids want the grownups to think they are, throughout the report, they insist that all poverty programs must survive rigorous tests of efficacy. They want to spend money only on poverty programs that “work.”  They want to terminate programs that can’t provide evidence that they “work” so that resources can be provided to people who truly need them.

            That sounds reasonable, except that when they talk about programs that work, what they mean is that they help people find jobs and leave the welfare rolls.  They’re offended by their observation that “even though the federal government has spent trillions of taxpayer dollars on these programs over the past five decades, the official poverty rate in 2014 (14.8%) was no better than it was in 1966 (14.76%).”

            In the first place, the correct comparison is not between the percentage in poverty in 2014 and the percentage in poverty in 1966.  As we nerdy geeks who understand science would tell them, you have to control for all factors except for the experimental treatment. The right comparison would be between a control group and a treatment group.  What we really want to know is what would have happened without the treatment.

            The answer, according to a report issue on the same day by the Center for American Progress is that between 1967 and 2012, social safety net programs have cut the rate of poverty by 40%.  That is, but for the treatment—Social Security, nutrition assistance, and tax credits for working families—there would be 40% more people in poverty.

            But second, Ryan and his cool kids are trying to insist that tools crafted for alleviating the social conditions that arise out of poverty do something that they weren’t designed to do.  Why is it fair or sensible to find fault with programs designed to provide shelter or fill bellies because they also don’t remove people from welfare rolls?

            If Ryan and his clique are so sure that “the best anti-poverty program is a job,” why have they said nothing in the report about the federal government’s ability to nudge the economy into creating the demand that, in turn, encourages the private sector hire more people?  There is ample evidence that by spending more money on repairing infrastructure, expanding research and development, and helping cities and states bolster the jobs of their teachers, police officers and firefighters can help do this.  Why is there no discussion about increasing the minimum wage so that people can earn what they need instead of having to rely, a la Walmart,  on public assistance programs?

            The answer is that more federal spending would eventually require tax increases, the bulk of which would have to be paid Ryan and his well-heeled cohort.  Higher minimum wages make it harder for Daddy to squeeze profits out of his non-union work force so as to afford those sweet little red ‘vettes or high horsepower beemers Paul and his crowd had been eyeing as rewards for their great achievements.  

            When they issue reports like this one, the cool kids make it hard for anyone to believe that they truly care much about helping people who live outside of their bubble.  They issue reports like this one because they just don’t want to look like they don’t care or because they want to camouflage their narcissism and greed.  Their life experience has taught them that when you’ve got power, grace and style, lip service is all that’s really required.