Poverty Will Always Be With Us Until We Do Something About It
Charles Krauthammer scoffs at the idea of spending money on ensuring that poor people have health care with the observation that “Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us” so we might as well spend our money on space exploration. Ezra Klein says “That’s true. But the degree to which they’re with us is directly dependent on where we spend those billions.”
I think even that concedes too much. I wish this chart actually started at zero, but the point should be clear either way. It shows the poverty rate in the United States:
What happened? Well, public policy happened. In the 1960s, federal domestic programs got more ambitious, especially with regard to senior citizens. And the poverty rate went down, with the declines concentrated among the seniors who were the main targets of the spending. The extent of poverty is very much subject to our control. Disease, presumably, really will always be with us. But still, polio isn’t with us anymore. Nor is smallpox.
Albert Hirschman wrote a book called The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. Of the three, I think “futility” is the most pernicious and in some ways the easiest to knock down. It sounds very wise to observe that problems are unsolvable. But even though change is hard, it’s very much possible.
42 Responses to “Poverty Will Always Be With Us Until We Do Something About It”
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July 20th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
I assume this chart uses the gov’t’s official poverty line? I’d be curious to know exactly how that line is set, who does it (i.e. can the Bush administration fiddle with it?) because it always struck me as absurdly low
Here it is from Wiki
Persons in Family Unit 48 Contiguous States
1 $10,830
2 $14,570
3 $18,310
4 $22,050
What if that family of four is a single person with three kids? How the hell are you supposed to house, feed, provide child care on 22K/yr?
July 20th, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Here, here.
Relative poverty, of course, is always with you, since someone’s always going to be making less than others. But absolute poverty can be ended, and relative poverty can be made comfortable as opposed to below standard living standards.
I remember reading one book on the War on Poverty that gave an estimate that if in 1968, we’d just distributed $11 billion ($67 billion in 2008 dollars) to the poor as a GMI (guaranteed minimum income), we would have eliminated absolute poverty entirely. Now, granted our poverty line is way too low, but still.
That’s why, even though I think it doesn’t go far enough in terms of dealing with jobs, I like the Half in 10 program. At least it’s getting us thinking in the right direction again.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Jim:
The poverty line was originally set by Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration back in in 1964; it’s currently issued by the Census and HHS.
It’s always been criticized as too low, because Orshansky based it off of the Department of Agriculture’s minimum food budgets to keep people from starving (which themselves are very low), and then just adjusted by the proportion of the average family’s budget allocated to food. The problem is that, as we’ve kept this measure constant by adjusting for inflation (in part to allow historical comparisons), the proportion of budgets allocated to food has changed dramatically as the price of things like housing and health care have gone up while new consumer categories that didn’t really exist to the same extent in the 1960s have arisen that aren’t counted.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
War will always be with us; we still fund the military. Disease will always be with us; we still fund th CDC and NIH. Taxes will always be with us; Republicans still try to eradicate them.
The struggle of life goes on…
July 20th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Matt still doesn’t know how the poverty rate is calculated. Domestic spending did become “more ambitious” in the 1960s, but that’s not reflected in the poverty rates. What is reflected is simple cash transfer payments (social security). Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, EITC, all of these are spending and none of them are included in the calculations.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Thomas,
Before holding forth on others’ ignorance, please make sure you aren’t advertising your own.
Cash payments from the government, including Social Security and welfare, most certainly are counted as income.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Leave it to an Obama cultist like Matt to mislead his readers. If you look at the graph closely, you see that he jiggered up the vertical axis to make his point stronger than it actually is. Which is to say, not at all.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
other Anonymous @ 7: Except that, y’know, Yglesias prefaced the graph with “I wish this chart actually started at zero, but the point should be clear either way.”
July 20th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
But… wasn’t Charles K. right, then? As MY mentioned, policy happened. Big, huge policies, like the War on Poverty. And poverty fell not to zero, but 11 percent of the population. Assuming diminishing returns on the programs, or even not, what would it have taken to stamp out that last 11 percent? Would that have been remotely possible, politically?
