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Paul Ryan, Big Brother, and the Safety Net
Paul Ryan is a smart and sincere man. Famously, he is one of the few people who understands the Federal budgeting process. (How profoundly disturbing is that?) He is a tireless proponent of changing the system from within, producing plans, budgets, and reform proposals that conform to the status quo while pushing the boundaries of what is considered acceptable. His latest self-appointed task is to show how Catholic Social Teaching is consistent with the Reformicon-Republican vision of America.
A recent foray in this direction is his article for America, ‘Preferential Options.’ (Ryan had the good fortune to have his article published alongside one titled ‘Dignity for All‘, penned by a progressive regurgitating talking-points writing under Rep. Joe Kennedy III’s name; American Thinker has a review.) In it, Ryan outlines one of his recent proposals for reform of the federal safety net.
It is the way Big Brother seems to be baked into this proposal that concerns me: not because I don’t think Paul Ryan is a committed small government reformer, but because I think he is. I fear the state has become too big, too powerful, and too pervasive for anyone — even someone with the right sort of worldview, like Ryan — to effectively shrink.
After a gesture towards the concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity — “Solidarity is a shared commitment to the common good…. Subsidiarity, meanwhile, is a prudent deference to the people closest to the problem.” — Ryan sets out the problem:
Each year, the federal government spends almost $800 billion on at least 92 different programs to help people in need. And yet the poverty rate is the highest in a generation… Today, technology is changing constantly—and with it the global economy. But… our safety net still works according to bureaucratic formulas set in the 20th century… [T]he federal government is… not helping people get back into the workforce; in fact, it is effectively encouraging them to stay out [because of the perverse incentives of means tested benefits].
Ryan offers part of a solution (“I do not have all the answers. Nobody does,” he writes): a pilot program to give States flexibility in getting people off welfare and into work.
But to qualify, states must meet certain requirements (they can be trusted only so far with the people’s money, I suppose). The most interesting of these is that “the state would have to offer at least two [welfare] service providers. The state welfare agency could not be the only game in town.” He goes on to suggest Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services as two possible providers a state might select. Delegating the actual service to competing non-profits, he explains, would ensure that the federal government would no longer “try to supplant our local communities. Instead it would try to support them.”
Next, Ryan suggests that states adopt a “case management” model. He gives an example:
Earlier this year, I saw the benefits of case management in action when I met a woman at Catholic Charities in Racine, Wis. When she first came to Catholic Charities, she was homeless and unemployed. So she sat down with a caseworker and put together a life plan. With the caseworker’s help, she and her fiancé each found work, and now she is earning her degree in health management.
A happy ending — to a spooky story.
Look at the outlines of this ‘reconception’ of the federal government’s role. The federal government is the inevitable source of welfare funds. It distributes them, with strings. The job of community organisations is to administer government funds, with all the problems of capture we have seen in healthcare and the ‘compassionate conservatism’ of the George W. Bush years. And if you are a person unfortunate enough to fall into the safety net, your way out is via a government licensed caseworker who will produce a government approved “life plan” for you. Oh, and all the while “a neutral third party would keep tabs on each provider and its success rate [via] key metrics”.
This is a fundamentally technocratic and centralized conception of solidarity and subsidiarity, where the relationship between government and supplicant citizen is one of patron and statistic.
And it may be the best we can reasonably hope for.
Image Credit: Christopher Halloran / Shutterstock.com
Published in General
Sorry for the late reply, but I find this particular flat tax myth particularly frustrating.
Flat taxes aren’t all that simple. They’re simpler, true, but calculating income is a significant chunk of the work done in calculating income tax. Furthermore, flat taxes might reduce fraud, but they’re not going to eliminate it. Most flat tax schemes in the US are meant to be close to revenue neutral, meaning that you wouldn’t reduce the incentive to fraud as in the Eastern European countries that implemented them. Fraud is almost half the IRS’ budget. You could cut the budget there a bit, but budget cuts in tax enforcement don’t necessarily improve the balance.
The IRS is split into the Large Business and International division (LB&I), the Small Business/Self-Employed (SB/SE) division, the Wage and Investment (W&I) division, and Tax Exempt & Government Entities (TE/GE) division. Of these, some of the third division would be hit (not capital gains and such). You wouldn’t be able to cut education for a bit, since this would be a new system that people would need educating about, but there’s every reason to believe that the people who process personal income tax receipts which are not suspected of fraud could be let go.
