Paul Ryan

In Janesville, Ryan is the local thread tying the town’s fate to national policy. The book’s central empirical finding — that laid-off workers who went back to school at Blackhawk fared worse on employment and pay than those who didn’t — cuts against the bipartisan “retraining gospel” embraced by Ryan and Barack Obama alike. Retraining, the book notes, “may be the only economic idea on which Republicans such as Paul Ryan and Democrats such as President Obama agree,” anchored in an “abiding cultural myth… of this as a land that offers its people a chance at personal reinvention” — a myth the evidence in Janesville undercuts.

In Romney — A Reckoning, Ryan appears as a fiscal hawk who abandoned his signature cause. The book observes that “even Paul Ryan, whose 2016 surrender to Trump Romney had treated more generously than others’, seemed to have given up on the issue to which he’d devoted most of his political career”: during his three years as Speaker the deficit rose nearly 80 percent — including two years of full GOP control — with the era’s signature legislation being a tax overhaul that slashed rates with few offsetting mechanisms.

Context: Paul Ryan is an American politician from Janesville, Wisconsin, who served as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives (2015–2019) and was Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election.

“A Better Way” (2016): As Speaker, Ryan led House Republicans in releasing “A Better Way,” a six-part policy agenda rolled out across June 2016 — poverty and upward mobility, national security, the economy (modernizing federal regulation), the Constitution (Congress reasserting its authority over executive-branch agencies), health care (an Obamacare replacement built on refundable tax credits and health savings accounts), and tax reform (the House GOP tax blueprint, including the destination-based border adjustment). The agenda’s site, http://abetterway.speaker.gov (also branded better.gop), is gone [STALE — checked 2026-09-16: domain dead; Wayback snapshots of the homepage are an empty JavaScript shell]. The six policy papers survive in the Internet Archive: Poverty, Opportunity, and Upward Mobility (June 7) · National Security (June 9) · The Economy (June 14) · The Constitution (June 16) · Health Care (June 22) · Tax (June 24).

Where this appears

• Janesville — his hometown; named with Obama as a champion of the “retraining gospel” the book’s evidence undercuts.
• Romney — A Reckoning — the deficit hawk who, as Speaker, presided over an ~80% deficit increase and a tax cut, abandoning his career cause.
• “A Better Way” (June 2016) — the House Republican agenda he led as Speaker; six policy papers archived via the Wayback Machine.