The US government didn’t lose the War on Poverty: it changed sides

I’m not getting your chart. Shouldn’t it be % of poor households, (perhaps adjusted for changes in household size)? And shouldn’t the admittedly outmoded poverty line, (not to mention the near poverty line), be adjusted for the different composition of the consumption “basket” over time, (such that, e.g. the costs of housing rents or education having increased, while the nutrition portion has relatively declined), as well as the effect of transfers?

The chart wasn’t labeled right-side/left-side, but I suppose it could have been inferred.

BTW I’m not at all disagreeing with your overall thrust, which I hold, (having lived through it over here), overwhelmingly likely, it’s just that the data indicators are better considered in multiple dimensions.

Also I believe that the BLS or the NAS or perhaps both were charged with coming up with a poverty line indicator to drastically revise and update the Orshansky artifact, which would raise the poverty and near poverty (and extreme poverty) rates considerably, were they ever officially implemented.

I’m a little uncertain on how you separate the effects of the Great Society programs from the overall massive poverty reduction that happened throughout the 1960s and early 1970s due to a very strong economy. Particularly the late 1960s, when the unemployment rate was down in the 4% range for five years – it’s similar to the poverty reduction in the good late 1990s economic conditions.

Just to connect with something I said on the other thread, I think that a big part of this (whether as a cause, or a rationalization or whatever) is the shift from thinking of society as a system of co-operation and poverty as a dysfunction of that system, to thinking of outcomes as a matter of individual choice and responsibility. This shift is reflected to some extent in the difference between Rawls’s conception of justice and Ronald Dworkin’s (obviously taking the choice part of Dworkin’s view and neglecting the redistributive part, but see Dworkin’s discussions of unemployment etc in _Sovereign Virtue_ for the extent of his buy-in to the Zeitgeist – see Chris Armstrong , Equality, Risk and Responsibility: Dworkin on the Insurance Market. _Economy and Society_, 34, (3), 451-473.).

But wait, if people in poverty stay there because it’s so awesome to get handouts and not work, and the US government is *cutting* handouts while poverty is increasing, that must mean that there’s something wrong with the first point.

Yeah, it’s not like there are European countries with immigrants. If only those African Americans would stop immigrating and being poor.

Anyway, you can keep people in poverty by ways other than paying them to be poor.

Yes, you can pay them to work at Walmart.

Meanwhile, all that’s really happening is a continual erosion of benefits, which are used to permit for tax cuts to the wealthy, for corporations, a relaxing of standards and regulations and other means of easing the “burden” on the upper classes.

So, advocate for whatever you want. You know it’s not the actual goal of the politicians who’re cutting benefits. And meanwhile, tell yourself that the poor are lazy. So incredibly lazy that even the meagerest crumbs keep them loving being poor.

It’s always going to be liberals causing the “problem”, because it’s not an actual problem, it’s a way to convince the middle class that the poor are bad people who’s vote was bought by liberals, that efforts to help the poor actually hurt them, and cutting taxes on the rich is the only real way to help everyone.

Which is of course, nonsense. The fastest growing benefits consumers are white people in Republican counties http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-05/republican-heavy-counties-eat-up-most-food-stamp-growth

Contrawise, cuts to food stamps most hurt the people who vote for those who make the cuts http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/12/food-stamp-cut_n_4585549.html

The poor are not a ‘side’. The ‘sides’ are the ruling class and those they rule. The government is an instrument of the former whose purpose, along with the rest of the state, is to control, regulate, and exploit the latter. Except under extraordinary circumstances, like the beginning of a civil war, the government does not change sides, it changes methods.

“they’re not poor enough to be grateful if you give them a handout.”

Cough *mortage interest deduction* Cough!

“This is an important subject for which we have no adequate and accessible data. ”

What? I am astounded. Go read Matt Bruenig on this and come back. We have data. We know what we are doing. We refuse to act because we just. Don’t. Care.

Next BB theory – the poor are being paid not to go to the polls.

