The House Budget Committee chairman, who on July 24 released an anti-poverty proposal that rehashed decades-old schemes to scale back safety-net programs and regulatory protections for low-income Americans, offers scant evidence of a serious determination to solve the problems that have Americans up in arms. If Ryan were serious, he wouldn’t be proposing to “consolidate” existing federal programs to aid the poor into block grants to the states — an approach that would give Republican governors, who have already shown a penchant for undermining health care, food stamp and education initiatives, the “flexibility” to do even more harm.