Monday, July 28, 2014

The Coy Keynesian Nod in Paul Ryan’s Anti-Poverty Plan

Andrew Flowers writes:
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan unveiled a new anti-poverty reform plan Thursday titled “Expanding Opportunity in America.” The Wisconsin Republican’s multipronged proposal includes expanded tax credits, attacks on regulation and criminal justice reform. But the plan’s centerpiece is the “Opportunity Grant,” a rolling up of nearly a dozen federal anti-poverty programs into one holistic subsidy for states who chose to opt into the pilot program.
The Opportunity Grant functions much like a block grant, when a fixed set of money is given to each state with loose guidelines from the federal government...Ryan’s plan coyly alludes to a Keynesian solution. In a section called  “Counter-Cyclicality and Welfare Reform,” the plan outlines ways that Opportunity Grant funding could be tied to economic conditions. But, rather strangely, it says that a “pilot project, by its nature, could not include a counter-cyclical component.”
Oh yeah, Paul Ryan is a real small government guy. Give me a break.

Rolling up of programs into big gobs is NOT reducing government. It's typical political posturing by Ryan as a fighter against big government to fool the headline reading masses. And Flowers is correct in calling out Ryan's Keynesian interventionist wording, because Ryan, when all is said an done, is nothing but a Keynes-type central planning tinkerer, without the mustache.

-RW

1 comment:

  1. The worst enemy of a major reform is a minor reform, as Murray Rothbard correctly argued in The Ethics of Liberty. In Ryan's defense, however, a deliberate reallocation of power out of DC and into the states is decentralization consistent with our battered 10th amendment.

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