Whether or not Paul Ryan’s plan would help the poor was not as important to the media as the fact that it would help Republicans appear “bipartisan.”
Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) has made a career of proposing to “reform” US poverty programs mainly by trying to eliminate them: calling for “savings” in spending on the poor (ThinkProgress, 5/8/12), declaring that “top-down anti-poverty programs” have failed and should be eliminated (TheNation.com, 10/26/12) and, this spring, proposing a budget that would have cut an estimated $150 billion from food stamps over the next decade (MSNBC, 4/1/14).
Ryan’s latest poverty plan, though, presented on July 24 in a speech to the conservative American Enterprise Institute, was widely portrayed as different. Vox’s Ezra Klein (7/24/14) touted Ryan’s Expanding Opportunity in America plan as “a sharp break” with his previous budget-slashing proposals, saying it “should, in theory, offer much more opportunity for common ground with Democrats.”
Slate columnist Reihan Salam (7/24/14) praised the Ryan plan for acknowledging that “a safety net in good working order is crucial to a healthy economy,” and wanting to shift government spending to “targeted efforts to lift people out of poverty for good.”
In the New York Times’ new “data-driven” Upshot section (7/24/14), meanwhile, Neil Irwin wrote that Ryan’s latest proposal “feels different from his previous efforts to overhaul the system of support for the poor,” while the New Republic’s Danny Vinik (7/24/14) called Ryan’s proposed increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit his “best idea ever”—a place where “in a rational policy world, Democrats and Republicans would probably be able to find common ground.”
So what was new about Ryan’s plan? As many news outlets noted, it does include increased funding for anti-poverty programs that he and other conservatives support—mostly the EITC and other programs to aid the working poor—albeit by diverting the money from existing programs he called “ineffective,” including helping poor families buy farmer’s market produce.
Its centerpiece, though, was something else entirely. Under Ryan’s plan, states would be allowed to entirely eliminate food stamps, federal housing aid and numerous other programs, replacing them with a single “Opportunity Grant” that local lawmakers could spend on whatever poverty programs they choose. The New York Times (7/25/14) described this as intended to “largely [shift] antipoverty efforts from the federal government to the states,” stressing that there would be no change in overall spending levels.
In fact, there was nothing new about this element of the plan: Ryan has been calling for replacing food stamps and other programs with a lump-sum block grant since at least 2011 (CBPP, 4/8/11). (The Times acknowledged only that the Opportunity Grants would “resemble” block grants, without describing how they worked.)
This is precisely what was done to cash assistance to the poor under the 1996 welfare reform law, with disastrous results: According to calculations by the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities (8/7/12), more than $12 billion a year in “welfare” spending now goes to plug state funding holes for such services as pre-K programs, child welfare administration and teen pregnancy prevention—more than is spent each year on actual cash aid to the poor.
“Do I think funding child welfare is important? Yes,” says CBPP vice president Donna Pavetti:
What Ryan did in his comments is to say they can’t use it for roads and bridges, it has to be used for poor people. But that doesn’t mean it has to be used for food, [or] it has to be used for housing. States could take the whole thing and say, “We want to provide pre-K—divert it there.”
And while Ryan’s plan wouldn’t cut poverty spending immediately, noted former White House economist Jared Bernstein (Washington Post, 7/24/14), replacing entitlements like food stamps with fixed grants would actually represent a huge cut if the economy were to take another nosedive:
Under the current system, SNAP (food stamps) responds to increased need by automatically increasing. That would largely not be the case here, as spending would be held at some baseline level.
At the same time, Ryan’s grants would only be “flexible” up to a point: Unlike the entitlements that would be eliminated under Ryan’s plan, Opportunity Grant funds would be newly subject to work requirements and time limits (Reuters, 7/24/14), just like welfare cash aid. “Food stamps, federal housing aid, utilities assistance and more don’t have work requirements—this would essentially mandate that states opting for the Opportunity Grant implement work requirements,” wrote the National Review on its blog (7/24/14)—something that the blog’s editor, Reihan Salam, chose not to mention at all in his column for the less-partisan Slate.
But then, the actual mechanics of how Ryan’s poverty plan would affect the poor didn’t interest many media commentators as much as its author’s shift in tone: Instead of stressing cuts to poverty programs as a way to balance the budget, Ryan was now pushing them as a way to tackle poverty. This, in the eyes of many news outlets, was a welcome shift toward “bipartisanship.”
“Ryan’s poverty plan mixes parties’ ideas,” trumpeted the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (7/24/14), saying its combination of EITC hikes with block grants “aspires to find some common ground between right and left.” “Creative ideas are rare in Washington,” asserted a Boston Herald editorial (7/28/14), adding that “Ryan’s approach destroys the Democratic narrative that Republicans want to permanently dismantle the safety net.”
In fact, Ryan’s plan was deemed so “bipartisan” that some worried aloud that it could hurt his standing with Republicans. Washington Post columnist Melinda Henneberger (7/24/14), citing Ryan’s statements that he wanted to “talk about how we can repair the safety net” and have the government “provide resources” to poor people, questioned whether it meant Ryan was giving up on seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.
And L.A. Times columnist Doyle McManus (7/27/14), under the headline “Has the GOP Gone Soft?,” singled out Ryan for proposing policies that “may face their toughest audience inside the GOP.”
For the media to evaluate economic policies based on whether they please both Democrats and Republicans is nothing new, as we’ve witnessed on battles over everything from the stimulus plan (FAIR Blog, 2/2/09) to the debt ceiling (FAIR Blog, 7/15/11). In fact, during the battles over welfare reform itself back in 1996, coverage largely focused on which bills could win the support of both parties’ leadership—with the San Francisco Chronicle editorial board (7/27/96) writing approvingly that Congress had “whipped itself into a fair frenzy of bipartisanship” with welfare reform and other bills.
The problem with bipartisanship as a moral touchstone should be obvious: Not only does it define sensible policies as being whatever the leadership of the Democrats and Republicans can agree on, but it allows one party to shift the debate by moving its own goalposts, and thus what counts as bipartisan.
While the Washington Post editorial board (7/24/14) singled out shifting money to EITC as the “most bipartisan part of Mr. Ryan’s plan,” the Times’ Irwin (7/24/14) acknowledged that it was hardly a new one for conservatives: “What was once a conservative idea, created in the Gerald Ford administration and expanded by President Reagan and both presidents Bush, is now more controversial on the right,” since it would eliminate income taxes for more poor Americans, making them what the Wall Street Journal (11/20/02) once derided as “lucky duckies.”
If the nation’s media were actually concerned about finding programs that help the poor, it’s not hard. For one, there’s the food stamp program that Ryan wants to eliminate, which has low overhead—95 percent of spending goes directly to benefits—and which by itself lifts nearly 5 million people out of poverty every year (New Republic, 8/16/13).
Or, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research’s Shawn Fremstad (The Hill, 7/22/14) noted, if Ryan truly wanted to boost the earnings of the working poor, instead of work requirements and EITC hikes, he could accomplish the same thing by raising the federal minimum wage, something that is supported by 80 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans (Hart Research, 7/23/13)—a bipartisan plan if ever there was one.
But then, helping the poor, or even pursuing poverty policies that most Americans can agree on, isn’t really the point for Ryan’s supporters. “Giving people money really does make them better-off: It’s better to have more money to buy groceries and other basic necessities than less,” admitted Salam. “But getting more money from the government doesn’t really make you less poor.”
In the world of punditry, then, it’s not about helping the poor afford groceries; it’s about making sure that they’ve earned the right to deserve groceries. That may be “bipartisan”—in the halls of Congress, anyway—but that doesn’t make it smart policy.
