House Ways and Means Committee chairman Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) derided President Obama’s suggestion that Republican lawmakers contributed to the problems in Baltimore through a refusal to pass “mass investments in urban communities” onstage at the NRI Ideas Summit this afternoon.
Earlier this week, Obama deflected blame to congressional Republicans in his remarks on the Baltimore riots. “There’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that,” the president said. “Now I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get mass investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference, around school reform and job training and some investments in infrastructure in these communities trying to attract new businesses.”
RELATED: More coverage of the NRI Ideas Summit
But in an interview with NR’s Eliana Johnson, Ryan pointed out that Congress has spent “trillions” of dollars on the War on Poverty in the last 50 years, to no avail.
“Deep poverty is near an all-time high. So, hmm, maybe we ought to rethink this,” Ryan said.
Ryan noted lamented that welfare programs are judged on their size rather than their effectiveness. “We’re not measuring it based on, ‘are we getting people out of poverty?’” he said. “It’s an enormous indictment [of] the status quo and it screams for a new round of what I would call welfare reform,”
The former vice presidential candidate admitted that Baltimore’s “problems go much, much deeper than” failed welfare policies — and he was quick to laud the Charm City residents working to address them.
“There are already heroes in Baltimore today who are showing great leadership,” he said, referring to the mother who famously pulled her son out of a riot and the volunteers who started cleaning up after the first night of unrest.
RELATED: More coverage of the NRI Ideas Summit
— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.