Rep. Paul Ryan is attempting a difficult balancing act, putting out a Republican budget that draws
69 percent of its cuts from programs that serve low- and moderate-income people, while simultaneously trying to rebrand himself as a Republican anti-poverty crusader. Appearances are most of what he's balancing, of course, trying to counter the viciousness of his actual, concrete budget with the image of Paul Ryan as a Republican Who Cares. But let's say he followed through and pushed the anti-poverty programs he's embracing through Congress. What then?
Well, brace yourself for not much of a shock: Ryan's pet programs are as questionable as his concern for poverty. Ryan is being guided by Robert Woodson, Sr.:
Woodson has been called one of the godfather's of President George W. Bush's faith-based initiative, which Woodson helped inspire when Bush was still governor of Texas. In the tradition of Booker T. Washington and other champions of African-American self-reliance, Woodson is a conservative who believes in the need for low-income and minority communities to help themselves. He thinks that the real source of social ills like crime, substance abuse, or out-of-wedlock births isn't racism, poverty, or inequality but rather moral failings. [...]
In 1995, the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse attempted to shutter a Teen Challenge facility in South Texas after finding a host of violations of state health and safety code regulations. In response, Woodson helped organize a protest at the Alamo. The outcry prompted newly elected Gov. George W. Bush to push through new rules exempting faith-based treatment programs from state regulations.
So, religious programs that don't have to follow basic regulations are what Ryan's big anti-poverty push is all about. The programs Ryan has embraced do boast some extremely impressive success rates ... except that that's generally based on self-reporting, so we don't actually know a thing about their effectiveness. Additionally, there is no scenario in which America's poverty problem will be solved by getting the small number of people reached by local church programs off of drugs or out of crime, and these programs do little to address the millions of Americans who work at low-wage jobs and often as temps. These people are as clean as anyone else, work hard, and are still poor. Prayer and faith might do all sorts of things for them, but won't put food on the table or keep the rent paid if the jobs are not there for them. And in this country, thanks to policies Ryan and his party back, the jobs are not there. In fact, even Woodson, Ryan's adviser, parts ways with Ryan on some of this:
[Woodson's] nuanced understanding about the nature of poverty may be one reason why Woodson and his protégé don't agree on everything—particularly aspects of the budget that Ryan recently proposed. Woodson views food stamps, for instance, as an effective anti-poverty program that works a bit like the vouchers he's long proposed; Ryan would slash billions from food stamps over the next decade.
I don't know what's in Ryan's heart. Maybe he thinks he really does care about poverty. But if his policy answer to poverty that encompasses many working Americans, and many more who'd like to work but can't find jobs because there are no jobs to find, is local faith-based drug treatment and boot camps, his efforts to fight poverty can only be fraudulent, since he's not even pretending to address the roots of the problem.