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News Analysis

The Debatable Premise Underlying Paul Ryan’s Antipoverty Plan

Speaker Paul D. Ryan with House Republicans and residents of the Graceview Apartments in Washington, as he introduced his antipoverty agenda, “A Better Way,” on June 7.Credit...Mark Wilson/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — An antipoverty agenda that Speaker Paul D. Ryan and House Republicans rolled out last week is based on a bedrock premise: The federal government has spent trillions of dollars over more than a half-century and has lost its war on poverty.

But that premise is substantially undercut by separate studies from economists at Columbia University and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service that show reductions of 40 percent or more in families living in poverty.

Indeed, experts on social welfare policy say, these substantial gains in reducing poverty are not visible precisely because Republicans succeeded over the last decades in shifting government aid programs from direct cash assistance to benefits like food stamps and housing vouchers that are not counted in annual statistics.

“Republicans don’t seem to catch on that this eliminates one of their talking points,” said Ronald T. Haskins, who helped write the 1996 law overhauling the welfare system as a senior Republican staff member on the House Ways and Means Committee, and who later served as an adviser on welfare policy to President George W. Bush.

The Republicans’ election-year agenda, called “A Better Way,” was also lacking in specific legislative proposals to address poverty.

Details were left out, in part because of internal Republican policy disagreements and in part because of a general opposition among Republicans to any government spending.

Liberal critics are even harsher, saying that Mr. Ryan and House Republicans were embracing a worn-out stereotype of the poor as criminal or lazy, and that they were putting emphasis on preventing fraud and abuse, which mostly just creates barriers to receiving needed help.

“I don’t see anything here,” said Timothy M. Smeeding, professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I see some broad generalities.”

Mr. Smeeding said that among the most crucial needs was employment assistance for able-bodied Americans who cannot get government benefits without working, but who find it difficult or impossible to get a job.

“I don’t see any help,” he said. “I see a lot of hassling. If you get food stamps, we are going to hassle you to do a drug test for food stamps and God knows what else. Where’s the help? What are you doing here, Paul? Where’s the job guarantee?”

Some conservatives who have applauded Mr. Ryan’s proposal, such as Robert Doar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, said Mr. Ryan’s decision to focus on poverty might seem incongruous in the current political environment, particularly given the rise of Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Doar, however, said that was a credit to Mr. Ryan.

“There’s a lot of middle-class economic anxiety, and House Republicans decided to focus on the difficulties of the poor,” he said. “I think they, at least in the speaker’s case, he and the Republicans have to be taken at face value. They think the problems of the poor are a really serious issue. He wasn’t putting his finger up in the wind and saying how does this play politically.”

Mr. Doar did acknowledge that “there could be more specifics,” adding, “Having Republicans talk about early child care or postsecondary education and talk about government as part of the solution, and work supports, to me that is a step in the right direction.”

Others said that Mr. Ryan and the Republicans needed to rethink their starting point and acknowledge the gains that have been made.

“On the war on poverty, the ‘we fought a war on poverty, and poverty won’ idea, I think our work has sort of debunked that,” said Christopher Wimer, the co-director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University.

His research shows that poverty in America has fallen 40 percent since the 1960s. “In the 1960s, most of the antipoverty programs we spent money on was actually cash,” he said. “Today, they come in the form of in-kind programs, food stamps or housing subsidies, or through the tax system, the earned-income tax credit, child tax credit or various other tax programs. Those simply aren’t counted.”

Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal budget analysis institute, said that Mr. Ryan seemed to have a sincere personal interest in addressing poverty, but that his view of poverty in America also seemed remarkably limited.

“They seem to focus on a small percentage of the poor who are some of the people with the most severe problems, such as crime and drug addiction, and then not just in their rhetoric but in their policy design,” Mr. Greenstein said in an interview.

Mr. Haskins said that Republicans should take credit for programs that have succeeded, especially the changes to the welfare system that put an emphasis on requiring work.

“I really think the main feature is that Republicans just don’t like government,” he said. “It’s hard for them to imagine that government works. They ought to give up this talking point.”

On this point, Mr. Haskins and Mr. Smeeding agreed.

“You should say this program works,” Mr. Smeeding said of food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. “It works better than we thought before, and we should make it better and expand it.”

Mr. Ryan and House Republicans also strongly oppose any effort to raise the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 an hour.

Mr. Greenstein said the main basis for his skepticism of the plan was that Mr. Ryan and House Republicans have long pursued budget proposals that would cut trillions of dollars from programs intended to help the poor, and that Mr. Trump has put forward proposals that would require even deeper cuts.

“This absolutely doesn’t square with their own budget,” Mr. Greenstein said. “He’s still for Trump because there would be a better chance of enacting his agenda.”

“Well, part of Trump’s policy platform is this $9 trillion-plus tax cut over 10 years, and Paul Ryan has always said he wants to balance the budget,” he said. “If you did a $9 trillion tax cut, you would have to have $9 trillion in new budget cuts on top of the budget cuts that are in the House Republican budget that already has the deepest cuts in antipoverty programs in modern American history.”

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Follow David M. Herszenhorn on Twitter @herszenhorn.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Antipoverty Plan Skimps on Details and History. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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