Paul Ryan fights hunger by washing clean dishes.
Every so often, in his quest to be seen as the Republican Party's Serious Policy Guy and to try to cloak his granny-starving tendencies, Paul Ryan trots out a line about how he wants to address poverty. And
so it was Monday morning:
"Look, I'm a conservative who believes that our constitutional principles, founding principles are the key principles for the day and they're the best if applied to our problems to solve problems," Ryan said during an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "And we need to have that kind of temperament. This is why I'm focused on poverty these days, this is why I'm focused on—we've got the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty coming up next year. We don't have much to show for it."
He argued that "there are better ideas that we can use to approach and attack the root causes of poverty" and that the right "should not cede the moral high ground on this issue."
Ryan hopes to claim the moral high ground on poverty through strategies like saying the House farm bill slashing food stamps by $21 billion over 10 years
made only "modest changes" and that "real reform" was needed, reform like "strengthening work requirements." Of course, many people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits do in fact work—many of them for giant corporations like Walmart and McDonald's. Here are
a few facts about the population of SNAP recipients on whom Ryan wants to strengthen work requirements: 47 percent are under 18 years old, 8 percent are age 60 or older, and about 6 percent are disabled and receiving SSI disability payments. And of the remaining non-elderly, non-disabled, adult people receiving SNAP benefits, more than half are working, live with another adult who is working, or have work requirements from other programs.
As for Ryan's contention that we don't have much to show for the war on poverty, "The Census Bureau indicates that SNAP would lift 3.9 million Americans—including 1.7 million children—out of poverty in 2010 if its benefits were included in the official measures of income and poverty." That's not all, either. In fact, we do have a lot to show for the war on poverty:
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.
I mean, granted, by lifting people out of poverty and keeping them from going hungry, programs like SNAP don't give people the help they
really need, like washing already clean dishes. But that's why we have Paul Ryan.