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Suzy Khimm questions how Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan will pay for itself without them:

While Ryan says his plan is budget neutral, it does not appear to account for the additional cost of hiring case managers, imposing new work requirements, and creating a new bureaucracy to administer them. That could mean less money for benefits and more for services to administer them, said Donna Pavetti of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). “There are things about it that sound good, but when you get to the reality of it, it just falls apart,” she said, adding that federal agencies have often struggled to allocate limited resources to staffing and find enough skilled case workers.

“This individualized case management, the work requirements – all of that is really resource intensive. How you’d do that without pulling from resources that help people meet their basic needs?” said Pavetti, CBPP’s vice-president for family income support policy. She points to a state-level program called Building Nebraska Families, which proved effective at moving more welfare recipients to work through intensive home visits, but which was also costly, averaging $7,400 to $8,300 per participant.

In a more comprehensive critique of the plan, Pavetti faults Ryan for ignoring the tradeoffs and limitations it implies:

The case of “Steven,” whom Ryan also highlights, makes the point as well.  A single 19-year-old non-custodial father, Steven is jobless and needs help to get off drugs.

Ryan’s proposal indicates that the Opportunity Grant would help him get drug treatment, move him into transitional housing (a form of subsidized housing), and get him help with attending parenting classes, finding work, and pursuing further education. These are all needed services, and limited funding keeps many people, particularly adults not living with children and who have the same needs as Steven, from obtaining that help.  But the Opportunity Grant structure would not provide additional resources (and as my colleague Robert Greenstein points out, could well provide fewer resources), so the only way to provide this richer set of supports for Steven is to cut the help that other families receive.

Running down how Paul Ryan proposes to keep the plan revenue neutral, Chuck Marr criticizes the cuts he would make to existing programs:

First, he would pay for it in part by eliminating the refundable part of the Child Tax Credit for several million children in low-income immigrant working families, including citizen children and “Dreamers,” thereby pushing many of them into — or deeper into — poverty. He would also eliminate the Social Services Block Grant, a flexible funding source that helps states meet the specialized needs of their most vulnerable populations, primarily low- and moderate-income children and people who are elderly or disabled.  (This program provides the kind of services and state flexibility that Ryan says we need more of when he promotes other parts of his plan that would enable states to cut food stamps and rental assistance and shift the resources to services.)

Also among the programs that Ryan would end is one that provides fresh fruits and vegetables primarily to children in schools in low-income areas.  By contrast, the President would pay for his EITC expansion by closing tax loopholes for wealthy taxpayers.

In Jared Bernstein’s take, the plan is a potentially costly solution in search of a problem:

The broader reason his plan is misguided is because Ryan starts from the mistaken assumption that the current U.S. anti-poverty system is broken, when in fact it’s actually quite effective, and not just in lowering market-based poverty rates, which it does by almost half, but also by investing in the longer term well-being of its beneficiaries. (Bob Greenstein provides the details here.)  That’s not good enough by a long shot, but neither is it motivation to radically change the system in ways that introduce a dangerous set of new risks, as this new plan does, I fear. …

The implication here is that while a faceless bureaucrat in D.C. can’t possibly evaluate your nutritional needs, for example, a bureaucrat in Albany or Sacramento can easily and efficiently do so. And while the plan requires state officials to use the resources for poverty reduction, and not, say, tax reduction, consolidation also raises serious risks of diverting funds to areas of anti-poverty interventions that state officials favor vs. areas of need.

In his first take on Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan, Douthat welcomes the  Wisconsin congressman into the fold of the reform conservatives:

Taken as a whole, this document basically eliminates the daylight that existed between “Ryanism” and reform conservatism on safety net reform. As I discussed two weeks ago, the reformocon quasi-movement has tended to view some of the projected discretionary cuts in the Ryan budgets as implausible and/or unnecessary, and generally prefers a revenue-neutral overhaul of the safety net that spends more on some programs (an E.I.T.C. expansion or wage subsidy, most notably) while cutting others and devolving others to the states. That’s basically what Ryan is proposing here, in a more detailed form than we’ve seen from any other figure of his stature to date, which means that there is now pretty clear unity (on this set of issues) between the House Budget chairman and the wonks who have praised him on entitlement reform, health care reform and other issues in the past.

Yuval Levin also situates the plan within the reformocon agenda and argues that it speaks to the health of the GOP. “Indeed,” he remarks, “it is becoming harder all the time to sustain the proposition that congressional Republicans aren’t engaged in the country’s major policy debates”:

In just the past year, we have seen proposed two major tax reforms, several pro-market Obamacare alternatives, several major safety-net-reform proposals, a higher-ed-reform proposal, several fundamental federal transportation-funding reforms, and several sentencing-reform proposals, among others. Some Republicans have also begun at last to take on corporate welfare, to rethink financial regulation, and to propose piecemeal immigration reforms that would address key problems discretely rather than in an all-or-nothing package that looks worse than nothing. Some of these proposals have been offered as bills, some have been more like policy papers, and of course none has gotten anywhere near the president’s desk. But has there been another twelve-month period when the minority party in Washington has put forward so many elements of a comprehensive domestic agenda?

