Paul Ryan: An opportunity to Cut Poverty

This week, our economy received some bad news: The International Monetary Fund revised its projection for U.S. economic growth this year to just 1.7%. Working families will pay the price. Real median household income is still lower than before the recession. Deep poverty in America has reached record levels over the past three years.

We need to expand opportunity in this country. And to do that, we need Washington to get its act together. Each year, the federal government spends almost $800 billion on 92 programs to help struggling families. Yet the poverty rate is the highest in a generation.

The problem with all these federal programs is that they're fragmented and formulaic. They don't see how people's needs interact. And what's worse, they measure success by how much they spend, not how much good they do. Instead, we need to measure success by results — that is, by how many people we're helping get out of poverty.

I don't have all the answers. Nobody does. But I'd like to get the conversation going by offering an idea to repair the safety net. I'd start a pilot program, which I'd call the Opportunity Grant. It would consolidate up to 11 federal programs into one stream of funding to participating states. The idea would be to let states try different ways of providing aid and then to test the results — in short, more flexibility in exchange for more accountability.

Opportunity Grant

Participation would be voluntary; no state would have to join. And we would not expand the program until all the evidence was in. The point is, don't just pass a law and hope for the best. If you've got an idea, let's test it and see the results.

Here's how the program would work: Each state that wanted to participate would submit a plan to the federal government. That plan would lay out in detail the state's proposed alternative. If everything passed muster, the federal government would give the green light. And the state would get more flexibility to combine things such as food stamps, housing subsidies, child care assistance and cash welfare. This simpler Opportunity Grant would include the same money as current law.

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