The War on Poverty worked. Contrary to President Reagan’s joke about it, it wasn’t poverty that won.
What we called poverty back in 1963 when we started on the adventure pretty much doesn’t exist in the United States today. So, yes, we got rid of it, abolished it. We won, not poverty.
This is not how we normally hear about it of course, from any side. This sort of victory would mean that taxing richer people to give money to poorer people works in reducing poverty. There are those who’d rather this weren’t so, or perhaps generally known. On the other side, all sorts of people would really rather we didn’t know that we have won. If that’s true, there’s no argument in ever higher taxation of the rich in order to send ever more to the poor, is there?
This is a point I’ve made around here before. More than once. Poverty is a lack of money; sending poor people more money makes them less poor. How can it be otherwise? Sure, it might not make them happier, won’t make them better educated, won’t heal broken family structures, and won’t delay gratification impulses. There are all sorts of things the simple transfer of money won’t do, but it will make people less poor.
The “Economic Report of the President” has an excellent chapter on this very point this year. Start at page 427 — I read it so you don’t have to go through all of it. As I’ve been saying, in fact, as all woke economists have been saying, the problem is that we’ve just not been counting the effects of what we do to reduce poverty on the amount of money poor people have, nor, therefore, the number of poor people.
The earned income tax credit, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Section 8 vouchers, Medicaid — all these are things sent off to poor people. Yet we don’t include them in our calculations of how many poor people there are.
Effectively, the official poverty measure is a reading of how many people would be poor if there wasn’t any government help. That’s a useful number, certainly. But what we want to know is how many are still poor after what government does. Only with that can we decide whether we need do more, or perhaps even that we should cut back. That’s the one number we’ve not had as an official measurement, until this report.
When we do add in everything we already do, then we get to:
It’s difficult to think of anything at all which government gets right to a margin as small as 2 percent. I think it fair therefore to declare victory. We had that War on Poverty, and we won.
It’s worth noting that this is even more so with child poverty, the one thing the American welfare system really is good at is concentrating aid onto families with children.
This will of course disappoint those who hoped it didn’t work, so we could stop doing it. But it will enrage those who want us to do even more than we already do. For if poverty doesn’t for all intents and purposes still exist, then what is the argument in favor of higher, crippling taxes upon the rich?
We know what the answer will be: inequality. But that’s going to fail the electoral test.
People might not always get the details of everything quite right. Quite what the delusion is that makes my fellow countryman Simon Cowell popular, I’m not sure of. But in aggregate and on big issues, there’s great wisdom out there. That’s exactly why we use this system called democracy to decide the big things, of course.
Americans will pay taxes and volunteer and charitably donate in large numbers in order to beat poverty. There’s no real reason why a child in a country as rich as this should be destitute. Absent serious mental or addiction problems with the mite’s parents, they’re not. Americans won’t mobilize in the same manner to beat inequality, which is exactly why so much of the debate is framed as poverty, which is what it was about, instead of inequality, which is what it is now.
Americans don’t obsess over Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos and their hundred billion dollars. Unless it’s to marvel at the wonder that their kids are growing up where it’s possible to do that and heck, they might, eh? They’ll dig deep for a pair of shoes for the barefoot, but worry not about an unequal distribution of Air Jordans where some might have more than others.
Another way to put this is that, well, if we don’t worry much about inequality, and we have in fact beaten poverty, then what is the Left going to complain about?
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at the Continental Telegraph.