The Bloomberg View editors give Ryan a pat on the back for rethinking his views on poverty and the safety net:

With this proposal, Ryan has returned to the fold of the late Representative Jack Kemp of New York, his mentor, who wanted to cut spending but also reduce poverty. Like Kemp, Ryan wants the government to help the poor yet still hold them accountable. There is and always will be a tension inherent in government programs for the poor — between providing assistance and discouraging dependence. For too long, the Republican Party has paid too much attention to the latter at the expense of the former. One promise of Ryan’s plan is that it may shift his party’s focus.

Vinik is a bit suspicious of this sudden transformation, asking: “Who is the real Paul Ryan?”:

Is he a deficit hawk who panders to the far right? Or is he a pragmatic policymaker that wants to increase antipoverty spending? Ryan’s supporters say that he’s the latter and that his budget wasn’t his exact position, but represented the opinion of the entire House Republican caucus. … In effect, then, Ryan is saying, “Ignore my past four budgets and the radical spending cuts in them. That was a show for the far right. I actually want to increase spending on anti-poverty programs.” Of course, Ryan won’t actually admit that, because it would infuriate the far right. But make no mistake, that’s what Ryan was implicitly saying Thursday.

But Ezra Klein urges Democrats to play ball with the rebooted Ryan:

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.

This plan, for instance, marks an important point of agreement between Ryan and the Obama administration: their proposals for expanding the EITC are almost identical — where, previously, the Obama administration wanted to expand the EITC and Ryan wanted to cut it. Their disagreement now is about how to pay for expanding the EITC. That’s a gap that should, under normal political circumstances, be bridgeable.

“It’s important to know,” Neil Irwin stresses, “that none of this is remotely a repudiation of conservative ideals”:

The E.I.T.C. is a version of a “negative income tax,” first imagined by the libertarian economist Milton Friedman as a way of helping the working poor with fewer downsides than conventional welfare programs, like large administrative expense and the creation of incentives for people not to work. Mr. Ryan even proposes paying for the increase in the tax credit by eliminating programs he calls ineffective, including the Fresh Fruits and Vegetables Program and the Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program. But a funny thing has happened over the past generation. What was once a conservative idea, created in the Gerald Ford administration and expanded by President Reagan and both Presidents Bush, is now more controversial on the right.

(Correction: this post originally referred to Ryan as a Senator. Not yet.)

Well, at least if you receive public assistance he does. Callie Gable outlines the main features of the anti-poverty plan Paul Ryan released yesterday, the centerpiece of which is the “Opportunity Grant”:

The Opportunity Grant would consolidate several existing aid programs into one funding stream to states, which states would then be required to offer to recipients of means-tested welfare benefits as part of a consolidated recovery and mobility plan. Disadvantaged Americans would each be [paired] with an individual case worker, with whom they would agree on personalized short and long-term goals (e.g., apply for child support or begin drug counseling) set out in “contracts.” Most important, Ryan is building on the success of the 1990s welfare-reform laws here: A key element of the contracts would be encouraging work, which, currently, only cash welfare requires. Food stamps, federal housing aid, utilities assistance, and more don’t have work requirements — this would essentially mandate that states opting for the Opportunity Grant implement work requirements.

Tyler Cowen is skeptical:

I’m not crazy about the complicated plan to monitor the lives of the poor in more detail (“…work with families to design a customized life plan to provide a structured roadmap out of poverty.”)  And my biggest conceptual objection is the heavy stress on block grants and letting the states figure things out. I’m not opposed to that in principle, and I might even favor it, but I think it’s often the lazy man’s way of avoiding talk about difficult trade-offs.

I’d like to see a possible plan for just a single state, or better yet two or three, that is supposed to represent an improvement.  That shouldn’t be too hard to do, or if it is maybe the states can’t do it either. It’s not as if fifty states are giving us a market-based discovery process, as the rhetoric sometimes implies.  Furthermore we have a bunch of large states with ongoing bad governance, such as CA, NY, and IL, and maybe the federal government really can do better for those places.

Other critics are less charitable. “Oh goodness,” Annie Lowrey exclaims, “let’s run through the ways that this is condescending and wrongheaded”:

First, it presupposes that the poor somehow want to be poor; that they don’t have the skills to plan and achieve and grow their way out of poverty. The truth is that many do have the skills, and what they lack are resources — say, enough money to pay for a decent daycare for your infant so you can work a full-time job, or cash to get your car fixed so you don’t have to take the bus to your overnight gig at Walmart. Ryan is not putting more resources on the table, as far as I can tell, and thus for many families he will not be addressing the root problem.

