Government losing ‘ war on poverty’
U. S. has the highest number of poor people in the industrialized world
WASHINGTON — Fifty years ago this week, U. S. President Lyndon B. Johnson launched an unprecedented “war on poverty” program with the utopian design to “cure and, above all, to prevent” poverty in America.
“We shall not rest until that war is won,” Johnson said. “The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”
Success was almost immediate. Thirty million Americans ( one in five) lived below the poverty line in 1964. By 1970 this figure had been halved.
More than $ 20 trillion US has since been spent on a broad array of programs in education, health care, food and wage support designed to address the immediate needs of communities and create opportunity where once there was none.
“Without these programs poverty would be twice as high as it is,” Arloc Sherman, a poverty expert at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, said in an interview.
Yet in the 1970s progress began to stall and eventually the poverty rate began to creep back up. Despite its colossal spending, the United States now has the highest level of poverty in the industrialized world and the plight of almost 50 million people has again become a major political issue.
“Almost every wealthy developed nation has done a better job than we have, I am sorry to say,” Sherman said. “I think by commonly used measures, Canada has lower child poverty rates than the U. S. does, but so does most of Europe and others. And I think what this shows is we have something to learn from most other wealthy developed nations.”
According to the U. S. Census Bureau, 16 per cent of Americans live below the poverty line. ( Canada’s equivalent Low Income Cutoff Line in 2012 was 9.4 per cent.) An alarmingly high portion of children and single mothers — 20 per cent and 33 per cent respectively — live below the line.
Describing the anti- poverty struggle as a “war” is tagged by some experts as part of the problem. It gives the utopian impression of a battle won — or lost — after which you can move on.
This is what Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida essentially said this week when he proposed that Congress toss out all the federal programs because “after 50 years, isn’t it time to declare big government’s war on poverty a failure.”
Echoes of this Republican doctrine have been bouncing off the walls of Congress ever since former U. S. president Ronald Reagan declared that America fought the war on poverty and lost.
Rubio’s plan is to replace federal programs — including ObamaCare — with a “flex fund” that would be paid to the states to spend as they see fit.
What has stalled the drive to reduce poverty? The simple answer is escalating income inequality, said Sharon Parrott, also a poverty analyst at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.
In a recently published study she noted that between 1964 and 2012, the share of national income going to the top one per cent of households doubled. In contrast, between 1979 and 2012, the share of income going to the poorest fifth of households fell.
“If the benefits of economic growth had been more widely shared, poverty would be lower,” she concluded. The income disparity problem can be partly fixed by raising the minimum wage and changing the tax code to redistribute wealth, Sherman said.