Progressive Caucus
Floor Speech
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Mr. TAKANO. I thank the gentleman from Wisconsin for yielding.
Earlier today, your colleague from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan) released his long-awaited antipoverty plan. This is a bold step for Mr. Ryan because, if you look at the history of the Republican Party, there is a clear and undeniable pattern of implementing policies that help the top 2 percent but that do nothing for those struggling to make ends meet. Of course, they have proposed various ``reforms'' over the years, but those initiatives were never anything other than safety net cuts or ineffective, recycled ideas disguised as reform. I am thinking of a childhood jingle, ``Jack and the Beanstalk''--Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the budget of faux reform.
That appears to be the case here.
Mr. Ryan calls his new plan an ``Opportunity Grant,'' as it would consolidate safety net programs such as food stamps and housing vouchers into a single grant to States.
If that sounds familiar, that is because an ``Opportunity Grant'' is nothing more than block grants under a new name, and block grants have been shown to have limited impact in helping to lift people out of poverty.
Now, if Mr. Ryan really wanted to lift people out of poverty, he would support a raise in the minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage will increase the take-home pay for more than 28 million workers, add $35 billion to the economy in higher wages through 2016, and create 85,000 new jobs as a result of increased economic opportunity.
At the very least, I know that my colleague, Barbara Lee from California, is, as I am, undertaking the challenge to live on a minimum wage by living off of $77, the average amount of money left over for full-time minimum wage workers after taxes and housing expenses.
I would challenge Mr. Ryan to step inside the shoes of someone who is living on that minimum wage. Although I know I could never fully understand what it is like, this challenge will give me a small glimpse into the lives of many people in my district.
So I would like to invite Mr. Ryan to participate in the challenge so he can, for a brief moment, understand what it is like for people in poverty to live on such a wage. Perhaps then Mr. Ryan will understand that the same old recycled ideas will not help those who really are in need.
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