Is Paul Ryan's Report on Poverty Skewed?

My local newspaper recently ran an opinion piece by Paul Krugman concerning Paul Ryan's report on the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty. The Fiscal Times also ran a piece on the same report. In my response, I reference a column by Coby Dillard which is linked here. I wanted to share my response to the newspaper.

Paul Krugman is the undoubtedly the most arrogant pundit to grace your pages. In “The Hammock Fallacy” he criticizes Rep. Paul Ryan’s House Budget Committee’s new poverty report for twisting the conclusions of research cited so voluminously in the report. In spite of, or perhaps because of his Nobel Prize in Economics, Mr. Krugman makes no such citations himself, relying solely on his own unassailable version of facts to rebut the Congressman.
 Research properly done produces statistics and figures commonly referred to as facts. Reports, based on these figures, produce opinions. Like the story of the six blind men and the elephant, a set of facts handed to a number of persons will generate any number of conclusions, none being the same.
 This article underscores the dire situation our nation is in. Mr. Krugman epitomizes the opinion of the left where you can never spend too much money on a problem, especially when it involves giving that money directly to a voter. Mr. Ryan, on the other hand, delivers the opinion from the right that giving too much money to an individual removes any incentive to do anything that will shut off the spigot.
 As Coby Dillard states in the piece directly above Mr. Krugman’s opinion, both sides in the political class seem to revel more in the game and the score than they do in the actual results.
 With an effectively 50/50 split over diametrically opposite approaches to problem solving, we, the people, are truly in a world of hurt.

If you link to the Fiscal Times page, the comments are interesting. There is a commenter named John Say who replies with some very cogent thoughts.