The War on Poverty: Now With Demographic Details
Brendan Nyhan sends me a link to this chart which shows the changes in poverty rate in more detail than the graph I posted this morning.
As this makes clear, the big sustained drop in poverty has been among senior citizens. And I think that should be no surprise as Medicare is the largest and most sustained Great Society program. The scope of Social Security was also expanded a lot during the 1950s and I believe it was made more generous during the 1960s. It also seems that you can’t claim any substantial Great Society success in terms of reducing the poverty rate among working-age people, aged 18-65. For kids, it looks to me like you had some meaningful progress that’s since been partially reversed by the changing demographics (for ideas on how to create new reductions in child poverty, check out CAP’s Half in Ten program).
So to be charitable to critics of the “war on poverty,” I think you can say that even though the Kennedy/Johnson years were a big success in terms of reducing poverty, the specific initiatives undertaken by the Office of Economic Opportunity were not at the forefront of this success.
6 Responses to “The War on Poverty: Now With Demographic Details”
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June 2nd, 2009 at 3:21 pm
It also seems that you can’t claim any substantial Great Society success in terms of reducing the poverty rate among working-age people, aged 18-65.
I dunno – the chart looks to be about 11% in 1965 and down to about 8% just a few years later – that is a 27% drop isn’t it? I would think when discussing any age cohort, that the closer one gets to the margins the less effective any policy is. A certain amount of those 18-64 year olds will have spent substantial time in prison, for example or will be otherwise unemployable.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Well, of course there is the question of whether the ‘War on Poverty’ was actually waged after Nixon took office. My understanding is that he essentially zeroed out the budget within a few years of his election, and of course a program with no funding won’t be really effective.
June 2nd, 2009 at 3:51 pm
Slightly off topic, what jumps out at me about that cart is that the upticks in poverty rates start slightly before the recessions.
June 2nd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Serial Catowner:
It’s actually a bit more complex than that – Nixon and/or Congress actually pumped quite a bit of cash into War on Poverty and other social programs, in part because Nixon was looking to get re-elected. His turn against social spending came about later.
The real zeroing out hit during the Reagan years, and it hit as early as his ‘81 budget. Not coincidentally, we see the rate of poverty tick up sharply well in advance of the recession for both working age adults and children as the programs that kept poverty down in those cohorts get the budget axe.
June 2nd, 2009 at 7:38 pm
The larger problem is that conservatives decided that the war on poverty had not worked, and then concluded that the whole idea was bogus. Where the right conclusion was that reducing poverty is actually still important, but we need some different policy ideas. That either means direct payments like the EITC or it means paternalism and big government. Conservatives naturally oppose all this because a lot of poor people aren’t white and therefor if we stop giving them all this preferential treatment they will work harder and stop complaining.
June 2nd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
You get points for integrity but not for graph reading. The graph shows that progress against child and 18-65 poverty during the war on poverty was reversed when the programs were reversed.
One might argue that the key factor was the excellent overall growth during the 60s, but the data just don’t show failure of the war on child and working age poverty.
The war didn’t end in 1980. The forgotten experiments were cancelled by Nixon. AFDC was not part of the war on poverty (telling people that AFDC existed was) but it sure looks like it reduced child poverty (at least in the short run). Of course, when Reagan took over there was a huge monstrous unprecedented increase in child poverty. It started rising with the Carter recession, but the Republicans managed to turn a cyclical increase into a new plateau.
Already in the 70s there were huge cuts in the real value of AFDC checks. Everyone “knows” that AFDC caused poverty, but no one looks at the ratio of the monthly check to the poverty line and the child poverty rate.
I’d say the new graphs strongly support your original claim, although analysis which doesn’t take GNP growth into account is simplistic.
The war on poverty reduced poverty. The programs which were preserved kept the elderly out of poverty. The gains from the programs which were eliminated or massively cut did not outlive the programs.
How about calculating cumulative change in child poverty under Democrats and under Republicans ? Eyeballing the graph I get -21% (Kennedy Johnson -13, Carter +1, Clinton – 9) under Democratic presidents and +8% under Republicans. That is much more dramatic evidence that active anti poverty programs work than the data on poverty of the elderly.
Of course one has to look at the aggregate economy. Everyone has done much better under Democratic presidents (except the super rich who do about equally well) so there isn’t anything special about the benefits for children at risk of poverty.