paul ryan age

♪ [theme music] ♪ >>> welcome to "potus 2016," where we call the presidential horse and race and pour cold, hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric.

i'm brian lehrer. house speaker paul ryan's antipoverty blueprint. it's a plan he hopes congress and the next president will embrace. to what extent is it a smarter approach to

lifting people out of poverty and to what extent- in the words of house minority leader nancy pelosi, the democrat, the same callous trickle down policies the g.o.p. has been pushing for years? we'll address that question

in a few minutes. but first, where are we in the political steeplechase? yes, time for the horserace. donald trump may be gaining some support as a result of the

massacre in orlando. the mass shooting quickly propelled national security into the spotlight and according to the polling group morning consult, 29% of voters,

almost 3 out of 10, now say security is their top voting issue, at least in u.s. senate and congressional races. this is a 10 percentage point increase since

early june and almost tied with economics as the top concern now. according to morning consult's numbers, trump has gained in head to head polling in

recent weeks, thanks to undecided voters being pulled in from the sidelines, partly thanks to this. hillary clinton's numbers, on the other hand, have remained steady

during june. however, real clear politics' polling averages show her maintaining a considerable lead over trump. as of june 21st, clinton, the blue

line across the top, bests trump, in red, on average by 6 personal points. and judging by real clear politics' average trend line, the orlando event does seems to have helped stem

trump's free fall since his racist remarks against federal judge gonzalo curiel who is presiding on a trump university fraud case. trump the businessman boasts of his business successes, but trump the candidate has

money troubles. this past monday it was surprising to many to see just how little cash trump has raised for his campaign during the month of may. in a filing made

monday, trump's campaign reported just $1.3 million in the bank, while coffers towered over trump's at $42 million. trump's tiny tally also underscored just how modest trump's

election campaign effort is when he needs to be pushing hard in swing states. trump currently employs about 70 staffers compared to clinton's 700. adding to trump's

troubles are a small group of dump trump republicans who believe they can wrestle the nomination from his hands next month at the convention.

the likelihood of that happening remains slim. but the idea would be a rules change where all delegates could vote their conscience on the

first ballot. but such a rule would need to be approved by a majority of those delegates, many of whom were trump delegates in the first place. they'd vote on the floor at

the convention. wrangling so many delegates would not be an easy task when such a monumental rule change would be the clearest case yet of the establishment

going against the will of voting republicans. however, there are still a few weeks before cleveland and the numbers of delegates interested in

hearing about such a plan have reportedly been climbing steadily. at this stage in the game though, which may be trump's weakest moment, the anti-trump movement lacks a candidate,

organization, and big donor backing. all right. time to dive into one policy issue, one part of the human condition that every president must

grapple with: poverty. recently the speaker of the house, paul ryan, revealed the outlines of a republican antipoverty plan that he hopes congress and the

next president will turn into law. it is the first of six blueprints that make up the g.o.p.'s better way agenda which will address various issues. the broad recommendations on poverty

include: more emphasis on work, streamlining myriad federal programs, giving states more flexibility, funding programs proven to work and defunding those proven not to. paul ryan. >> we believe that

the status quo does not have to persist. we believe that this country cannot really harness and realize the beautiful american idea that the

condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. we can't get that right if we don't fix this problem. >> our first guest thinks the paul ryan

anti-poverty blueprint has merit. he is robert doar, a fellow in poverty studies at the american enterprise institute, the conservative think tank. mr. doar was commissioner

of new york city's human resources administration where he oversaw a 25% reduction in the city's welfare caseload and the transition to work of a half million public assistance applicants and recipients under mayor michael bloomberg.

he joins us via skype from washington, d.c. welcome. >> thanks, brian, good to be back with you. i remember some good talks on your radio show in the old days.

>> that's right. when we were doing it for the new york city local audience. now, tell us for the nation, your understanding of the heart of the ryan plan.

>> well, it's a focus on work. it was discussed in the republican conference and among americans generally that our programs aren't doing enough to

help people into employment. and employment is really the best way out of poverty. there's an emphasis on greater focus on work in the food stamp program

and attention to other programs where employment is a second priority. i think speaker ryan is saying it should always be a first priority. >> does that

basically mean work in exchange for benefits, like the old welfare system before the mid-'90s didn't require work so much as the one after clinton and

gingrich came to that agreement? >> well, for people like me who have actually run these programs, it doesn't always have to have a failure to comply

with work requirement leads to the ending of benefits. you can reduce the benefits, you can have a program that expects work, you can tell people that that's

what we expect them to do and make it sort of part of the daily case management of the program. but there are gradations to how you bring greater

focus to work. the problem for some programs, for some people, i think it's too many, there's no attention to work at all. the number of individuals who

oversee these benefits and report no earnings but are able bodied, are working age adults, has grown dramatically in the united states. that's not a good thing.