BB @ 20

Yes it costs business more to provide their employees with benefits like health insurance. Truly, requiring business to do so degrades everyone’s quality of life.

I agree with the point of the post and the shift in the focus of US government policy has had enormous negative impact. I would add — not as a counterargument but to point out the difficulties of the problems faced by the poor in our society — that our legal system has become incredibly complex and very difficult for anyone to navigate without legal assistance which is simple not there in most civil cases. I heard a presentation recently from someone very involved in the delivery of legal assistance to the poor who pointed out that in the US one can lose one’s child, lose one’s house, in some cases end up in prison, etc. all without being provided with the assistance of counsel; and in well over 90% of cases the poor do not get any assistance of counsel. This makes it extraordinarily difficult to achieve justice for vast numbers of people (the second objective the first sentence of the US Constitution; listed before the common defense and others) regardless of the particulars of government policy and would continue to impact terribly upon the poor even if there were a real attempt to address poverty and a renewed war on poverty.

About 300 billion in federal spending discounting Medicaid type expenditures.

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/bad-arithmetoc-on-the-battle-against-poverty

So about a $1000 per capita.

Now what should we be doing? Well first let’s focus on child poverty. Why child poverty? Because even immoral chuckleheads like Brett can’t blame children for their poverty. Finland has the lowest rates of child poverty in the world. Here is what they do:
http://www.demos.org/blog/1/7/15/child-welfare-programs-finland

So lets do that.

/Pretending that we don’t know what to do is disingenuous. Don’t do it.

MPAVictoria ,

That link does not provide the requested information in any way shape or form. The number 300 does not appear any where on the page.

300 billion in federal spending would amount to almost 18,000 dollars in spending for every family in poverty. With 115 million families and 14.5% living in poverty. That would just be federal spending alone and not include Medicaid according to you.

I don’t think we spend that much. It might be close but certainly not that much. Our two main national anti poverty programs, besides Medicaid, Food stamps and the Earned income tax credit pay out about 150 billion dollars, maybe a bit less. But not everyone who benefits is poor.

Do you actually have the information?

Mattski @ 19
“Anyway, you can keep people in poverty by ways other than paying them to be poor.
Yes, you can pay them to work at Walmart.”

Yes and then they can rely on foodstamps they can use at Walmart to get their dinner. OR have fellow employees run a canned food drive to co-workers…

Here is a report from the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality that shows the importance of a safety net – but more importantly, how a “failing” labor market is crippling the nation.

(The report suggests “…suggests that full recovery from the latest recession will likely not occur absent major labor market reform and intervention.”

The report also states that “Absent any safety net benefits in 2012, the supplemental poverty measure would have been 14.5 percentage points higher.”)

http://stanford.io/1NUoTWF

If you need another source:
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/?fa=view&id=1258

There is a new book about the politics of this: The Age of Acquiescence by Steve Fraser. It looks like the kind of book that is made for a CT symposium.

adam.smith ,

That really wasn’t it. All I can hope is unlike MPAVictoria you don’t keep insisting it was.

And if it was ,again, that would mean that we spend something like 20,000 dollars per family fighting poverty. We don’t. Also what we need the data over time. From 1960 to today. That data might exist but I doubt it.

Admit that you didn’t even read any of the links someguy.

45: Almost done, and enjoying the heck out of it. A fun read, Fraser may not be showing his work. Sample, about the Tea Party:

That utopian visions continue to smolder and flare up in these regions and not elsewhere is telling. The handicraftsman is extinct. The yeoman farmer is gone.
The peasant-proletarian immigrant from the Old World has been digested by the New. Slaves got free, got re-enserfed, and finally got dispossessed and
warehoused. What lives on clinging to life at one moment, reproducing like a rabbit the next, is this breed of family capitalist and all its managerial and
blue-collar relations. A utopian capitalism in league with and at odds with really existing capitalism endures

Consumer capitalism retrofits the past into saleable nostalgia: retro or vintage clothing, Disneyland, paddle steamboat excursions, resurrected antique railroad
rides to nowhere, three-cornered hats. History for all of us—and most of all, for family capitalism—becomes less a resource than a sedative. In the fabulist
imagination, all those real-world indictments of the family capitalist idyll—the family sweatshop, the private brothel, the emotional straitjacket—go to die

One Amazon reviewer calls out the “allusions as thick as thieves,” and if you are a serious academic reader, it can seem either superficial or very dense. “Primitive accumulation,” a sentence about Harvey, and pages of examples. Haven’t gotten there yet, the endnotes may be amazing.