Moreover, since the early 80s we seem to be wavering from 11 to 15 percent, regardless of administration. Regardless of policies in place. This would seem to call for an historic chart like the ones I see bandied about for taxation. Top marginal rates don’t seem so bad today compared to 1930! So, historically, rates are quite low. Seems the same could be said for poverty. Even after 8 years of George W. Bush.
July 20th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Thomas, I’m not understanding what you’re trying to say. How are cash transfer payments not included in the calculations?
July 20th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Sam M, it is possible that 11 to 15 percent is a “natural” poverty rate for the US… at least with the methods we’ve used to address it thus far.
On the other hand, from the OECD’s POV, there seem to be other ways to address the issue, since by their measure, the poverty rate in the OECD as a whole hovers around 10%, compared to about 17% in the US.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Charles Krauthammer scoffs at the idea…
My default comment to any Krauthammer post is this:
“Fuck you”.
He’s a disingenuous twat-whistle, and he doesn’t deserve the time of day.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Not a fan of Krauthammer in general, but I think that he is responding to the oft-heard criticism that we shouldn’t spend money on space exploration as long as poverty/disease/hunger exist. But, since those things, to a greater or lesser degree, will likely always exist as long as humans exist, it’s an impossible standard to meet. Thus, Krauthammer is, I think, making the point that if we wait until we solve those things to take ambitious new steps forward, we’ll be waiting forever.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:18 pm
I disagree with Krauthammer 9 times out of 10. But this time he is right.
NASA’s budget is 17 to 18 Billion a year. Compared to other budget items, it isn’t that much.
Cutting that wouldn’t necessarily mean more money for poverty reduction either.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
Moreover, since the early 80s we seem to be wavering from 11 to 15 percent, regardless of administration. Regardless of policies in place.
Well, not “regardless of the policies in place.” Even Reagan and W at their height couldn’t touch social security or Medicare. The suggestion that we should pretend the largest poverty-fighting programs just disappeared and re-appeared when they didn’t is terribly stupid. There’s a lot of other programs that fit into that category as well.
I mean, women almost never die in childbirth anymore. That should be impossible. It runs contrary to all of human evolution. But we figured out how to do it. Now, we have a new set of problems, which is women live to a ripe old age and die of heart attacks…but that’s a much better problem to have than dead mothers and orphaned children.
We’ll never rid ourselves of ignorant blowhards. Or rude people. But that doesn’t mean all of us should throw up our hands and pretend everyone lives in the best of all possible worlds simply because we personally have a cushy job.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Matt:
By now you ought to know that the official poverty rate doesn’t include food stamps and the like.
What happened in the 1960s to drive down the poverty rate was prosperity.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Poverty will always be with us, but space is going somewhere?
July 20th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Re: “Poverty and disease and social ills will always be with us”
Wow. Was his next line “Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”
I wonder what the Three Ghosts of Christmas are up to come the next holiday season?
July 20th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Krauthammer’s full quote was something to the effect that we shouldn’t be using the goal of poverty reduction as an excuse for having a really pathetic space exploration budget. He’s right. The only problem is when both the left and the right agree that there’s a zero-sum trade-off between social welfare funding and the NASA budget. There’s not. In fact the more sensible question to ask is why the budget just for the Air Force is several times larger than the budget for all of the country’s space exploration projects. Members of Congress are forcing through funding for military aircraft which may never be used for anything while NASA’s spacecraft fall apart.
July 20th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
That graph is obviously incorrect. It shows the poverty rate going down during the Reagan Administration. Any good liberal will tell you that’s when the homeless population exploded in this country.
http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/135/reagan.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2004/6/11/reagan_and_the_homeless_epidemic_in
July 20th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
According to that chart, poverty rates started falling in 1959 and throughout the early 1960s well before LBJ managed to push through any of his anti-poverty programs. Of course, poverty continued to decline at that point, but correlation doesn’t mean causation. In fact, looking at the chart, it seems like poverty rises and falls with the rest of the US economy. Why, poverty rates even started falling in the mid-90s, when those evil Republicans were pushing welfare reform…
July 20th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Any good liberal will tell you that’s when the homeless population exploded in this country.