it wasn't good in new york city, where food stamp benefits are supplementing the wages of low wage household heads. i like that idea, but i get worried

about households where they're coming in and asking for food stamps but they're not asking for anything else, and they say they're not working.

that family may be in distress. we need to be talking with those families and getting them into >> is this premised on the old conservative

principle of the undeserving poor, the poor are poor because they lack the proper character traits, rather than because the economy leaves

people behind? >> no. i mean, that's just a cliche, brian, i'm kind of disappointed that you would resort to that. the fact is in places like new

york city, there are entry level employment opportunities, they do exist. for whatever reasons, people are not taking advantage of them. but they may be in

distress. the fact of the matter is people have earnings, and they can supplement those earnings with other forms of support and

certainly be above the poverty line. that's better for families, for children, better for them. ryan is reacting to a concern that since welfare

reform was passed in 1996, in more recent years we've gotten away from that requirement or expectation that people really need to be helped into the labor market.

i think that's a legitimate concern. and the numbers show it, that it's a legitimate concern. >> but you, i believe, supported food stamps and the earned income

tax credit, for example, as the kinds of supports that would help people transitioning to work. i think you just described food stamps in that

context. but ryan's budgets over the years have been partly about reducing the amount of federal spending on poverty alleviation programs like medicade and food stamps

and turning them into state level programs and letting the states decide more who is actually poor and who is deserving or undeserving. so does the ryan poverty program

continue that trend of how his budgets have been characterized? >> well, in the past, when you're the budget director, the chairman of ways

and means, you're involved with a budget negotiation with the president and senate, you sit in a negotiating position. and that is not necessarily where

you end up. holding the ryan budgets out, when he's talking about a poverty initiative, i think it's a little bit of bait and switch. he has in the

past, although it was not exclusively in this most recent report, talked about giving flexibility to the states by merging federal funding

streams and providing on an experimental basis willing states to take these large streams and use them in the way they think is best. brian, i ran the

medicare staff and the cash welfare program, and the program for domestic violence victims, all of which had different federal funding streams.

frankly, i think mayor bloomberg and other creative mayors would have wanted greater ability to merge those funding streams instead of having to deal

with these silo'd programs that have different rules, different offices, different eligibility criteria. that doesn't make any sense. often when i've

heard democrats, and they're not talking about paul ryan's plan, they've said that kind of thinking is good thinking but all of a sudden when it

comes from the house who represents the republican conference, it's not a good idea, it's nervewracking. it's an experiment. it would allow states the

opportunity to take these various funding streams and merge them and create a program that serves the person where they are, not as a recipient of

medicare or a recipient of food stamps. >> i think the democrats would tend to say that might be all well and good under an earnest leader like michael

bloomberg when he was mayor of new york. it might look very different when you're talking about the governor of alabama or mississippi or texas or pick your

state, where the politics of poverty alleviation may be very, very different and there might be a popular movement to leave more of the poor people behind.

what about that concern? >> someone worried about local flexibility might also say, not under such great leadership under the mayor of detroit or chicago.

you're fair to say there's a concern leadership, that's fair. but i think blue states have as much trouble with necessarily getting it right as red states.

so, you know, but my view is, i think you're right, that is a valid concern. the way you handle that is hold the states accountable with performance

measures, with potential fiscal penalties, with benefits, offer them bonuses if they do well. in some respects the snap program has a lot of state flexabilty and states are able to

do certain things under those programs. i think that done right, you can have greater flexibility for states and not have this sort of race to the bottom

that you're concerned about. i'm concerned about it too, and it does happen, by the way, not just in mississippi and alabama, but also in chicago and detroit.

