Nearly two years ago, not long after his failed bid for national office, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) appeared on msnbc and told Joe Scarborough, “I’m focused on poverty these days.”  It seemed like an odd thing to say. Ryan was, and is, perhaps best known for his far-right budget plan that cuts taxes for the wealthy by hundreds of billions of dollars, while slashing investments in programs that benefit working families. For the Republican congressman to say he’s “focused on poverty” was belied by his actual policy agenda, which is brutal towards those actually in poverty.  It doesn’t help that the first policy statement he makes is an out-and-out lie: “After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates.”  This sentence suggests that either Paul Ryan has absolutely no clue how poverty rates work, or he does know and is actively deceiving viewers. First of all, the specific claim in question isn’t even technically accurate…. But even that dramatically understates the progress that has been made. The official poverty rate is a travesty of a statistic, and using it at all in this context is irresponsible. It’s literally based on food prices in 1955. But more relevantly for these purposes, it excludes the very anti-poverty programs Ryan is talking about.  The study’s top-line finding is that in 2012, federal safety net programs cut the poverty rate by more than half, reducing it from 29.1 percent to 13.8 percent and lifting 48 million people above the poverty line, including 12 million children.  Remember, as far as Paul Ryan is concerned, these factual details simply don’t, or at least shouldn’t, exist.  If the House Ways & Means Committee chairman is “focused on poverty these days,” it seems he has quite a bit of reading up to do.
The good news: Paul Ryan is focusing his attention on poverty. The bad news:he doesn't seem to have any idea what he's talking about.