Paul Ryan -- Still Lyin'

Here's what Ayn Rand acolyte and chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (!) Rep. Paul "Lyin'" Ryan (R-Galt's Gulch) had to say about the poverty rate on "Face the Nation" last weekend:

After a 50-year war on poverty and trillions of dollars spent, we still have the same poverty rates.

Here's what Vox's Dylan Matthews had to say about that (apologies, but the lengthy excerpt is necessary):

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. The poverty rate was 19 percent in 1964, when the War on Poverty was announced. In 2013, it was 14.5 percent. We do not have the same poverty rates we did then. Ryan is just wrong.

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. It excludes in-kind transfers like Medicaid, food stamps, and housing vouchers, as well as tax-based programs like the EITC. Blasting those programs because they don't show up in the poverty rate is like arguing that Netflix shows have zero viewers by pointing to cable ratings.

A much better metric, which takes anti-poverty programs fully into account and is based on more recent data, is known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure. The SPM factors in government programs, and is based on current data about spending on food and other necessities. It's the poverty rate people like Ryan should be referencing. While the federal government has only been using the SPM for a short while, a group of researchers centered at Columbia — Christopher Wimer, Liana Fox, Irv Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, and Jane Waldfogel — went back and calculated SPM numbers for every year since 1967. To distinguish from the government-issued SPM metric, they call this "anchored SPM."

The researchers found that anchored SPM (the blue line below) has fallen dramatically in recent decades. But if you take out government programs, you get the green line below, which doesn't fall at all. Poverty — measured accurately, in a way that includes the government programs Ryan is trying to evaluate — fell, and it fell entirely because of government programs:

(click on image to enlarge)

Wimer, et al (via Vox)

 So, in other words, the poverty rate was reduced by about 40 percent by the anti-poverty programs initiated in the 1960's, which is a little different from "the same."  But all Ryan has to do is convince a few "journamalists" in the media that he's a straight-shootin', wonky "reformer" who knows his stuff, and Mission Accomplished!  He's a Very Serious Person with Serious Ideas. That there will be no push-back except in progressive blogs to Ryan's "focus on poverty" is a given, so we will translate the gist of Ryan's "poverty proposals" for the policy-challenged in the media and elsewhere as "reverse Robin Hood."

(h/t Steve Benen/ Maddow Blog)