>> there are some critiques of the ryan antipoverty program that also come from the right. i'm going to cite oren cass from the manhattan institute who

criticizes the ryan plan for not going far enough. he says the plan continues to rely on a federal bureaucracy that often fails. and he cites the

oversight mandated, i guess that's what you're just referring to, with holding states and localities accountable under this. the oversight mandated in granting states more power and

he writes, quote, the problem is compounded in the overwhelming number of process oriented recommendations. ryan goes on to detail four

proposals that entail some combination of reducing duplication and redundancy. in other words, there's a lot of detailed federal

oversight, more than some conservatives would have liked to see. >> i think that's true. i'm a republican or conservative that does recognize that

federal oversight is here to stay and we're going to have to recognize that. i think to some extent speaker ryan deserves credit for not putting out an

idea that is a beautiful, pretty, conservative utopian, but will never happen. matter is, if you want to move these programs in a successful and

politically pragmatic way, you have to get into the details and deal with the world as it is, not as how you might want it to be if you're oren cass,

who i like very much, i think he writes very well on these issues, but i think he's not practical politically in his criticisms. >> you mentioned tax credit as

something you've used in conjunction with work, that is a work support program. and from what i've read, speaker ryan is not forthrightly in

support of maintaining the eitc, that that's starting to fall out of favor in republican circles when that was more of a bipartisan- or more popular on a bipartisan basis because it was seen as a

work support program. now it's start to lose favor in the g.o.p. is that something you see happening? >> the eitc is a longstanding bipartisan program which both

republicans and democrats have supported. speaker ryan last year said he was ideas to expand it for adults who don't get very much from the

earned income tax credit. >> we're talking about earned income tax credit, refining the definition. for people who are working but not making much money, the government

winds up actually supplementing their income so they get an earned income tax credit. they can't get a tax rebate because they don't make enough to owe tax.

>> yes, and it's a quite substantial, for a single mom with two kids it's about $5,000 in new york city. when you add in the state and city earned income tax credits.

very generous program and it's probably our largest and most successful antipoverty program. speaker ryan recognizes that. he knows there are populations that

could benefit from those programs' expansion. the problem is a serious error rate. up to 20% of the payments that go out have been found by the irs

in audit after audit to have gone inappropriately. when you're in the business of running these programs, you can't ask for an expansion of a

program with that big an error rate. speaker ryan and other republicans have backed off a little on this idea of expanding tax credit until they find a way to

solve this error rate problem. and i think there will be more discussion about it, we'll put out a paper in the next month or so about ways to address of error rate.

i think that's going to be part of any discussion of how we expand or increase the >> can you stay with us while we bring on a columbia university

professor who studied some existing poverty programs and give us your feedback? >> sure. >> time for evidence-based politics where we pour some cold,

hard facts on the overheated fundamental to the gop's thinking about poverty is the conviction that past antipoverty programs have failed.

but have they? joining us now, christopher wimer, co-director of the center on poverty and social policy at columbia university. he and his colleagues in new

york have done research that suggests poverty has dropped since the 1960s, and would have been drastically higher were it not for existing programs.

he's co-author of a recent working paper about historical trends in poverty. welcome to the program. >> thanks for having me. >> what question were you trying to answer with this study?

>> so we've know for decades that the official measure of poverty in the united states is widely regarded as being fundamentally flawed. people have known that for decades,

we didn't invent the reasons why we think that's true. there have been recent efforts to improve the measurement of poverty in this country and so in 2011 the u.s. census bureau and

the bureau of labor statistics began releasing what's called an improved measure of poverty in this country. so we took a look at that with my colleagues at columbia and said, what happens if we

take that back in time, does that change the long term trends we've seen? >> all the way back to, say, the beginning of president johnson's war on

in the mid-1960s? >> almost. we go back to 1967, that's the earliest date we think we can compute. >> that's a good starting point. >> so what's the newly computed

poverty rate at that time? >> at that time, about 26%. so in the official poverty universe, under official poverty statistics, the poverty rate would have been 14, 15% in 1967.

which is not too different- >> so you think it was higher, almost double what the official stats had it at that time. >> yes. >> which is pretty shameful, a quarter of the

population in poverty in the united states. >> exactly. >> especially in that era which was an economic boom time. >> the poverty line is set in a

specific point in time. so in our work, when we calculate the poverty rate to be about 26%, we're calculating that against today's living standards.

you could do the same thing and calculate poverty rates over time using living standards of the 1960s. you would see the same decline, maybe from 19 to 11%.

>> what's the poverty rate today, by your calculation? >> about 16%. >> so what you're saying is, the kind of programs like food stamps

and the earned housing vouchers, free meals for kids in poverty in public schools, those are the main things that i think you looked at. >> that they have

worked to reduce poverty by 10 percentage points. >> that's exactly right. the biggest problem from our perspective is that it simply doesn't count a

lot of these benefits. so the definition of resources under the the official measure is just pretax cash income. in the 1960s when the poverty measure was

instituted, that sort of made sense. most of the benefits were in cash. you had aid to families with dependent children program, known as welfare. you had social security

benefits, unemployment insurance. those things came in the form of cash. they've increasingly, or we've increasingly relied on tax programs and other benefits in order to aid the poor.

