Blog 2.6

1. What are the reasons given that suggest that Trump will likely follow Ryan's legislative agenda instead of Ryan following Trump's?

2. What is the Center On Budget and Policy Priorities [(CBPP)]?

3. What Lyndon Johnson programs are likely to be cut significantly?

4. What happened to welfare in the 1990's that will likely happen to these programs?

5. If states have freedom to make decisions in spending for these programs, what are they most likely to do?

6. Why does Paul Ryan's plan advocate for allowing insurance companies to sell across state lines?

7. What would be the effect of funding Medicaid through block grants?

8. What are the two areas the article claims are the things Paul Ryan does not want  to cut?

9. Ryan wants to cut spending for all sorts of programs, but where does he want to increase federal spending?

10. According to the article, what was the impact of poverty fighting programs implemented in the 1960's?

11. Who would benefit most from Paul Ryan's tax plan?

12. What does he want to do to Social Security & Medicare (programs in which ALL people use)?

Answers:

1a. "Republicans... have won Congress, and it’s House Speaker Paul Ryan who... leads those Republicans." Therefore, if legislation is passed, it will likely be under Ryan's guidance.

1b. "Ryan has spent the better part of a decade crafting a coherent, sweeping agenda to reform and slash the American safety net." Because Ryan has been forming a coherent plan for quite sometime, coming up with a new plan would be a waste of time for Trump.

1c. "Trump enters office as a historically unpopular president distrusted by his own party in Congress. He’s not in a position to dictate to them what he wants. To keep [Congress] on his side, he’s going to have to do what they [want, and] what they want — and have repeatedly voted to pass in recent Congresses — is Ryan’s budget."

2. "The Center On Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) is an American think tank that analyzes the impact of federal and state government budget policies from a progressive perspective. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, the Center's stated mission is to 'conduct research and analysis to help shape public debates over proposed budget and tax policies and to help ensure that policymakers consider the needs of low-income families and individuals in these debates.'" It is led by Robert Greenstein.

3. "Ryan’s proposals would repudiate the federal government’s 50-year guarantee of medical care and food to America’s poorest residents, a promise generated by Lyndon B. Johnson when he made food stamps permanent in 1964 and created Medicaid in 1965."

4. Medicaid and food stamps will move to the state level, but "no state will have a program anywhere near as generous or comprehensive as the ones they did have. The 1996 welfare reform law effectively rendered welfare dead, according to sociologists of poverty, particularly in the eyes of the extreme poor, who ceased to see it as a program that can help them at all."

5. "The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) will be slashed and turned over to states, which will likely use the money as a slush fund for other endeavors."

6. "By enabling the selling of insurance across state lines, [it] would effectively ban states from enacting stricter regulations."

7. "If Medicaid is block granted and cut, and the [Affordable Care Act] repealed and replaced according to Trump’s plan, the total increase in the uninsured could very well reach 30 million to 40 million."

8. "He wants to drastically cut basically everything the government does outside of defense and retirement spending."

9. "Ryan, like most Republicans, wants to increase defense spending."

10. Paul Ryan claimed that, "'After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates,' [but...] if you measure poverty properly, taking safety net programs into account, poverty fell by 40 percent from 1967 to 2012."

11. "His tax plan, which would cost at least $3 trillion over the first decade,... would give 99.6 percent of its cuts to the top 1 percent."

12. "He intends to cut it, drastically, to return it to the states, and give the states unprecedented flexibility in how to spend that money. That would mean the end of the guarantee of health care and food to America’s poorest residents."