Christopher Jencks has a stellar piece in the April 2nd New York Review of Books, The War on Poverty: Was It Lost? (Probably behind a pay wall). He begins with quotations from two State of the Union addresses from two radically different Presidents.
This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won.
—Lyndon Johnson, State of the Union Address, January 8, 1964
Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.
—Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, January 25, 1988
Reagan's take has been the conventional wisdom for over a quarter of a century now. Only 20% of the public believes LBJ's war on poverty made a "major difference" for the poor, and 23% (that perpetual 27%, plus or minus, who cling to the crazy on every issue) say it "made things worse" for them.
That canny 20% clearly have it right. If you eyeball the Census Bureau chart showing what percentage of the country's households fell below the poverty line, LBJ's initiative dropped the poverty rate from 19.0% of households in 1964 to 12.1% in 1969, no mean achievement. After that, the number fluctuates slightly around the 13% level. But in his review of Bailey and Danziger's book Legacies of the War on Poverty, Jencks digs deeper and finds that the Census Bureau's methods and definitions inadvertently fudge the results, and the real poverty rate, in terms properly comparable the rate in 1964, is now as little as 4.8%.
Progressives never need to be apologetic about the success of the War on Poverty.
A few details after the lovely linked linguini.
The legacy of the War on Poverty consists not only of the programs LBJ initiated, but of those that were brought on line in the same spirit over the following decades, such as:
• 1974 - Section 8 housing (Housing and Community Development Act)
• 1975 - Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• 1975 - Earned Income Tax Credit
• 1997 - Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)
In determining whether a household's income falls below the poverty line, the Census Bureau considers income of all family members, from such sources as wages, salaries, self-employment, and unemployment checks. Then the Bureau adjusts the poverty threshold for each size of family upward each year, by the rise in the Consumer Price Index (specifically the CPI-U, which tallies prices for urban consumers.)
Jencks identifies four features of this system that skew the numbers, all in the same direction.
The definition of "household". In each residence, one owner or renter is designated as the "householder"; the "household" consists of that person plus all those related to him or her by marriage, birth or adoption. So a married couple with no children counts as a 2-person household (poverty threshold of $15,600 in 2013). A cohabiting couple with no children counts as two "unrelated individuals", each with a poverty threshold of $12,119. If they both garner incomes just below the poverty line, they count as two people living in poverty. But if they got married, they'd both count as well above it.
There are a lot more cohabiting couples now than in 1964. Knock today's official poverty rate down by 2 or 3% for a fair comparison to the rate then.
Noncash benefits. As AFDC has withered on the vine, most poor Americans increasingly get their benefits in kind rather than cash: food stamps, housing subsidies that don't pass through their hands, free medical care. None of this counts as "income" for Census Bureau rules. There goes another 3% of the poverty rate.
Refundable tax credits. If EICs were counted as income, the poverty rate would take another 3% haircut.
Price changes. Because we Kossacks justly rebel at the notion that the COLA formulas should be squeezed to reduce future Social Security payments, we've cast a cold eye on chained CPIs. Nevertheless, most economists - and certainly all conservatives - are convinced that the CPI-U overestimates how much inflation has raised the cost of goods and services over the years. If they are right, it follows as day follows night that the current poverty thresholds are high by the same percentages. And then they cannot avoid the conclusion that the poverty rate is also being overestimated. If CPI-U had been replaced all along by their favored chained PCE index, official poverty rates would go down by another 3.7%.
There's likely some overlap in these factors, and some imponderable interactions between them. Spot the War on Poverty skeptics the first one, and just combine the last three. You still arrive at an adjusted current poverty level, where "poverty" means what it meant in 1964, of 4.8%.
There are a number of ways in which today's oligarchy-driven economy has magnified the insecurity of the whole middle class, and those things weigh at least as heavily on the poor. I don't mean to minimize all the new problems they face. Given the present shameful explosion in inequality, it's also true that, if we have succeeded in thinning the ranks of the horrifyingly poor (as suggested by other Census data like the number of people living without toilet facilities), we have a moral duty to step up a level and provide relief for those who are merely struggling and desperate.
Still, if the foreign military adventures of the warhawks had "failed" as well as the War on Poverty, they'd never let us hear the end of it. How about putting a little more of Uncle Sam's resources into the corpse-free war that history has shown we really can win?