Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., visited the House of Hope in Washington, D.C.’s, down-at-heel Anacostia neighborhood Tuesday to discuss what he called “a new approach to fighting poverty.”
He took the opportunity to talk about a 35-page plan that is part of the House Republicans’ policy agenda.
In fighting poverty, Ryan hopes to increase the focus on local civil society groups rather than leaning on a federal bureaucracy that has spent trillions of dollars over five decades having no impact on poverty — or, at least, no positive impact.
Ryan’s proposals include greater reliance on block grants to community groups, imposition of work requirements for those receiving welfare, and measuring programs’ success by how quickly they restore people to self-sufficiency and lift them out of the trap of government assistance.
Unfortunately, but justifiably, Ryan’s event and the substance behind it were supplanted in media coverage by controversy surrounding the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump’s comments about the judge presiding over the Trump University fraud trial.
But although Ryan’s work on poverty did not glean the attention it deserved this week, what he is doing is vital to the nation’s future.
Conservatism is a fount of policy ideas, and the Republican Party has many members, Ryan among them, sincerely interested in making America a better place. The speaker, and the conference he leads, are providing a necessary service with a sincere and comprehensive attempt to address big problems rather than merely profit from them politically.
In the best case scenario, Trump will embrace such ideas. (We hope he will also read the Trump Briefing Book being published weekly in Washington Examiner magazine). In the worst case, this work needs to be done anyway.
All current controversies aside, the political battle of ideas is thoroughly asymmetrical. As the Democrats’ agenda makes clear, the party of the left is seizing on the big problems less to provide solutions than to capitalize on race, class and gender-based resentments that are the by-product of those problems.
The always-exaggerated gender pay gap (a statistical artifact created by bad analysis to buttress bogus claims of a Republican “war on women”), the $15 minimum wage (a gimmick that wins votes but would kill jobs while lifting few people out of poverty) and federal regulation of transsexual bathroom use were never pressing issues, and still need not be. But they form the backbone of Democrats’ agenda because, despite being bad policy in each case, they are nevertheless understood to be useful for demagogues to drive voters to the polls.
Where there are real and consequential problems, such as an education system that fails generation after generation of schoolchildren, Democrats have been on the wrong side for decades because schoolchildren don’t vote or donate money, and teachers’ unions do.
Politics, at its best, is about presenting workable solutions to real problems, and not about easy crowd-pleasing promises that appeal to low self-interests. Ryan’s hope is that serious policy work will gain traction within Team Trump. It’s anyone’s guess whether it will, or whether Trump will get beyond his slogan, Make America Great Again, in discussing the economic empowerment of the poor.
That is probably out of Ryan’s hands. But good ideas are more enduring than political popularity, and their time, even if it is not now, will come.
