Paul Ryan's Anti-Poverty Plan

More like his anti-poor people plan:

Ryan is very good at marshaling faux scholarship churned out by ideologues in the service of talking points, and at convincing reporters that he is an actual policy wonk. Unfortunately, he seems to have convinced himself and undertaken the ambitious goal of reconciling his policies with the work of real researchers. That was a bad, bad move.

The bigger dilemma is that Ryan’s budget goals leave him no room to maneuver. He’s committed to balancing the budget within the next decade. But he wants to prop up defense spending, refuses to increase tax revenue, and has promised to maintain Social Security and Medicare benefits for all current retirees. He recently cut a deal with Democrats to ease cuts in the main domestic spending programs. Having taken everything else off the table, the only place left for his cuts is programs that benefit the poor.

And Ryan’s budget absolutely slays the budget for anti-poverty programs – the vast majority of his spending cuts come from the minority of federal programs aimed at the poor. That fact has led to his current predicament: Democrats have painted him as a cruel social Darwinist, causing him to become concerned about his image as an “Ayn Rand miser,” causing him to re-brand himself as a poverty wonk, causing him to dive into scholarly literature. But scholarly literature is never going to show that his plans to impose massive cuts to the anti-poverty budget will help poor people.

Ryan's problem is generally the Republicans' problem.  They want to balance the budget and cut taxes, avoid slashing entitlements (at least in the near future when there base demographic is still alive to vote), maintain or increase defense spending, fight a war anywhere somebody looks at us funny, and that only leaves cutting support for the folks who have the least, because we know they won't do anything to the folks who have the most.  The reason Dave Camp's tax reform plan doesn't see the light of day is because it proves that Republicans can't dramatically lower rates, eliminate deductions and stay revenue-neutral.  They can claim it will, but once they put a plan down on paper, we'll find out they don't have a plan that works.  Paul Ryan's budget is the exact same thing. He may claim to be a policy wonk, but he isn't very good at math.  He just takes the outcomes he wants and tries to slash away at the social service budget until he gets in the ballpark.  Now he's trying to find a way to wrap his plan in academic cover, and he does that half-assed, too.  The guy is pretty much useless.