In the above, you have to decide whether to pass over “History for all of us—and most of all, for family capitalism—becomes less a resource than a sedative.” or stare at it for a while.

Reminds me a lot of Ernst Bloch.

“Also I believe that the BLS or the NAS or perhaps both were charged with coming up with a poverty line indicator to drastically revise and update the Orshansky artifact, which would raise the poverty and near poverty (and extreme poverty) rates considerably, were they ever officially implemented.”

That’s the new supplemental poverty measure. Won’t replace the old one as that’s written into too many laws. But this new one moves to something similar to every other nation’s measure. Below x% of median household income adjusted for size. But still, confusingly, not including all transfers. Given that the US is more unequal than most other countries then yes, the US poverty numbers look pretty bad by this measurement method.

Dan at 10 has the major point though and JQ at 11 is rather avoiding it.

” The result is to understate the progress made on poverty reduction since the 1960s, but not to change the basic story.”

It’s the last phrase of that which is wrong. 60s poverty measurements were those under the poverty line after poverty alleviation efforts (largely to almost completely so). Today’s numbers are those below the poverty line before poverty alleviation efforts (largely to almost completely so).

As it happens MR has a post today on this very point:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/how-much-has-the-u-s-poverty-rate-declined.html

“Official percent poor in 1964: 19.0%
Official percent poor in 2013: 14.5%
Reduction to correct for:
Value of noncash benefits – 3.0%
Omission of refundable tax credits – 3.0%
Replacing CPI-U with PCE index – 3.7%
Adjusted percent poor in 2013: 4.8%”

I’d say, and of course this is only an opinion and JQ and anyone else is entirely free to disagree with it, that that does change the basic story.

>Both the number and the percentage of families in poverty dropped sharply during the 1960s when the “War on Poverty” was being waged actively, and remained near their all-time lows through the Nixon and Carter years

This narrative is absurd. The chart shows the poverty rate dropping rapidly in the early 60s, well before the war on poverty. The war on poverty programs were not passed until the late 60s, and took some time to set up. What the poverty data shows is that poverty was massively declining in the US until the war on poverty started, at which point poverty stopped going away. This has continued despite the relentless increases in the size, eligibility, and generosity of virtually every of all of the programs involved. As for the absolute number of poor people, also passed in the mid 60s was the Kennedy immigration reform bill, which caused immigration to the US to double between the 60s and 80s and triple by the 90s. In sum,the only honest reading of this chart is not “the government switched sides” but “the war on poverty made things worse, not better.”

Just so people have some facts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

I think for many of us who were wide awake in the 1980s that Reagan’s rhetoric and assaults were very much about declaring a war on the war on poverty.

The simplest measure of poverty is 50% of median – household – income. Family data underestimates things. Any other measure pursues spurious precision to conceal it’s politics – which largely is about minimizing poverty. All the efforts to replace Orshansky are exercises in rationalization – that’s where academics are able to inject themselves into the issue.

Americans like their poverty absolute and biological – so poor that they’re dying in droves. And because we maintain populations just at the level of destitution to prevent widespread kill-offs, things are not so bad. And then we can indulge in our notions about relative poverty that points to all those TVs and cable access and refrigerators and cellphones and such shit that are very present in poor households. In this country, our debate about poverty isn’t philosophical but finger wagging that run the gamut from Charles Murray to David Brooks to all the way to Nicholas Kristof. Its all about aspirations and and the nemesis of impulsiveness and the cure is swift kick by hypocrites. It’s always the truly depraved judging the truly deprived.

