News that Mitt Romney selected Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan as his Vice Presidential running mate for the GOP nomination overshadowed even the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games in London, England, this past weekend. Most of the nation probably heard Ryan’s name for the first time back in 2011 when the Chair of the House Budget Committee was credited as the lead writer and advocate for the Republican Party’s budget proposal, entitled “The Path to Prosperity,” which offered an alternative approach to the current Medicare system and the Affordable Care Act that was recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
So far, the Romney campaign has offered little insight into what the candidate’s policies will be in regards to issues important to people with disabilities. The American Association for People With Disabilities sent a questionnaire to both of the major party presidential candidates earlier this summer, asking for their position on employment opportunities, education, health care, and accessibility with regards to this population.
AAPD President & CEO Mark Perriello noted in this July 13 blog post that his organization had not received a response from the camp of the former Governor of Massachusetts. (The AAPD website provides links to the full questionnaire, as well as President Obama’s answers, on this page.)
Since speculation is our only option at the moment, is there anything to glean from the selection of Ryan that will tell us the what the country would look like for for people with disabilities under President Willard “Mitt” Romney? We know that in Ryan’s home state, advocates for people with disabilities have asked Governor Scott Walker to issue an executive order declaring Wisconsin an “Employment First” state in hopes of increasing more career training and employment opportunities for these individuals. The request followed the release of United Cerebral Palsy’s report, “The Case for Inclusion, 2012,” which ranked Wisconsin 27th in state-by-state rankings of support and services for people with disabilities.
An April 10, 2012, The New York Times editorial, entitled “A Rockier Pathway to Work,” is highly critical of the 22% reduction in federal spending for education, training, employment, and social services proposed by Ryan’s 2013 version of “The Path to Prosperity.” While the $16 billion in proposed cuts would impact all Americans, not just those with disabilities, the op-ed’s rhetoric speaks to the same goals of workforce inclusion:
The cut in that category is typical of a budget that savages precisely the kind of domestic spending, like job training and Pell grants, needed to help people get off social-safety-net programs, while slicing open the net itself, through big reductions in Medicaid and food stamps…
For his own part, Ryan defends his plan by pointing out the waste and inefficiency of the current federal system to provide career training; and this was even before the latest report from the Government Accountability Office that reviewed the work of 45 different offices that support employment for people with disabilities and concluded that “little is known about the effectiveness of these programs.”
Please share any coverage you’ve read about Congressman Ryan’s views on education and career training as it relates to people with disabilities in the comments below.
Image by monkeyz_uncle, used under its Creative Commons license.