Paul Ryan's New, "More Serious" Poverty Plan. What No Republican Gets

Alan: People conditioned by trans-generational poverty are often so damaged by the cultural collapse around them that any proposed remedy based on "personal responsibility," "will power" and "striving after carrots" is not going to work. Millions of people (perhaps tens of millions of people) are, in effect, "wards of the state" and will be discharged from custodial care as slowly as car crash paralytics are mainstreamed back to their communities. And even then, only with lots of help. At bedrock, American conservatives are desperate to exempt themselves from unconditional responsibility to "the refractory poor" by insisting that poor people are responsible for themselves.
The paralytic dysfunction wrought by trans-generational poverty is reminiscent of PTSD: lots of soldiers get it, while others - under identical circumstances - do not. To spotlight the health of the latter does not disprove the crippling disintegration of the former. 



Like prayer, ideology is not enough.

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What Ryan still misses in his new, more-serious plan. "An incentive system like this assumes that end goals such as employment are entirely within the control of a poor people if they would just try hard enough. This notion fails to recognize that, while personal responsibility is important, so too are structural obstacles....We can hardly expect personal effort alone to overcome poverty without systemic investment on society's part on the fronts beyond a poor person's control. The idea of a contract with punitive benchmarks also ignores lessons that researchers have learned about the effects of poverty on cognition." Emily Badger in The Washington Post.

Ezra Klein: Democrats should welcome Ryan's plan. "The constant thread in Ryan's career isn't his concern for budgets but his efforts to overhaul the safety net. But Ryan has a quality most reformers don't: he is exceptionally good at building consensus within the Republican Party. And that's what makes his poverty plan so important: Ryan is ratifying a shift in the GOP's focus away from the kind of policies contained in his budgets and towards the kind of policies contained in his poverty plan (and that have also been offered by Sen. Marco Rubio, Sen. Mike Lee, and others). This is a conversation that should, in theory, offer much more opportunity for common ground with Democrats." Ezra Klein in Vox.

Another idea: Why not a guaranteed income for everyone? "Eliminating poverty seems like an impossibly utopian goal, but it's actually pretty easy: we can just give people enough money that they're above the poverty line. That idea, known as a basic income, has been around forever, but it's made a comeback in recent years. And it's a sign of how far it's come that opponents of the idea are beginning to feel the need to make arguments against it....The experiments raise valid worries, but they hardly herald doom, and still suggest that a negative income tax could eliminate poverty at a manageable cost." Dylan Matthews in Vox.

"Nixon's Guaranteed Minimum Income Proposal Gets New Traction"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/05/nixons-guaranteed-minimum-income.html