Cutting a small number of IRS jobs, though, is not the same as abolishing the IRS.
Some people, like Herman Cain, talk about abolishing the IRS and mean that they would relabel it. I don’t know if we have any candidates keen on that this cycle, but I strongly disagree with Aaron. I’d much rather have actual, substantive, cuts of the sort that can rescue the economy than headline symbolism to make us feel good while the economy sickens. It’s not as exciting, but exciting entertainment is not what I look for in a budget.
Republicans can, and have done so. Bush 41 turned Reagan’s deficits around with the 1990 OBRA, helped somewhat, in declining order, by Clinton’s 1993 and 1998 supplements. Most of the 1990 cuts were implemented. If you look at public spending over time, in 1982, when Reagan first had control over the budget, the US spent 35.26% of its GDP on government services. In 2007, the year before the recession hit, the US spent 34.17% of its GDP on government services. Those aren’t the kind of numbers you get from relentless, unstoppable, growth.
Spending went up when the Democrats had a filibuster proof supermajority, but it’s been coming down again. Maybe we won’t hit a 35.66% year in a little over a year, but it seems plausible that we will. If we win the Senate, we should be able to do even more than we did with just the House and an exceptionally competent senate negotiator in McConnell.
We do need entitlement reform; that remains a critical threat. We don’t particularly need to fire a few of the DofE employees and transfer the rest to other departments, although I favor doing so.
Because people who have paid the payroll tax their entire life think they are now “entitled” to get “their” money back in SS checks. The “entitlement” nature of the program was a stroke of genius, and makes the program extremely difficult to tinker with, much less abolish.
The Supreme Court also ruled that Social Security is constitutional, FWIW.
This. My point is not to defend the program on its merits, my point is that any politician who suggests even minor changes will stand accused of wanting to push grandma over a cliff.
Proposing that it should be implemented on the state level rather than the federal level goes well beyond “minor” changes.
I think our best hope politically is some sort of opt-out provision for younger workers. But then I don’t see how we can possibly afford to keep writing checks to retirees once younger workers start opting out.
While annual expenditures went down, did future obligations go up? There’s a difference between correcting a budget and simply pushing expenditures into future years. How many new programs, agencies, committees, and such were created during that time?
The expansion of government must be measured also by legal code and bureaucracy, not just financial planning. When will Republicans commit themselves to repealing more laws than they add? When will they exhibit the necessary PR management skill to cut Department of Education funding without appearing to diminish actual education?
It would be cheaper…
If you mean “was the population aging during that time, and gaining longer life expectancies” then, well, yes. Like I said, we need entitlement reform. Bush didn’t do that, but he did do welfare reform, working with Tommy Thompson to pilot it in Wisconsin, which provided some long term help. In 1990, the problem was the short -medium term deficit; entitlement reform was a good deal less urgent then than it is 24 years later. Bush won on most of the policy battles he fought, with Clinton building on them in the case of the NAFTA, deficit reduction, welfare reform, and WTO, but with the bulk of the work on each being done by Bush. He didn’t fight every battle, but he fought the ones that were pressing and took the opportunities available.
Similarly, the next President isn’t going to be able to get all the things that conservatives might want, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t win the battles that need to be won, the most important of which I’d say were entitlement reform, SCOTUS nominations, and taking a more effective role in the Middle East. Maybe labor reform. Perhaps your list is different. What I really don’t want is for him to prioritize symbolic acts, as if Obama had made Guantanamo his big push and lost his filibuster proof Obamacare window.
Is this because you’re thinking that there exists a meaningfully segregated fund or because you disagree with Ryan’s maths? I do think it’s worth noting that while the Ryan Plan promises to keep things constant for current retirees, moving everyone else onto a different system almost certainly makes it easier for a future President to means test even the current recipients. Part of the beauty of the Ryan Plan is that it changes the paradigm. The New Deal has an incredibly potent hold on a lot of Americans, and Ryan really undermines it.
That is what leftists thought before we passed welfare reform, but it turned out not to be true. It really is cheaper for America to have more Americans working. It’s generally better for the Americans, too.
Because I fear even Ryan’s plan is too ambitious to have much chance of passing.