10 Things You Might Not Know About Poverty

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/10-things-you-might-not-know-about-poverty



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1) Johnson's programs were never intended to end poverty all by themselves. They were supposed to accelerate and reinvigorate a process of poverty reduction that was already under way in post-WWII America—as was clearly laid out in the 1964 Economic Report of the President, one of the two key documents defining the original scope of the War on Poverty, along with Johnson's 1964 State of the Union.

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2) The US economy has failed to keep reducing poverty as it did before 1964. After a few good years, the economy weakened substantially after 1973, undercutting the progress LBJ and his advisers had counted on. GDP grew 4.0 percent per year from 1948 through 1973, but only grew 2.7 percent annually from 1973 through 2011. The average annual unemployment rate from 1948 to 1973 was 4.8 percent, but since then it's been 6.5 percent, roughly 40 percent higher. That labor market weakness, combined with all-out attacks on labor unions, and a declining minimum wage, has significantly undercut the ability of tens of millions of Americans to raise themselves out of poverty simply by working an 8-hour day.

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3) Safety net programs have cut poverty by 40 percent since the 1960s. Along with social insurance programs like Medicare, and Social Security expansions—also associated with the War on Poverty—means-tested programs targeting the poor have dramatically reduced the rate of poverty in America since LBJ's presidency. For decades, the official poverty measure (OPM), based on cash income, has provided a crude and in many ways misleading measure of poverty, one that is particularly ill-suited to measuring the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs.


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4) The War on Poverty wasn't just means-tested programs for the poor.

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When I asked Bailey to group the programs into larger categories, she responded: “Here are four (not mutually exclusive) categories. Lots of programs cut across the categories:

Macroeconomic and structural change: 1964 tax cut, minimum wage, worker training and development, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Housing and Urban Development
Human capital development: Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Higher Education Act, Head Start, Civil Rights Act
Social insurance: Social Security, Medicare
Safety net: food stamps, AFDC, Medicaid, Older Americans Act.”