The war on poverty was a terribly compromised effort, very American in its idealism, its naivete, in its class biases. One of the most radical programs was community action which, for a time, aggressively pushed for the maximum feasible participation of the poor in the developing local anti-poverty programs. But community action had it’s roots not in fighting inequality but in fighting delinquency and crime – from the Chicago Area Project to the Mobilization for Youth experiment. The poor were associated with social problems, much like urban renewal fought urban blight where sociologically and programmatically blight had as much to do with the presence of blacks as it did broken neighborhoods. But it wasn’t poverty or delinquency that killed community action but mayors, governors, and other politicians who resented federal resources being distributed outside the power structure.

The war on poverty ever hobbled delivered the goods so that by the mid-1970s even the crude Orshansky measure saw the poverty rate dipped to 11%. We’ll never see that number again. Because we don’t want.

The book to read on this subject of the Great Society is John Schwarz’s “America’s Hidden Success.” He analyzes these issues about the decline in poverty already begun before the G.S. programs began, but how the poor people were helped because of the programs. It put money in their hands they did not otherwise have. Sounds simple enough but it does get lost amidst data crunching and the likes of Charles Murray, Heritage Foundation, etc. think tank nonsense.

The problem with the G.S. programs is they rarely put people to work as with W.P.A., P.W.A. and C.C.C. programs. That was Michael Harrington’s criticism from the start. The response from Sargent Shriver and other well meaning liberals in the LBJ administration was that this would be temporary as they had seen the decline of poverty already and were assuming the middle class would continue to thrive. The article here is correct that our nation’s leaders and policies changed sides under the last year or so of Carter and especially under Reagan.

Here is link to Schwarz book: http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Hidden-Success-Reassessment-Kennedy/dp/0393304477/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426435724&sr=8-1&keywords=america%27s+hidden+success+schwarz

The EITC is not under much political pressure right now, and I’m somewhat plugged into the politics of it. (It doesn’t get big until 1993; not a War on Poverty creation.) A few cons have suggested expanding it slightly for childless workers, in the process garnering uncritical praise from credulous liberal commentators. The real target these days is SNAP–including work requirements and/or converting it into a block grant.

The rate under the SPM is flat after 2000, suggesting the system, in the face of assorted economic calamities, prevented things from getting worse.

The War on Poverty morphed after 1968 with Nixon’s election, from a focus on ‘helping people to help themselves’ to transfers. The latter ramped up for a while with increases in program participation but were allowed to wither during the 70s. Lack of progress after the mid-70s is not surprising in that light.

If you include refundable tax credits in income, you should back out taxes too. An estimate of 4.whatever for the rate is so idiotic it doesn’t even bear scrutiny.

@ reason

>Cassander – I think this is a blatent lie. Can you justify it with data (and not nominal, real per capita).

These things are typically measured in terms of share of GDP. In 1962, the US spent about 9% of GDP on defense and 6% on entitlements. By 1975, those figures had roughly reversed, 6% on defense, 10% on entitlements. Today, the figures are about 4% of GDP spent on defense, an unusually low 13% on entitlements.

Over the same time, in constant dollars, mandatory spending has risen from 280 billion to about 2 trillion, a roughly 7 fold increase on slightly less than doubling the population, the OMB doesn’t do per capita figures, but you can do the math.

All figures came straight from the horses mouth, the offical OMB tables here: https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/Historicals

@gathering dust

>The simplest measure of poverty is 50% of median – household – income

The simplest measure, and the least correct. If the median income were a million dollars a year, people making half a million are not poor. Measures of poverty should be objective.

@ reason

Woops, crossed some numbers, those constant dollar and population figures were for 1970, not 1975. Population in 1975 was 215 million, today it’s about 315. Mandatory spending was 580 billion in 1975, today it’s 2 trillion. So real per capita spending hasn’t gone up 7 times, it’s only gone up about 3.5 times, but population growth was only 50%, not double.