But they wanted to be homeless…..
July 20th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat.
But when his disciples saw it, they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste?
For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.
When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, Why trouble ye the woman? for she hath wrought a good work upon me.
For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
Conservatives are weirdos. Homelessness did explode during the Reagan administration.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Conservatives are weirdos. Homelessness did explode during the Reagan administration.
No, reporting about homelessness exploded during Reagan. You are hilariously proving Tommers point.
July 20th, 2009 at 8:05 pm
I’m proving Tommers point by made-up facts that exists only in your head? Impressive.
July 20th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
Rea,
The cross-reference at Mark 14:7 states this a bit differently:
“For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always.”
Our Lord was not advocating that we leave poverty up to the market, as Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Steve Sailor would apparently prefer. Unless you can make the argument that space exploration is as worthy as honoring the Incarnate God, I hardly think this quotation is relevant.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Maybe some parent who lost a son in Iraq will push Charles Krauthammer’s ass down a stairwell.
Let Charles crawl about 10 blocks to the emergency room.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:07 pm
Sam M:
If I seem a bit impatient, it’s that I’ve been arguing this point on this blog for over a year and it hasn’t seemed to sink in. The poverty rate in 1959 was 22.4% – by 1964, it had dropped 3 percentage points to 19%. Then between 1964 and 1969, it dropped 7 percentage points, more than doubling the rate of decline.
If you dis-aggregate the numbers, it’s fairly clear that public policy’s at work here, because it was largely a massive decrease in elderly poverty (i.e, unrelated to the economic fortunes of workers), with improvement among children coming in second (ditto).
That being said, yes, you can reduce poverty below what’s “natural.” Other countries manage a poverty rate of 5%, I think we can definitely hit that without nationalizing most of the economy…oh wait…
July 20th, 2009 at 10:08 pm
Apollo was a stupid fucking waste of money and a follow on mission will be the same.
The way to do space travel is to fund advanced physics and develop the knowledge that will give us new sources of energy and –one day — the means to do space travel based on something other than refined versions of the fucking gunpowder rockets developed in China about 1000 years ago.
Pissing huge sums away on stupid shit and non-viable NASA program will greatly retard progress in the long run — not help it.
How many of our young geniuses see Physics as a desirable career today? How many Einsteins are lured away to craft baffling con schemes for hedge funds.
July 20th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Don Williams: Physics and astronomy are totally different fields. We should do both. Going to the moon allows us to collect rocks, conduct experiments, etc. Now, robots can do a lot of that on a cheaper budget, and certainly there’s a case to be made for more robots and less humans in space exploration, but there’s plenty of things that robots have not yet caught up with us on, so humans should still go into space from time to time.
Space is full of data. WE NEED TO COLLECT THAT DATA.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:35 am
Obama’s proposed 2010 NASA funding is better than any year of the Bush administration.
Krauthammer is an idiot to praise Bush’s mismanagement of NASA.
We need to be doing lots of ambitious robotic exploration and launch vehicle development, not sending people to places that are downright fatal.
And yes, we should fund the hell out of NASA. IMO, space exploration is important, not because of any short term gain, but because it is crucial for our long run survival and growth.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:45 am
@Don Williams:
I’m all for funding high energy physics. One day, we may get fusion right, or discover a power source we haven’t imagined.
But we don’t need Star Trek technology to go to space.
Look up nuclear rockets. The nuclear salt-water rocket, in particular, could reduce interplanetary trips to a matter of weeks and make interstellar travel feasible. It could be built with standard fission technology.
Look up the Launch Loop. Unlike other permanent launch infrastructure, a launch loop could be built with materials we have today. Yes, it is an incredibly ambitious project, but what it requires is the will to build it.
