Paul Ryan has broken new ground so often with his various poverty reports and budget policies that he could soon find himself pitching the latest version of "workfare" in China. But Thursday, he was only at the American Enterprise Institute in DC repeating – with his trademark earnestness – a plan to "do better" and "repair the safety net and help families get ahead." His guiding principle? "Listen to local leaders who are changing the status quo."

Ryan's other big, creative idea? "Opportunity Grants." One could complain that they would just be confusing given other three federal (and multitudinous state) "Opportunity Grants", but the real problem is that "Opportunity Grants" are just another name for block grants … and those Ryan's solution to almost every perceived problem. Think federal educational aid should be directed at the local level? Convert "fragmented programs" into a block grant. Too many job training programs? "Consolidate" them into block grant. Head Start not getting the results you think it should? Convert it to a block grant.

But block grants are neither true "streamlining" nor do they create "laboratories" for experiments in improving policy. There is a 40 year history of federal block grants to look at, if one wanted to, and the results have hardly resulted in a plethora of state and local success stories.

What I really want Ryan to do, however, is to explain how it is that Head Start isn't working: his footnotes lead to a paper that stops its analysis of Head Start in the third grade. Long-term studies, however, have found almost uniformly positive results: participants get high school diplomas, they stay out of prison, they go to college and they earn more money than non-participants.

The biggest problem with Head Start right now is that the sequester – which Ryan voted for, complained about and then incorporated into his own budget plan – gave the program its largest cut in history: $400m out of an $8b budget. After the slashing, 57,000 children left the program – and that left tens of thousands women without child care while they worked.

The sequester's Head Start cuts were rightly seen as part of the GOP's war on women, but Ryan chose to ignore almost entirely those walking wounded in his poverty report. But is almost impossible to have any serious discussion about poverty without talking about women.

Women earn less in income, they make up a disproportionate percentage of the poor and they suffer the impacts of poverty – untreated mental illness and disease – at a higher rate than men. More women than men are at risk of becoming poor. Because so many of the poor and near-poor are women with children, their poverty has the worst kind "trickle down" effect you could imagine.

But here are some things mentioned in Ryan's report more times than women (0) or "females" (3): "success" (45), "opportunity" (132), "innovation" (20), and, of course, "block grants" (13).

Ryan's other proposals are as original as his rhetoric: he borrows from Republican and Democratic ideas alike and, when he doesn't merely duplicate them, he makes them worse.

A perfect example: his plan to extend the Earned Income Tax Credit looks almost exactly like Obama's and the one put forward by Senate Budget Committee Chair Patty Murray (itself a creature of bipartisan birth) except that, where Murray and Obama pay for their proposed expansion with increasing taxes on corporations and the very wealthy, Ryan would just cut other anti-poverty programs. And weirdly, in a report gagging on data (there are 232 footnotes in the 73-page document), Ryan simply asserts that his expanded EITC could be supported if the government, you know, "Stop[s] programs that don’t work and support[s] programs that do." Well, since you put it that way...

The most attention-getting proposal in Ryan's arsenal of hand-me-down weapons is his support for criminal justice reform: specifically, to change Republicans' once-beloved mandatory minimums and put federal muscle behind programs that would allow non-violent, low-risk offenders to finish their sentences in rehabilitative programming rather than in prison. That's great, but I liked this idea better last year when Rand Paul talked about it.

Ryan has a bad habit of confusing data with evidence or argument, and his pretentions to wonkiness – mainly, he uses a lot of numbers and jargon – have protected his status as the GOP Ideas Guy. (Granted, there is a paucity of competition for that role.) His newsworthiness has been enhanced by the spectacle of a Republican who talks about poverty – and specifically the poor – with something other than the typical blanket condemnation.

He aired some of that empathy at AEI on Thursday, beginning his speech with a reference to his "poverty tour", from which he returned with anecdotes about hard-working mothers and recovering addicts. He spoke to his conservative audience about having visited gang-ridden high schools and homeless shelters with incriminating pride: such boasts are meaningful only if you've never been to those kinds of places before.

Ryan has been in Congress for 15 years; I suppose we should be grateful that he's finally taken the time to see what his votes have wrought. But for all he's seen on his poverty tour, he doesn't seem to have listened much.