This Mickey Kaus tweet is too harsh when it comes to the tensions between Paul Ryan’s recent interest in poverty policy and Ryan’s support for Gang of Eight-style expansion of low-skill immigration. But when you look at Paul Ryan’s (and Marco Rubio’s) views on poverty policy reform and immigration, you can tease out five postulates

1. America’s low-skill, low-earning population is struggling both economically and socially.

2. The American welfare state is not optimized for helping this population attain steady employment and form stable families.

3. Reform of this welfare state will be a slow, trial-and-error process.

4. Reform of the welfare state aimed at low-earners will not be cheap, and will possibly include federal wage subsidies.

5. We need to vastly expand the low-skill, low-earner population through immigration – even though America’s current low-skill population has a high unemployment rate, a low labor force participation rate, and has been experiencing stagnant wages for thirty years.

It really is incoherent to both want to subsidize the wages of low-skill workers (presumably because market wages are not high enough to connect them to the labor market) and to increase the population of low-skill workers.

But this incoherence is actually a sign of progress. It was June of last year when a Marco Rubio aide was arguing for a larger guest worker program for the construction industry on the grounds that our current population of low-skill workers “can’t cut it” in the workforce. It was four years ago where Romney spoke, not merely of low-earners, but of 47% of Americans:

And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

Ryan has recently disavowed his “makers vs. takers” rhetoric, and he has worked on a reform of poverty policy. Rubio has gone from making news because his aides were trashing low-wage workers to news because he was coming up with a plan to improve the returns to low-wage work.

Ryan’s instincts sometimes lead him astray, but maybe the best of his good qualities is that Ryan responds to constructive criticism by trying to make his plans better instead of crafting weak arguments about why the criticism is wrong. (Mike Lee also has that admirable quality.) Ryan is moving in the right direction. That is the cause of his current incoherence. It would have been more coherent to just give up on our current population of low-skill workers as loser takers who don’t care about their lives, and can’t cut it, and call for their replacement by foreign guest workers. It would also have been wrong. Ryan’s current incoherence is an improvement. Hopefully Ryan’ attains a better coherence that combines his improved thinking on poverty policy, with a better immigration policy.