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The War on the Poor: Donald Trump's win opens the door to Paul Ryan's vision for America

Updated by Dylan Matthews@[e-mail] Nov 22, 2016, 8:50am EST


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Donald Trump has won the White House. But it’s Republicans who have won Congress, and it’s House Speaker Paul Ryan who, in practice, leads those Republicans. And so for all the effort being made to divine what Trump really, truly thinks, the reality is it may matter less than what Ryan thinks — and that’s a question we already know the answer to.

Ryan has spent the better part of a decade crafting a coherent, sweeping agenda to reform and slash the American safety net. His agenda of slicing and dicing programs targeting America’s poor isn’t the agenda Trump ran on. But it’s one to which he’ll default. He’s already endorsed Ryan’s plans on Medicaid and has attacked food stamps at length. His vice president, Mike Pence, is a longtime friend and congressional ally of Ryan’s who if anything has argued for larger cuts than the ones Ryan wants.

What’s more, Trump enters office as a historically unpopular president distrusted by his own party in Congress. He’s not in a position to dictate to them what he wants. To keep them on his side, he’s going to have to do what they want. And what they want — and have repeatedly voted to pass in recent Congresses — is Ryan’s budget.

This is a disaster for America’s poor.

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Ryan doesn’t just repeal Obamacare — he also slashes deep into Medicaid

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Ending America’s last line of defense against hunger and deprivation

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This is a chart of extreme poverty — the share of people living on less than $2 a day in cash income — from 1996 to 2011. It was put together by the University of Michigan's Luke Shaefer and Johns Hopkins's Kathryn Edin .. http://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9248801/extreme-poverty-2-dollars , America's leading researchers on extreme poverty. The gap you see between the solid and dotted black lines is the difference between the extreme poverty rate not counting food stamps and the rate counting food stamps. Roughly 2.1 percent of households with children in 2011 were kept afloat, barely out of the $2-a-day range, if you count food stamps. That's a little under 800,000 families, representing millions of children. If food stamps are cut, they could fall back into extreme poverty.

The two faces of Ryanism

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More than two-thirds of the cuts in Ryan’s last budget .. http://www.cbpp.org/research/ryan-plan-gets-69-percent-of-its-budget-cuts-from-programs-for-people-with-low-or-moderate .. came from reduced funding for programs for low-income people, like Medicaid or food stamps. In some sense, that’s out of necessity. Ryan, like most Republicans, wants to increase defense spending. He refuses to raise taxes. He is willing to propose reforms to Social Security and Medicare but loath to actually argue for reductions in spending, and the cuts he does suggest tend to take a decade or more to kick in. The largest program category in the budget left, once the military and old-age social insurance programs are out of the way, is programs for the poor.

When forced to defend these cuts, Ryan typically denies they’re cuts at all (they’re merely reductions in outlay growth, he says) and then insists that the programs being cut are hotbeds of wasteful spending that fail to meaningfully cut poverty. “The federal government provides an open-ended match to what the states spend on Medicaid, which gives them a perverse incentive to spend as much money as possible,” his staff explained .. http://budget.house.gov/fy2015/settingtherecordstraight.htm .. upon announcing the FY2015 budget.

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Ryan’s cuts versus Ryan’s reforms

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This is just what Ryan wants for the poor. There’s more for everyone else.


The dream team. Zach Gibson/Getty Images

And that’s just the beginning.

Ryan’s plan for the poor’s safety net doesn’t include his most famous budget proposal, which would see Medicare turned into a version of Obamacare .. http://www.vox.com/2016/4/12/11407982/paul-ryan-donald-trump-moderate , with seniors given a choice between subsidized private coverage and traditional single-payer Medicare. It doesn’t include his 2004 plan with then-Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) to privatize Social Security .. http://www.cbpp.org/research/the-ryan-sununu-social-security-plan , a plan so large in scale that that the private accounts it created would wind up owning every stock and bond in the United States.

It also doesn’t include his tax plan, which would cost at least $3 trillion over the first decade and by its second decade would give 99.6 percent of its cuts .. http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/analysis-house-gop-tax-plan/full .. to the top 1 percent. Ryan’s plan is structured such that it likely would not cause the tax increase for single parents that Donald Trump’s tax plan would .. http://www.vox.com/2016/9/26/12991790/donald-trump-tax-hike-middle-class — but the upper middle class, the rich but not superrich, those making $150,000 to $300,000 or thereabouts, would see large tax increases, of $2, 000 to $3,000 a year on average.

[HOWEVER]

There’s reason to be skeptical that Ryan will succeed in reforming Social Security and Medicare, which Trump campaigned aggressively on preserving and not cutting. The politics around taxes is also tricky, as Senate Finance Committee Chair Orrin Hatch is insisting on doing tax reform on a bipartisan basis .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/11/17/tax-reform-shaping-up-to-be-one-of-washingtons-first-fights-under-trump/?postshare=5201479487113694&tid=ss_tw , which rules out the sweeping cuts for the rich that Ryan and Trump both want.

Even on programs for the poor, you can expect opposition to pop up as these ideas become actual bills. Providers and nursing homes that depend on Medicaid dollars will fight block granting the program. SNAP cuts will face resistance from companies like Walmart, where SNAP dollars are largely spent, and whose employees often depend upon the program. This is in addition to liberal groups, organized labor, and other traditional advocacy organizations that can be expected to fight cuts.

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Watch: Repealing Obamacare could change millions of lives

[ a long and despairing read ]

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/11/22/13641654/paul-ryan-trump-poverty-safety-net

.. no doubt American poor will suffer much worse under the Trump presidency, though some light
down the road exists in the stat that college educated people were Trump's particular sore point ..

America's Educational Divide Put Trump in the White House
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