Ryan on Poverty

[Geee]

National Review:

Paul Ryan has earned a reputation for making Americans confront fiscal deficits many would prefer to ignore. Yesterday in Cleveland, the chairman of the House Budget Committee was at it again, forcing liberals and conservatives alike to look at their respective antipoverty deficits.

Ryan exposed the moral and fiscal bankruptcy of the liberal welfare state, driving dependency on more than 80 federal means-tested programs to the tune of $1 trillion annually. The Wisconsin Republican also owned up to conservatives’ leadership deficit when it comes to fighting poverty — and made a big down payment toward erasing it.

It’s not that conservatives don’t have answers to the question of poverty. To the contrary, we’ve had striking successes in the 1996 welfare reform and school choice for low-income students, for starters. But we’ve lacked the coherent framing, leadership, and initiative to convey the conservative antipoverty vision in a way that would capture Americans’ imagination and dislodge the default welfare-state paradigm.