The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's announcement of "The War on Poverty" has, of course, brought umpteen assessments of the war's success (and failure). Officially, we haven't moved the needle much. By the Census Department's accounting, the US poverty rate has gone down just four points, from 19 to 15%, and economic inequality has soared. Conservatives argue that the minimal changes in poverty levels just don't justify all the spending on anti-poverty programs. Progressives ask, isn't 46 million people living in poverty still too many? Shouldn't we do more?
In the year's since Johnson's idealistic declaration, our focus on spending, and on raw data, has obscured a more human and qualitative view of poverty.
Johnson knew that the politics of poverty could be divisive and that talk of handouts could rub the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" believers the wrong way. In 1964, he spoke as strongly as he could about the way that solutions to poverty could lift the whole nation. He still faced opposition. Perhaps that's why his 1965 address arguing for passage of the Voting Rights Act also contains an even more resonant argument for the government's role in lifting the horizons of the poor. He makes clear the intrinsic connection we've glossed over: ending poverty is part of the campaign for human rights, not the welfare system.
As Johnson noted:
But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.
Today, politicians of all stripes affect the pose of a regretful accountant when discussing welfare programs: they say "I feel your pain" on the one hand, and then turn around and declare "but the numbers don't justify the spending" on welfare programs. It's a sign of that disturbing migration of the middle to the far right that some critics don't even bother to put a scrim of compassion over their green eyeshades. Fox News' "Entitlement Nation" segment has boldly scolded children who benefit from free lunch programs.
Proponents of anti-poverty program spending will always lose the debate on simple math alone. And conservatives have been incredibly effective at making that the debate. Americans believe that the most important element of "achieving the American dream" is money in your pocket: 28% say lowering taxes would help the most in achieving upward mobility. When asked why poverty persists in the US, the number one response (24% give it) is "too much government welfare that prevents initiative".
Both these answers illustrate a tragically simplistic understanding of the nature of poverty – and the role of the government. If we think about poverty as a function of income (an understandable assumption), then we look at the amount of money spent and wonder where it went. Critics of anti-poverty spending take great pleasure in advising the government to just "send a check" to each low-income family for the amount we've spent on their benefits. Representative Paul Ryan has claimed that would be about $22,000 – and it'd be more effective than the indirect assistance of the social safety net. No wonder an astounding 59% of the country says that there is "little chance" of most poor people escaping their circumstances.
But large-scale studies of class mobility show that the forces that move people out of poverty are more diffuse than can fit in any pocketbook. They have less to do with bank statements than conversations between two people and the distance between two points. In the largest study of its kind, Harvard researchers found that geography was the most important factor in determining whether a child living in poverty would rise to middle class in adulthood.
Living in mixed-income neighborhoods mattered more than tax credits or even access to higher education – or race. Living in areas that had the most established school systems and extensive public transit systems meant that children born to families making less than $25,000 who lived in Seattle had a 10% chance at ending up making over $107,000; a child raised in Atlanta had half as much a shot. And that's just the extreme end. That child in Seattle will most likely wind up making $34,000; the child in Atlanta can expect just $28,000. That is the difference between barely making it out of poverty and actually becoming middle class.
Given what we know about class mobility in general – the richer you are, the better chance you have at getting richer – the disparity in opportunity will just get more stark as the generations move forward.
Does this mean that direct spending on poverty is a bad idea, or ineffective? Does it mean we should just use those $22,000 per-family check to move them to Seattle? I don't believe so; it should just remind us that the broad vision Johnson sketched out was about so much more than feeding and housing the poor. The policies that emerged from that optimistic moment addressed nutrition, mass transit, wilderness conservation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The thinking wasn't "we're going to end poverty and better our country," it was "you can't do one without the other".
The recent push to raise the minimum wage may begin to inch us toward this more broad vision; it de-couples "ending poverty" and "giving money to poor people" in a healthy and enlightening way. It will also probably work. (A reviewfound evidence in 48 out of 54 economic analyses that raising the minimum wage reduced overall poverty.)
The War on Poverty, for all the glory we still associate with military victory, actually diminishes what President Johnson was trying to accomplish. A better phrase might be "The Great Society". The luster of the term has dimmed with overuse, but it is a much more accurate description of not just what ending poverty will give us, but how we might accomplish it.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/08/war-on-poverty-more-than-feeding-poor