Category Archives: War on Poverty

Trash Talk from the New York Times

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The Budget Committee of the House of Representatives has just issued a report “The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later”, providing an excellent summary of federal antipoverty programs and their cost at the present time (budget year 2012).  Highlights are:

  • The federal government spent $799 billion on 92 different programs to combat poverty
  • Over $100 billion was spent for 15 different food aid programs
  • Over $200 billion was spent on cash aid
  • Over $90 billion spent on education and job training (over 20 programs)
  • Nearly $300 billion spent on healthcare
  • Almost $50 billion spent on housing assistance

The report also points out that many low-income households face very high effective marginal tax rates, approaching 100%, if any members are employed, because making more money means losing welfare benefits.  This discourages low-income individuals from working at a time when the labor-force participation rate has fallen to a 36-year low of 62.8%.
CaptureHere’s the situation: we have a rapidly growing federal budget with huge deficit spending (see above chart), a stalled economy with low labor-force participation, and an inefficient welfare system which encourages people not to work. Surely our goal should be to motivate welfare recipients to become productive citizens by returning to the workforce.  So doesn’t it make sense to revamp our welfare system to be more efficient as well as to create more incentives for recipients to get and hold a job?
Apparently this does not make sense to the New York Times.  Two days ago they ran an editorial “Mr. Ryan’s Small Ideas on Poverty”, castigating Paul Ryan for “providing polished intellectual cover for his party to mow down as many antipoverty programs as it can see.”  The editorial goes on to say that “it’s easy to find flaws or waste in any government program, but the proper response is to fix those flaws, not throw entire programs away as Mr. Ryan and his Party have repeatedly proposed. . . . For all their glossy reports, Republicans have shown no interest in making these or any other social programs work better.”
Putting it as charitably as possible, the NYT is being unhelpful.  It is a beacon of progressive thought for millions of Americans.  But it is apparently unwilling to give any credence to a sincere effort by fiscal conservatives to reform a major government program to make it operate more efficiently and effectively.

Who Are the Enemies of the Poor?

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In his usual provocative fashion, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says that Republicans are “Enemies of the Poor” because “they’re deeply committed to the view that efforts to aid the poor are actually perpetuating poverty, by reducing incentives to work.”
CaptureBut the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, “How the War on Poverty Was Lost”, that “the typical American living below the poverty line in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV.  He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player.  The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.”  In fact we are now spending $600 billion a year of our $3.4 trillion federal budget and another $230 billion by the states to fight poverty.  The poverty rate was 19% in 1964 and is 16% today (when government benefits are included).
Mr. Rector reminds us that “LBJ’s original aim (in initiating his antipoverty program) was to give poor Americans ‘opportunities, not doles’.  It would attack not just the symptoms of poverty but, more important, remove the causes.  By that standard, the war on poverty has been a catastrophe.  The root ‘causes’ of poverty have not shrunk but expanded as family structure disintegrated and labor force participation among men dropped.”
So what should our poverty agenda look like going forward?  We are already providing the basic necessities of life.  Our future efforts should therefore be focused on improving the quality of life for the poor.  This means more effective education and job training.  It means more effort to keep families together by reducing marriage penalties.  But most of all it means providing more opportunities for employment and job advancement.  This requires faster economic growth.  There are many ways to accomplish this.  Back to square one!
The true enemies of the poor are those who refuse to accept the progress which has been made in the War on Poverty and the need to change our approach in order to make further progress.