More spending doesn't equal less poverty

When President Johnson created the War on Poverty in 1964, an array of new federal assistance programs was born. These include Medicare and Medicaid, food stamps for low-income families, and work-study programs for low-income college students. The effort seemed to help. At that time, the individual poverty rate in the United States was more than 19 percent. When Johnson left office in January 1969, the rate had decreased to around 12.5 percent.

Most of the government’s anti-poverty programs come in the form of so-called transfer payments. These payments take money from one group of people through taxes and spend the money on others in the hopes of “lifting” them out of poverty. But it doesn’t always work that way.