Tim Worstall,

But those programs don’t just pay benefits to poor people. They also pay benefits to folks over the poverty line.

MaxSpeak,

I don’t generally favor tax cuts but refunding to employees both the employee and employer side of the SS Tax on the first 10k of earned income would be a great tax cut.

A lot of people have posted links that allows us to start making very rough estimates about the information. But that is it. The needed data does not exists in any kind of easily accessible form and might not exist at all. It is important data. I wonder why it does not exist? I think that no one is really interested in the answer. It is much more convenient to simply project out our mood affiliation as a fact and declare victory.

(It really does not like we suddenly started paying a pittance in the early 80s. That seems to be a myth. The tax cuts for the rich have been financed via debt.)

@someguy88

If you guys were really clever, you’d write a bill that cut payroll taxes in roughly the way you suggest, and make up about 95% of the difference with a carbon tax, then dare the republicans to vote against it. You could run saying any Republican who was against would rather help the oil companies than “save social security” (a completely meaningless phrase, but effective), help the environment, and cut taxes all at once. You’d crush them.

“How do we reduce poverty? Whether relative or absolute? Well, what those lovely social democracies do it ta everyone, and the rich more, in order to redistribute the incomes. OK.”

Poverty reduction as redistribution of income – I suppose if you “redistribute” Walmart’s income into living wages – yes – a redistribution of income to labor and away from shareholders.

Do note an important fact – welfare is “redistribution” of income – as are wages kept stagnant by an aggressive push to keep profits high and labor costs low.

Walmart – the largest employer in the US – is getting a lot of press for raising its wages so that a full-time (40 hr wk employee) gets paid less than $21,000 – pre-tax. The company returned $68 BILLION to shareholders in 2014. (see their annual report.) Speaking of redistributing income…

@John Quiggin

>As I said, when Reagan announced that the War on Poverty had been lost, he was actually switching sides.

You can’t have it both ways, John. If poverty is lower today than during the 70s, you can’t claim that Reagan, or anyone else, switched sides. If it isn’t (and never was) lower, you can’t claim that the war on poverty was initially a huge success.

““The market distribution of incomes in those social democracies, Sweden, Denmark, isn’t noticeably different from that of the US. “

Evidence, please. That’s not my impression at all, FWIW. CEO salaries in the multimillions are much rarer in those countries.”

The second table here, gini before taxes and transfers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

Comparing the second and third tables shows you the effect of that redistribution. Interestingly, the numbers for the US in that third table do include the effects of the transfers in kind that JQ so blithely dismisses up above.

“Walmart – the largest employer in the US – is getting a lot of press for raising its wages so that a full-time (40 hr wk employee) gets paid less than $21,000 – pre-tax. The company returned $68 BILLION to shareholders in 2014. (see their annual report.) Speaking of redistributing income…”

It did? Looking at their shareholder presentation the $68 billion they mention is the net sales growth over the past 5 years. Which isn’t really quite the same as returns to shareholders. Have I missed something there?

Cassander
So Medicare is anti-poverty? I call foul.

By the way, I’m not disputing that the “War on Poverty” programs were micro-economically poorly designed. But it is none-the-less true that the best way to fight poverty is as Stephen Gordon of Worthwhile Canadian Initiative frequently says is to give money to poor people.

Followers of this thread might be interested in Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger’s new edited volume, “Legacies of the War on Poverty” (Russell Sage Foundation). See also Sandy (Christopher) Jencks review of same in the NY Times Review of Books.

BTW, there seems to be some confusion upthread about the supplemental poverty measure. It’s not a measure of relative poverty (that would be what’s known in the field as the relative poverty threshold). But, it’s a “new” (as in, since the 2000s) measure of poverty that does a better job than the official poverty threshold/the Orshansky measure of accounting for both resources (e.g., SPM includes the cash value of SNAP and other in-kind benefits and expenditures (e.g., SPM adjusts for different costs of living by geographic location, also estimates health care, housing, and transportation expenses).

