He writes,

Ryan excludes Medicaid from his Opportunity Grants. But truly untangling the safety net requires disassembling Medicaid and allowing that funding to be reallocated, either to new healthcare programs or in some instances to different ends entirely. Our current allocation of spending across healthcare, housing, nutrition, training, etc. is an arbitrary artifact of separate legislative authorizations and bureaucracies evolving over decades. We should not be segmenting healthcare (which is as large as all the other buckets combined) as somehow untouchable, especially when it is not where someone in poverty would likely want to spend a marginal dollar.

I agree.

Cass also writes,

Ryan proposes reforms to the EITC that bring it closer to a wage subsidy (e.g., tying it directly to each paycheck), but for reasons unclear does not go the final step of simply replacing one with the other. More problematic, the expansion he proposes is small in both scope and scale – the result of funding it only through the cancellation of a potpourri of small programs and tax expenditures. For a work-incentives-led approach to be effective, funding to a wage subsidy needs to expand far more dramatically – ideally by reallocating it from existing anti-poverty programs that already go to those who work.

I agree with this criticism, also. But I share Cass’s overall take on Ryan’s proposals, which is that they are good reforms in an area much in need of reform.