Pinocchio Ryan strikes again.
Rep. Paul Ryan, perhaps feeling the need to rebuild his (undeserved) reputation as a smart guy after that whole Romeny/Ryan debacle, actually used real economists' studies for his newly released
report on poverty. His budgets have always been held together with spit and baling wire, pretend numbers and savings based on wishful thinking and hypothetical future action. This time, he appeared to make an effort to base his conjectures in published data. However, the people who published these studies say,
he twisted that data to his own ends.
[S]everal economists and social scientists contacted on Monday had reactions ranging from bemusement to anger at Ryan’s report, claiming that he either misunderstood or misrepresented their research.
Ryan’s paper, for example, cited a study published in December by the Columbia Population Research Center measuring the decline in poverty in the U.S. after the implementation of Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.”
One of the study’s authors, Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, said she was surprised when she read the paper, because it seemed to arbitrarily chop off data from two of the most successful years of the war on poverty. [...]
Barbara Wolfe, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said Ryan’s paper simply misstates the findings of one of her papers studying the effect of housing assistance on labor outcomes. [...]
Wolfe also objected to Ryan’s use of another of her studies, which his paper claimed found “Only a minority of families alter their employment decisions in response to Medicaid’s design.”
Ryan also misrepresents a study on Medicaid by Jeffrey Brown and Amy Finkelstein, according to Brown, the William G. Karnes Professor in the Department of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Ryan ignored caveats in this study on whether Medicaid "crowds out" private insurance, that "there may also be other factors that would continue to limit the size of the private market even if Medicaid was reformed." That's just one of the
Zombie Medicaid arguments Ryan makes, basing his arguments on cherry-picked data from real studies. All of which makes this:
President's budget isn't a serious document. It's a campaign brochure and a missed opportunity.
http://t.co/... via @WeeklyStandard
— @PRyan
even more galling. Paul Ryan is not a deep thinker or a policy wonk. He's an ideologue with a
basic and profound disregard for the poor. This "report" shows nothing more than to what lengths he will go to dismantle the safety net.