The basic story is that the % of Americans in poverty is slightly higher (less than 1 percentage point) under the SPM than under the OPM. The real action, though, is in the breakdown of poverty by age. The poverty rate among the elderly is much higher (7 percentage points) under the SPM than the OPM, primarily because the former takes health care costs into account. Conversely, the child poverty rate is much lower under the SPM than the OPM, because the SPM includes SNAP and (if I recall correctly) the cash value of school lunches as sources of “income.”

The chart provided by John Quiggin shows that for after taxes and after taxes plus non cash benefits that we reduced poverty by about 50% from about 1960s to the early 80s. From a little over 30% to a little over or about 15%. (From 32.5 to 15 would be 56%) From trough to trough from the early 80s bottom to about 2010 our latest bottom we reduced poverty by 50%. From about or a little over 15% to about 7.5%. ( From 12.5 in the late 70s to about 7.5% today is still a 40% reduction.) This is from the chart John Quiggin provided!

And so an equal reduction in poverty from one period to the other becomes proof postitive that the government switched sides under Reagan.

Note Reagan did not become president in the late 1970s. He becames president in 1981 and his policies at would have at the earliest taken effect in 1982.

The chart is completely opaque. We still do not have the data we need.

Tim W0rstall @83 yes, you missed something:

“$68B* returned to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases” – it’s on the same page as the infographic about the net sales (p.2?) Both figures are over five years.

Again, speaking of redistribution of income…

To JQ – poverty is not “reduced” via government safety net programs. That’s double-talk of the worst kind. The level of desperate need is diminished (I suppose we could return to Dickensian times) – but until people get living-wage jobs, poverty remains stubborn and intractable – and people remain reliant on the government to provide food on the table. The idea that someone is not “poor” any more because they’re on SNAP or receive other government assistance is simply not true.

“Progress in reducing the poverty rat stops almost completely with the Volcker recession.” Is it possible that a terrible recession – not the “switching of sides” – halted the drop in poverty?

Here’s more to consider – the Institute of Policies studies issued a report this week that shows “the financial industry’s 2014 bonuses were double the combined earnings of all Americans who work full-time at the federal minimum wage.”

Bankers (168K employees) got $28.5 billion in bonuses (on top of Wall Street salaries) – and on the other hand, the nation’s 1,007,000 full-time minimum wage workers were paid a total of $14 billion.

For their efforts last year, bankers saw a 3% increase in the size of their bonus, even though there was a 4.5% decline in industry profits. Fair is fair, except on Wall Street, where a bonus is a bonus regardless of performance. http://www.ips-dc.org/deep-end-wall-street/

We can’t really talk about the persistence of poverty in the US without also talking about the War on Drugs (which also took off in the 80’s) and the rise of the Carceral State. More than any cutbacks or program elimination, the decision to begin sending Black men to prison in huge numbers beginning in the 80s has been the primary factor driving the rise and entrenchment of poverty, particularly in the inner cities. It’s a little hard to look for work when you have a criminal record and no credit rating. You can’t even buy a car to get to work, sign a lease on an apartment, etc.

@reaason

>So Medicare is anti-poverty? I call foul.

Lyndon Johnson would have disagreed, and so do I. Johnson very much cast it as part of the great society.

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/650730.asp

>you really didn’t answer the question by presenting a vague total “entitlements” figure. List the individual data, or limit yourself to Medicaid, Foodstamps and Welfare (so I’m not counting Social Security or Medicare).

Those are the official US government figures and terms, not mine. The definition is not vague, it’s explicitly spelled out and includes all the programs you mentioned. there is no possible way to look at the data and not conclude that spending on all of those programs has constantly increased. But feel free to bury your head in the sand rather than question your priors if that’s what makes you happy.

I don’t get it – that the government switched sides is a new idea? It’s 35 plus years old new.

