POVERTY IN AMERICA The Wall Street Journal OPINION Robert Rector: How the War on Poverty Was Lost Fifty years and $20 trillion later, LBJ's goal to help the poor become self-supporting has failed. By Robert Rector Jan. 7, 2014 On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking. "This administration today, here and now," he thundered, "declares unconditional war on poverty in America." Fifty years later, we're losing that war. Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. Liberals argue that we aren't spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that's not the problem. In reality, we're losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: "to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities." The federal government currently runs more than 80 meanstested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (That figure doesn't include Social Security or Medicare benefits.) Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is 16 times greater than it was in 1964. If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.
LBJ promised that the war on poverty would be an "investment" that would "return its cost manifold to the entire economy." But the country has invested $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years. What does America have to show for its investment? Apparently, almost nothing: The official poverty rate persists with little improvement. That is in part because the government's poverty figures are misleading. Census defines a family as poor based on income level but doesn't count welfare benefits as a form of income. Thus, government means-tested spending can grow infinitely while the poverty rate remains stagnant. Not even government, though, can spend $9,000 per recipient a year and have no impact on living standards. And it shows: Current poverty has little resemblance to poverty 50 years ago. According to a variety of government sources, including census data and surveys by federal agencies, the typical American living below the poverty level in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. His home is larger than the home of the average nonpoor French, German or English man. He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player. More than half the poor have computers and a third have wide, flat-screen TVs. The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year. Do higher living standards for the poor mean that the war on poverty has succeeded? No. To judge the effort, consider LBJ's original aim. He sought to give poor Americans "opportunity not doles," planning to shrink welfare dependence not expand it. In his vision, the war on poverty would strengthen poor Americans' capacity to support themselves, transforming "taxeaters" into "taxpayers." 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. A large segment of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than when the war on poverty began. The collapse of marriage in low-income communities has played a substantial role in the declining capacity for self-support. In 1963, 6% of American children were born out of wedlock. Today the number stands at 41%. As benefits swelled, welfare increasingly served as a substitute for a bread-winning husband in the home. According to the Heritage Foundation's analysis, children raised in the growing number of single-parent homes are four times more likely to be living in poverty than children reared by married parents of the same education level. Children who grow up without a father in the home are also more likely to suffer from a broad array of social and behavioral problems. The consequences continue into adulthood: Children raised by single parents are three times more likely to end up in jail and 50% more likely to be poor as adults. A lack of parental work poses another major problem. Even in good economic times, a parent in the average poor family works just 800 hours a year, roughly 16 hours weekly, according to census data. Low levels of work mean lower earnings and higher levels of dependence. So how might we restore LBJ's original mission in the war on poverty? First, as the economy improves, the government should require able-bodied, non-elderly adult recipients in federal welfare programs to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving benefits. We should also reduce the antimarriage incentives rife within welfare programs. For instance, current programs sharply cut benefits if a mother marries a working father. Reducing these restrictions would begin a long-term effort to rebuild the family in low-income communities.
This would be a better battle plan for eradicating poverty in America than spending more money on failed programs. And it would help achieve LBJ's objective for the poor to "replace their despair with opportunity." The New York Times The Opinion Pages Progress in the War on Poverty By Nicholas Kristof JAN. 8, 2014 America s war on poverty turned 50 years old this week, and plenty of people have concluded that, as President Reagan put it: We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won. That perception shapes the right s suspicion of food stamps, minimum-wage raises and extensions of unemployment benefits. A reader named Frank posted on my Facebook page: All the government aid/handouts in the world will not make people better parents. This is why the ideas from the left, although always made with the best of intentions, never work.... All of this aid is wasted. Yet a careful look at the evidence suggests that such a view is flat wrong. In fact, the first lesson of the war on poverty is that we can make progress against poverty, but that it s an uphill slog. The most accurate measures, using Census Bureau figures that take account of benefits, suggest that poverty rates have fallen by more than one-third since 1968. There s a consensus that without the war on poverty, other forces (such as mass incarceration, a
