Overshadowed by high-profile legislative efforts on trade, taxes and other hot-button items, House Republicans have slowly been building the case for welfare reform.
A House Ways and Means subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, is set to hold a hearing Thursday morning with the Agriculture subcommittee responsible for food stamps on aspects of welfare programs that can discourage work.
It will be one of a half-dozen such hearings on the welfare system so far this year.
Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, made anti-poverty policy a focus during the last two years of his tenure as chairman of the House Budget Committee, last summer announcing a plan to overhaul the safety net with the goal of making it encourage work more. On Wednesday he discussed his intentions for reforming poverty policy at an unusual appearance at a TED talk hosted at the Newseum in Washington.
It’s impossible to say that the War on Poverty is “anything but a stalemate,” Ryan said, arguing that the federal government’s efforts may have relieved poverty but haven’t boosted mobility.
Ryan discussed the problem created with poverty programs for which people qualify based on income. If people earn more, Ryan noted, they can lose those benefits, such as housing or health care benefits, creating a “trap” for them.
Those implicit marginal tax rates, as economists call them, are an often-cited concern of conservatives and will be featured at the hearing Thursday.
“The simple fact is that under current welfare program rules, more work doesn’t always make families better off,” Boustany said in introducing the hearing. “This poverty trap may be unintended, but for those in its grip it is all too real.”
One of the witnesses at the hearing will be Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist who has written extensively on implicit marginal tax rates created by government programs. Notably, his work has factored into Congressional Budget Office analyses of Obamacare’s effect on workers.
Another will be Urban Institute analyst Eugene Steuerle, who has drawn attention to the disincentives to work created by income requirements in programs such as welfare and housing assistance.
Republican worries about implicit marginal tax rates, however, are often dismissed by Democrats as excuses to cut programs that conservatives don’t like.
Ryan anticipated that criticism Wednesday, saying that his plan would not cut a penny. “This is not about saving money. This is about saving lives,” he said.
Ryan called for measuring programs based on the outcomes of the people enrolled in them, not by the amount of money spent on them or the number of beneficiaries. With Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, he has introduced legislation that would establish a commission to study the use of data in evaluating programs and tax provisions.
