The House Budget Committee released a report about anti-poverty programs on Monday. It's as comprehensive a guide to Republican policy thinking as you'll find these days—and, in many respects, it's everything you would expect from Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and his allies.

The report focuses on what these programs do wrong, while giving scant attention to what they do right. It hypes data that support conservative conclusions, while relegating contravening data to asides and footnotes. The report’s central claim, for example, is that programs have not done much to reduce poverty. As many of us noted a few weeks ago, when Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty turned 50, the record suggests that poverty is a lot lower than it would have been if these programs never existed—particularly if you count the impact of programs like food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit, as most experts would agree is appropriate.

Still, the report is not a screed. The tone is dry and academic. While it doesn’t highlight studies supporting liberal conclusions, it doesn’t ignore them either. And the takeaway isn’t that all anti-poverty programs are a total waste. It’s that most of the programs lack decent coordination and management, while some have serious design flaws. Surely there's some truth there.

But the real question is what to do about these problems—how to reform these programs, so that they work better. And if you read the report carefully, you'll find pretty good evidence that Ryan's approach is the wrong one.