Open thread for night owls: Paul Ryan pretends to have a solution for poverty

John Nichols says Paul Ryan has taken as side in the war on poverty'against what works:

So, in Ryan's opinion, the 'war on poverty' that President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1964 as part of a broader Great Society initiative made matters worse. But that's just wrong. How do we know? Census data. In 1959, 22.1 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. In 1969, 13.7 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. The poverty level has varied since 1969. It has gone as high as 15 percent. But it has never again gotten anywhere near where it was in 1959. What changed during the 1960s to dramatically decrease poverty? 'Centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs' like Medicare (1965), Medicare (1965), the initiatives launched with the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 programs such as the Jobs Corps (1964) and Head Start (1965). Those programs worked. Brilliantly. They're still working. Brilliantly. An honest political leader who really wanted to do something to finish the 'war on poverty' would propose to expand them, with, for instance, an expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans, and a real Jobs Corps that would put Americans to work rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure of America. But Paul Ryan does not believe that. He says 'the problem' started in the 1960s.

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