Second, it isolates the poor. Middle-class families don’t need to justify and prostrate themselves for tax credits. Businesses aren’t required to submit an “action plan” to let the government know when they’ll stop sucking the oxygen provided by federal grant programs. The old don’t need to show receipts demonstrating their attendance at water aerobics in order to get Medicare. Nope, it’s just the poor who need to answer for their poverty. That strikes me as flatly wrong.

To be fair, she adds, there’s “a lot for liberals to like in here, and there is a significant amount of evidentiary backing for some of his policy proposals”:

Ryan proposes a number of common-sense reforms with broad bipartisan appeal: reducing licensing requirements, getting rid of kinks in anti-poverty programs and the tax code that create a disincentive for families to earn more; prison and sentencing reform, as well as recidivism reduction; supporting evidence-based policies; moving to a system that addresses poverty individually and comprehensively. I especially like the idea of providing more aid to the poor in the form of cash. (Money is more valuable when it’s fungible, and the poor can decide how best to use it.)

Emily Badger expands on Lowrey’s criticism:

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 in the economy, in the education system, in the housing market. 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. Princeton psychologist Eldar Shfair and Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan have argued that the stress of living in poverty sucks up mental bandwidth the rest of us take for granted. That mental tax means that a mom may forget to take her medication, or to pay a utility bill on time, with each mistake yielding a cascade of other problems. This means that living in poverty is like living without room for error. It also means that we should design anti-poverty programs that are flexible and forgiving, not punitive and deadline-oriented.

But Reihan defends Ryan’s paternalistic approach:

But wait a second, you might say—Social Security beneficiaries aren’t required to present a plan! Why should poor people be treated differently than workers who’ve been making Social Security contributions for decades, and who are collecting benefits at the end of a long working life? There’s actually a pretty straightforward reason: Social Security is designed for old people. No two old people are the same, to be sure, but they all have the same basic problem: They are too old to work, or to work very long hours. That’s a problem we can deal with.

People with low or no earnings, in contrast, face diverse obstacles. Some need short-term help to, say, fix their car, which will allow them to commute to work, or to make a deposit on a rental apartment. Others don’t have the skills they need to earn enough to support themselves and, for whatever reason, will have a very hard time acquiring them. Sure, you could give both kinds of people food stamps and call it a day. Or you could recognize that one-size-fits-all programs don’t do justice to the ways in which individual circumstances vary.

Waldman’s beef, meanwhile, is with the concept of block-granting welfare funds:

This sounds reasonable until you start to think about how it would play out. In practice, it’s likely that the states most eager to sign on would be precisely those that aren’t too happy about the ways the federal government provides benefits now. The devil would be in the details; what if a state decided to take its entire block grant and devote it to giving lectures to poor people on why they should get married? There could be a lot of needs going unmet while states implement their ideologically-driven visions of how poverty ought to be addressed.

Drum also has his doubts:

Overall, my initial reaction is that I like the idea of more rigorously testing different anti-poverty approaches, but I’m pretty skeptical of Ryan’s obvious preference for eventually eliminating most federal anti-poverty programs and simply sending the money to the states as block grants. This is a longtime conservative hobbyhorse, and not because states are models of efficiency. They like it because it restricts spending, especially during recessions when federal entitlement programs automatically increase but block grants don’t. That may please the tea party set, but it’s bad for poor people and it’s bad for the economy, which benefits from countercyclical spending during economic downturns.

Dylan Matthews voxplains the other main component of the plan, which entails an expansion of the earned income tax credit. In another post on the subject, Reihan comments on this aspect:

Ryan has not only embraced expanding the EITC for childless workers — he has largely embraced President Obama’s proposal for doing so, the difference being that he favors funding it via different means, the details of which will (of course) have to be fleshed out in the future. The EITC is not a perfect program, and there is an ongoing debate over how exactly it impacts the labor market. There is room to reform the EITC. Yet it is hard to deny that for workers with modest skills who’ve found that the market value of their labor has been under severe pressure, it has been a lifeline. Ryan has, in this discussion draft at least, chosen to accept the EITC’s flaws for now and to expand it. When asked to put up or shut up on raising the returns to work for low-wage workers, he has decided to put up. That strikes me as a pretty big deal. Where Ryan leads, let’s hope other GOP lawmakers will follow.

Highlighting a less prominent feature of the plan, Sullum cheers Ryan’s embrace of sentencing reform:

Under current law, Ryan notes in the paper outlining his proposals, “a single gram of crack cocaine could be all that separates a convict from a less-than-five-year sentence and a 40-year sentence. Rigid and excessive mandatory sentences for low-level drug offenders, like these, may add to an already over-crowded prison system without appreciably enhancing public safety.” Ryan also endorsed the Public Safety Enhancement Act, which would let nonviolent offenders leave prison early if they complete evidence-based reintegration programs. “Here’s the point,” he said in his speech. “Nonviolent, low-risk offenders—don’t lock them up and throw away the key. Get them in counseling; get them in job training; help them rejoin and contribute to our society.”

(Photo: By Douglas Graham/CQ Roll Call via Getty)