Failed Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan, who believes that the problem with America is that there are too many "takers" slacking off in "hammocks," went on MSNBC Monday morning with a simple message to America's poor: I care.

SCARBOROUGH: The Republican Party, do you think we're getting it? we've lost five out of six elections with the popular vote. do you think we're starting to get it we need to be conservative ideologically but a bit more moderate tem mentally. all of flame throwers and bomb tossers, I mean didn't help you out on the campaign trail when you were responding to what --

RYAN: Senate candidates were --

SCARBOROUGH: Were saying and then what people sometimes on radio and tv were saying. That made your job harder, didn't it?

RYAN: I'm a conservative who believes our founding principles are the key principles for the day and the best if applied to our problems to solve problems. And we need to have that kind of temperament. This is why i'm focused on poverty these days and -- we have the 50th anniversary on the War on Poverty coming up. We don't have much to show for it, the highest rate in a generation. I think there are better ideas that we can use to approach and attack the root causes of poverty and as conservatives we should not crede the moral high ground on this issue. We shouldn't crede the playing field to a political monopoly.

Glad that Ryan his stating plainly he believes the New Deal and Great Society are antithetical to the country's founding principles. That's news you can use!

But Ryan is just wrong about the effectiveness of the Great Society. We have a lot to show for it: tens of millions of fewer impoverished seniors.

And the overall poverty rate is lower today than it was in the late 1950s.

Clearly, ground has been lost recently, especially since the Great Recession. But to claim that "we have nothing to show" for antipoverty programs is to deny facts. What's more, the large spike in the total number of impoverished Americans in the 2000s occurred when Republicans -- including Paul Ryan -- controlled all three branches of government, and after Republicans teamed up with Clinton to "reform" welfare.

But I'll give him this. Ryan's focused on poverty, all right. He wants to make poor people even poorer by shoveling lots of free money to rich people.