rise in single mothers and the decline in trade unions) would have lifted poverty much higher. A Columbia University study suggests that without government benefits, the poverty rate would have soared to 31 percent in 2012. Indeed, an average of 27 million people were lifted annually out of poverty by social programs between 1968 and 2012, according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The best example of how government antipoverty programs can succeed involves the elderly. In 1960, about 35 percent of older Americans were poor. In 2012, 9 percent were. That s because senior citizens vote, so politicians listened to them and buttressed programs like Social Security and Medicare. In contrast, children are voiceless, so they are the age group most likely to be poor today. That s a practical and moral failure. I don t want anybody to be poor, but, if I have to choose, I d say it s more of a priority to help kids than seniors. In part, that s because when kids are deprived of opportunities, the consequences can include a lifetime of educational failure, crime and underemployment. Research from neuroscience underscores why early interventions are so important. Early brain development turns out to have lifelong consequences, and research from human and animal studies alike suggests that a high-stress early childhood in poverty changes the physical brain in subtle ways that impair educational performance and life outcomes. A careful review of antipoverty programs in a new book, Legacies of the War on Poverty, shows that many of them have a clear impact albeit sometimes not as great an impact as advocates hoped. For starters, one of the most basic social programs that works indeed pays for itself many times over is family-planning assistance for at-risk teenage girls. This has actually been one of
America s most successful social programs in recent years. The teenage birthrate has fallen by half over roughly the last 20 years. Another hugely successful array of programs involved parent coaching to get pregnant women to drink and smoke less and to encourage at-risk moms to talk to their children more. Programs like Nurse-Family Partnership, Healthy Families America, Child First, Save the Children and Thirty Million Words Project all have had great success in helping parents do a better job with their kids. Early education likewise has strong evidence of impact. Critics note that in Head Start, for example, gains in I.Q. seem to fade within a few years. That s true and disappointing. But in the last five years, robust studies from scholars like David Deming have shown that graduates of Head Start also have improved life outcomes: higher high school graduation and college attendance rates, and less likely to be out of school and out of a job. Another area of success: Programs that encourage jobs, especially for the most at-risk groups. The earned-income tax credit is a huge benefit to the working poor and to society. Likewise, a program called Career Academies has had excellent results training at-risk teenagers in specialized careers and giving them practical work experience. Even eight years later, those young people randomly assigned to Career Academies are earning significantly more than those in control groups. As that example suggests, we increasingly have first-rate research randomized controlled trials, testing antipoverty programs as rigorously as if they were pharmaceuticals that give us solid evidence of what works or doesn t. So let s drop the bombast and look at the evidence. Critics are right that antipoverty work is difficult and that dependency can be a problem. But the premise of so much of today s opposition to food stamps and other benefits that government assistance inevitably fails is just wrong. And child
poverty is as unconscionable in a rich nation today as it was half a century ago. Read both articles before answering the following questions: 1. Define: means-tested, doles, stagnant, capacity, array, eradicating, buttressed, albeit, rigorously, bombast, premise, unconscionable 2. Robert Rector states that 15% of Americans live in poverty, unchanged from the mid-1960s. Nicholas Kristof states that poverty rates have fallen by more than one-third since 1968. How can both claims be true? (Hint: Look carefully at how income is measured in the statistics each author cites. What accounts for the difference?) 3. Rector notes that Americans living below the official poverty line have much higher living standards today compared to in the 1960s. He attributes this difference to government welfare benefits. What are some other possible reasons the poor today are more able to afford things like TVs and cars? 4. If Rector agrees with Kristof that the lives of the poor have improved since the 1960s, why does he still say the War on Poverty was lost? 5. What standard does Rector use to measure the success or failure of the War on Poverty? (See paragraphs 7-8.) What standard does Kristof use? Which standard is better? Why? 6. What are each writer s reasons for using his standard? Are they good reasons? Explain. 7. So let s drop the bombast and look at the evidence. Does Kristof mean that critics of the War on Poverty do not use evidence? If so, is he right? Explain.
8. How can we learn anything from the evidence if people don t agree on what standards to use in judging it? 9. Do you agree that we can test antipoverty programs as rigorously as if they were pharmaceuticals? How does Kristof think we can do this? 10. What studies does Kristof point to in order to show that poverty would be higher without the War on Poverty? Does he show that these studies test this claim as rigorously as a pharmaceutical is tested? Is this possible? Explain. 11. What does Rector mean when he writes, If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.? Why don t we just give poor people cash instead of trying to help them through programs? 12. How does Rector argue that welfare has contributed to increasing single-parenthood and crime? What conclusion does Kristof draw by treating the increase in single parenthood and incarceration as independent of the War on Poverty? 13. What would Rector think of Kristof s claim that we can make progress in the War on Poverty? 14. Why do Rector and Kristof try to evaluate the War on Poverty as a whole, as opposed to evaluating specific programs? 15. What arguments, if any, does Rector make about specific programs? What arguments, if any, does Kristof make? Can we generalize from successes or failures of specific programs to conclusions about the War on Poverty as a whole? Explain. 16. Kristof believes that family planning assistance for at-risk teenage girls has caused the fall by one-half in the teenage
birthrate over roughly the last 20 years. Why does Kristof use a trend from the last 20 years to measure the success of a project-- the War on Poverty--that began in 1964? 17. Why were so many elderly people poor in 1960, despite the existence of Social Security? Why were so few poor in 2012? Does Kristof show that Social Security and Medicare caused this decline in elderly poverty? Does he test his claim with the rigor with which we test pharmaceuticals? Explain.