Paul Ryan’s new antipoverty plan

Paul Ryan on Thursday released a plan to combat poverty in the US. The plan represents a major departure from his prior budgets and has sweeping policy changes on everything from regulations to education. But it does contain one familiar concept: block granting.

Ryan’s plan contains an “Opportunity Grant” program in which 11 safety net programs would be lumped together under one funding stream. Though he says the program is not a “garden variety block grant” because of accountability measures he included, policy experts have already put it under the block grant umbrella.

The most important idea in Paul Ryan’s poverty plan reverses the most important idea in Paul Ryan’s budgets.

Those budgets were built atop a series of promises — no new taxes, sharp deficit reduction, no near-term changes to Medicare or Social Security, and no more defense cuts — that combined to make deep cuts to spending on programs for the poor the cornerstone of Republican fiscal policy. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculated that fully two-thirds of Ryan’s savings came from cuts to those programs. So that was the GOP’s basic poverty plan: cut spending on programs for the poor.