Measuring poverty is more about moving chairs around in a classroom than counting the number of chairs. New measures like most of the social programs and policies adopted since the 1960s are about maintaining people in poverty – not lifting them out. The closest thing to moving people out of poverty is the EITC.

Thinking about and doing something about poverty in the U.S. always gets mired in the contradictory goals. We want to help people, but not too much, and as cheaply as possible. Much of the discussion above is an echo of why the government switched sides. It’s not so much that the costs are too high but the poor are just getting way too much.

The bottom 20 percent of households are poor in the U.S. Fifteen percent are maintained in poverty. Because the programs require that the poor not get too much.

Reading the back-and-forth re: what to even measure (pre-transfer or post-transfer), I found myself thinking of how much a shift to a universal lump-sum payout (with no means testing or other qualifications) would simplify this argument. (I assume, perhaps foolishly, that the numbers would include the payout.)
Then, I found myself wondering what the various individuals posting would have to say about the role some sort of minimum/basic income might play in addressing the persistent problem of poverty. (Ignoring, for the moment, the idea of determining poverty as a certain percentage of salaries in the X %ile.) If the amount were pegged to a certain percent of the poverty line, it would make this discussion (if nothing else) much easier.
I work with members of a community where the vast majority of families qualify for nutrition assistance. It seems to me the simplest way to wage a war on poverty (if we really want to win it) would be to just give them money, without attaching all of the onerous strings many current programs do.
But I’m sure I’m missing something. Anyone care to help me out?

@103 Shirley0401

What a naysayer to your proposal would suggest is that food stamps are for food and fuel credits are for heat etc. give a guy $xxx and how do we know it isn’t used on gambling, drugs, and all manner of general sin….then the “children” are still hungry and cold and deserving of care and the money has only supported vice.

I’m not taking this argument in the least, there are 100 things wrong with it, but some version of that is why (in the U.S. anyway) the preference is to subsidize the needs that want to be provided rather than simply provide dollars and hope for the best.

@someguy88

I gave those numbers. In 1980, entitlements were 670 billion inflation adjusted dollars and the population was 225 million. Today, they are 2 trillion dollars, and population is 320 million. That works out to per capita outlays growing from 3000 dollars a person to 6200. Not exactly “savage cuts.”

“but we are doing a decent amount now.”

Which is why the US has the worst child poverty rates of 35 developed nations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/04/15/map-how-35-countries-compare-on-child-poverty-the-u-s-is-ranked-34th/

/oops you beat Romania. Good for you!

Yep, nothing to see here:

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/social-mobility-memos/posts/2015/02/19-cost-poverty-stress-graham

someguy88

Don’t disagree (and glad you recognize the dishonesty in cassander’s posts) but you might want to look at the time trend of that more closely (and with more disaggregated figures – I think some are here – https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/pkrugman/The%20state%20of%20the%20welfare%20state.pdf . But at the same time the Gini co-efficient has been rising strongly, perhaps indicating that part of the reason it is spending more is that it needs to (I guess the EITC – subsidizing the working poor is a significant part of the increase).

My own personal view has long been to favor a basic income (which I prefer to call a national dividend) and this view has been reinforced since I have been actively engaged in economics blogs since I have found the arguments against it (including from JQ) unconvincing.

If you’d actually bothered to look at the data, you’d know that they include figures for just means tested entitlements if you prefer that figure. In 1962, 24 billion, 1980, 104. Today, 550 billion. They’ve grown even faster than general entitlements, not slower.

@someguy88

>not all that money is spent on folks below the poverty line.

I don’t see how that’s relevant. the US poverty line is not some platonic dividing line. Someone making a dollar over it isn’t meaningfully less poor than someone under it. What we are talking about here, in general, is public commitment to the idea of fighting poverty and whether it has waxed or waned. that means the total size of programs justified in the name of fighting poverty, even if some of the money goes to non-poor, is what matters. Now, you can make a case that SS and medicare have different mindspace in the eye of the public, but definitely not any of the means tested programs.