This Chart Proves the War on Poverty Has Been a Catastrophic Failure
Robert Rector / July 28, 2014
For the past 50 years, the government’s annual poverty rate has hardly changed at all. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty, roughly the same rate as the mid-1960s when the War on Poverty was just starting. After adjusting for inflation, federal and state welfare spending today is 16 times greater than it was when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S. How can the government spend so much while poverty remains unchanged?
The answer is simple: The U.S. Bureau of the Census official “poverty” figures are woefully incomplete. The Census defines a family as poor if its annual “income” falls below specific poverty income thresholds. In counting “income,” the Census includes wages and salaries but excludes nearly all welfare benefits. The federal government runs over 80 means-tested 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; roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient. (These figures do not include Social Security or Medicare.)
Of the $916 billion in means-tested welfare spending in 2012, the Census counted only about 3 percent as “income” for purposes of measuring poverty. In other words, the government’s official “poverty” measure is not helpful for measuring actual living conditions.
On the other hand, the Census poverty numbers do provide a very useful measure of “self-sufficiency”: the ability of a family to sustain an income above the poverty threshold without welfare assistance. The Census is accurate in reporting there has been no improvement in self-sufficiency for the past 45 years..
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The war was lost long ago.
Why would you work when the government pays you do to do nothing?
These people have no pride.
They get free rent (section 8) , free phones, EBT cards, all in total gives them a nice life for doing nothing but wasting air.
Its a disgrace that the Democrats use this to buy votes, instead of letting people rise up the economic ladder.
Its generations of those milking the government for ‘entitlements’ who will never ‘break the cycle’.
Each baby momma knows that every child represents more money from the government.