>> let me get robert doar on this. mr. doar, i don't know if you've seen this study before or hearding this for the first time but how much does this ring true for you? >> i know the study very well

and i think it's absolutely correct. no republican or democrat really denies the fact that we've made great progress in alleviating material hardship

of poor americans, from actions by both republicans and democrats, and it included a lot of factors including the 1996 welfare reform legislation and

tax credit and s.n.a.p. it made poor americans much stronger than they without those changes. the official poverty measure is wrong to the extent to which it

reflects material hardship. however, president johnson or anyone who cares about this issue isn't really interested in only helping people by relieving material

hardship. we would also like them to be able to earn their own success so they don't have to combine work with benefits or get benefits in order

to escape poverty, they can escape poverty by their own efforts and by whatever is going on in their community. on that score, the official poverty measure does help,

because it shows the extent to which so many americans are not able to escape poverty without additional help from federal programs. >> does that make

sense to you, to add to a holistic picture? >> the neat thing about this measure from our perspective is it allows you to deconstruct the trends over time.

we can show what would be without the taxes and transfers and with taxes and transfers. we know from our study without aid from government programs which

include things like earned income tax credit, to try to make work pay, if you will, poverty would have increased between 1967 and 2012, the last point when we

wrote this paper. >> chris, you have to acknowledge that that was the result of policy changes made by america, made by the country, that there was not a

partisan point to be made here, don't you think, chris? tax credit, s.n.a.p. expansion, they've come from bipartisan agreement on

legislation that increased the way these programs benefit poor americans. >> it's an entire package of benefits, not just one simple law.

it's not just the 1996 welfare reform. the 1993 extension of the earned the big expansions in food stamps that have happened over the past decade really

staunched some of the bleeding that would have occurred. each program has its own political history and own series of political decisions

behind it, right? and the food stamp increases started before the recession. and a lot of policy changes during the bush administration contributed to

those food stamp increases too. >> and a lot of states have done particular things, doing less frequent, you know, -- relax fingerprinting

requirements to get s.n.a.p., et cetera. a lot of states have made attempts to bring people onto the rolls of the s.n.a.p. program because

partly that so many people are not getting cash welfare anymore. so the program brings benefits to the state. when people get s.n.a.p. benefits,

it's pretty much guaranteed the people are going to spend those benefits and it's going to go back into the local economy. >> professor wimer, let me ask

you, how does this factor into any judgment that you may make about the blueprint which is what, you know, the political washington establishment is

going to be debating going forward? >> yeah, i mean, as robert said, you know, big emphasis behind the ryan blueprint is this emphasis on work.

i don't think people on the left or democrats are anti-work by any means. i think what people have a hangup or hiccup about it is we don't have any

sort of guaranteed, you know, employment willing to work and able to work, and maybe sending resumes out and maybe are getting no call backs, getting

those resumes denied. if we had more of a guaranteed employment or guaranteed job of last resort, people would be more comfortable with tying some of

these programs to work. if you think about program, for kids, there's no real work requirement right now. i would be hesitant to put a work requirement,

because it's not a work program. program is designed to provide food assistance to low income families, designed to make sure that

especially families with kids don't go hungry. it does reduce poverty, our work shows that it reduces poverty. if you correct for underreporting of

s.n.a.p. benefit, you see it even increases the antipoverty effect even more greatly. we should be, if anything, expanding it. >> except that

employment and earnings would have a better impact or more longer lasting impact than food security, which is the basic measure of hunger.

the feeling is we haven't done enough to get people to the other thing i would say about a job requirement, i kind of agree with chris, you have to

be careful about employment requirements. but what about declining an offered job? what if you offer someone a job, on able-bodied adult,

and they refuse to take it, even though their increase, their -- >> we're going to run out of time. do you see that as a big problem in the united states today?

>> i actually know from running a welfare program in the largest city in the united states that there are people who see benefits who will decline an offered job.

>> we don't want kids to suffer for the sins of their parents. you could have a wildly irresponsible parent. we still don't want those kids to

go hungry. they didn't choose to whom they were born. >> do you think the ryan program passed the congress, that obama and clinton would veto it and

trump would sign it? >> i think there is opportunity for discussion on some of these issues. as we go forward into the future. it will all happen with the next

president, it's not going to happen with president obama. so i continue to be hopeful that people of good faith can get together and come

to good solutions. >> good discussion, both of you, thank you very much. that's "potus 2016" for today. we're here each week at this hour pouring cold,

hard facts on the overheated campaign rhetoric. thanks for watching. ♪ [theme music] ♪