If we want to go to space on a large scale, we don’t need to wait for high energy physics before it can happen.
July 21st, 2009 at 8:38 am
I hardly need to go all theistic–all I need to do is point out that unlike Jesus in the Book of Matthew, a few days before being crucified, the Moon and Mars ain’t going anywhere. They’re more like the poor in that respect.
The space program is not necessarily a waste–properly done, it’s an investment for the future. But our focus has been on showy propaganda programs rather than, for example, an economical means of lifting payroll to orbit . . .
July 21st, 2009 at 8:39 am
Argh! Lifting payload to orbit. MY is a bad influence on me . . .
July 21st, 2009 at 9:26 am
[...] Poverty Will Always Be With Us Until We Do Something About It — Matthew Yglesias – What would make this chart perfect would be the names and terms of the presidents along the x-axis. Envision that context when you look at the chart, and you’ll get the picture. [...]
July 21st, 2009 at 9:46 am
I’d like to see a plot of spending on social programs and see how that progresses along with poverty reduction. And then, I’d like to see a plot of growing bureaucracy. I think most bureaucrats could get a job on the private market, thus reducing the need for an ever-expanding base of tax consumers.
At what point is there declining marginal utility? Judging from the graph, there seems to be resistance and support lines at 15 and 11 percent. Perhaps the growing economy of the post-war years was a better explanation than government subsidies.
July 21st, 2009 at 11:06 am
I’m with Matt until about 1974 or so, but after that, aren’t the peaks and valleys in this graph pretty well explained by recessions?
July 21st, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Rob:
The key year on that graph is ‘79, where the peaks and valleys that you see from 74-79 that are part of the normal business cycle suddenly reset at 2-3 percentage points higher – which I would argue corrolates very well with Reagan’s deep cuts to social welfare spending, which doesn’t reset until the economic boom of the 1990s, and resets somewhere in between during the Bush years.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:54 pm
What happened? Well, public policy happened. In the 1960s, federal domestic programs got more ambitious, especially with regard to senior citizens. And the poverty rate went down, with the declines concentrated among the seniors who were the main targets of the spending. The extent of poverty is very much subject to our control.
=============================================================But how could the poverty rate have fallen from 15 to 11 % in the 90s when the sainted Bill Clinton dismantled many of those ambitious social programs?
http://www.greenchange.org/article.php?id=877
Clinton’s welfare reform bill, which was signed on Aug. 22, 1996, obliterated the nation’s social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single parents, off of the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies and continued Medicaid coverage. Families were plunged into crisis, struggling to survive on multiple jobs that paid $6 or $7 an hour, or less than $15,000 a year.
But these were the lucky ones. In some states, half of those dropped from the welfare rolls could not find work. Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding. The booming and overcrowded prison system handled the influx of the poor, as well as our abandoned mentally ill.
The growing desperation provided a pool of broken people willing to work for low wages and without unions or benefits. And while Clinton was busy selling out the poor, he lowered the capital gains tax from 28 percent to 20 percent, a reduction that permitted the wealthiest 1 percent of the population to derive 80 percent of the tax savings.
July 21st, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Campesino:
Clinton dismantled one (actually quite small) part of the social safety net, not the whole thing. Increasing the minimum wage, establishing family and medical leave, and economic prosperity helped to counter the effects.
July 21st, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Campesino: Nationally, only about 14% of welfare leavers post-welfare-reform ended up without a job, a working spouse, or disabilty benefits. Many of the other 86% are now working and often non-poor, although still low-income. (http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/310839_snapshots3_no7.pdf). Of course we should still be concerned about low-income welfare leavers – especially those who are disconnected – but welfare reform did inspire many folks to go to work, greatly increasing their income even after accounting for work expenses.
Also, Clinton deserves credit for greatly expanding the EITC, one of the U.S.’s most effective anti-poverty programs.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxfacts/displayafact.cfm?Docid=36