War on poverty and great society programs

It required the states to meet federally designated minimum commitments. How much has been spent on the Great Society?

How the Great Society programs were inspired? What inspired Johnson's Great Society Programs? Having grown up poor, the president knew first hand what poverty meant;;a country in which poverty, disease, and racial injustice would be eliminated through government reforms.

S could not afford both Vietnam and the Great Society. How long is the Great Society play? Show Information. What did the Great Society programs indicate about the federal government's changing role?

It gave the federal government a greater involvement in the economy and in society. It was also aimed at reducing poverty by contrasting with the traditional market economy that had prevailed before. What did the war on poverty accomplish? War on Poverty, expansive social welfare legislation introduced in the s by the administration of U. Lyndon B. Johnson and intended to help end poverty in the United States.

Why did the war on poverty start? The war on poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, January 8, In , transfers reduced deep poverty by about 13 percentage points. If that same magnitude of impact had occurred in , deep poverty rates would have fallen to about 3 percent instead of the actual 5 percent that occurred.

The top line indicates what the SPM deep poverty rate would be if these cash and in-kind transfers and the tax-related benefits were not included in the SPM deep poverty measure. The Great Recession saw another major shift in government support. Because most means-tested programs have automatic features that provide more support to families when their incomes drop, government support is expected to increase when incomes decline in economic downturns.

Table 4 , panel B, shows the pattern of governmental support per family for all major social insurance and means-tested programs other than Medicaid and Medicare from to In contrast to the period from to , shown in panel A, during the Great Recession, included in panel B, the support provided was widely shared across different economic and demographic groups. The smallest increases went to elderly families, whose support grew by only 8 percent, and the increased support for the disabled, which grew by a larger 17 percent.

However, support for the non-elderly, nondisabled families with pre-tax and pre-transfer income in the deep poverty range increased by 37 percent, a bit smaller than the 41 percent to 48 percent growth for those in shallow poverty and the near poor, but nevertheless substantial.

However, the level of government support for the poorest families in was still below its level in Further, as the Great Recession winds down and the additional support provided by Congress disappears, some of these gains will be eroded. The War on Poverty was a major social policy initiative that has had lasting positive effects on the poor in the United States. The programs created in the s and early s established the framework for the modern social safety net, and subsequent expansions of many of those programs have increased assistance to the poor to historic levels, especially during the Great Recession.

Others took a different tack, and said that we never really tried. It seems clear that we have made some progress, but many challenges remain; the War remains unfinished. As we have shown, relying on the SPM indicates that we have made more progress against poverty than is shown in the official figures. And, as we have noted, the SPM-type income of those at the 10 th percentile of the income distribution has increased since Given the rapid rise in the EITC, SNAP, and housing subsidies shown in Figure 3 and their large antipoverty effects, it is increasingly difficult to rely on the official poverty figures, which fail to record the impacts of these programs.

We expect both research and policy interest in the SPM will continue to rise as we continue to chart the effects of public income support programs on poverty.

The poverty-reducing impacts of the nation's social safety net have been facing the headwind of increasing inequality of earnings and family income and reductions in real market income of individuals and families at the bottom of the distribution. This growing inequality of wages and income appears to have large intergenerational effects as parental support for children is directly related to family economic position and to the education and resources of parents. However, the rapid growth in the share of brown, yellow, black, and other minority children in the nation 90 requires attention by policymakers to insure that they and their families are better integrated into the economy and that schools serve their needs.

The current and continuing problem is low aggregate demand for labor, leading to lack of employment and trivial wage changes for the lower half of the income distribution Autor, Although out of favor for decades now, career and technical education CTE and job training programs are receiving renewed interest, especially when there is employer involvement. There is even renewed interest in direct job creation through wage subsidies.

But still labor market outcomes are not good; the majority of new jobs since the Great Recession have come in low-paid, part-time, service-sector jobs Heinrich and Smeeding, However, we continue to learn more both about the characteristics of successful career-oriented programs such as those offered by community colleges and the effectiveness of other labor market supports.

Policies that address human capital accumulation, such as improvements in early childhood education, better K educational systems, increased rates of college-going, and more successful CTE and manpower training programs are all under active current discussion.

Another increasingly recognized problem is the existence of extreme poverty and disconnected families. Moreover, the small fraction of the population that has virtually no private income is receiving very little in government aid relative to their needs. These families need special assistance, not just in employment, but also in child care, housing, transportation, substance abuse, and domestic violence. Much remains to be done, and much is under discussion, as we slowly recover from the Great Recession.

An increase in the minimum wage seems more likely to be passed than any other antipoverty proposal. At the same time, many seek to expand the EITC benefit for single persons and increase the refundable Child Tax Credit for children under age 6. How the changes in the minimum wage and refundable credits will be combined is a major policy issue. Overall, the War on Poverty substantially changed the social policy landscape in this country.

Although the optimism of the s poverty warriors that poverty in America would disappear was sadly misplaced, they began a series of policy changes that continue today. The problem of poverty has shifted in the decades since the War on Poverty was launched, as has the nature of the policy response.

The poor are less likely to be elderly and more likely to be children in single-mother families. Although the effectiveness of government antipoverty transfers is still debated, recent research shows that most large antipoverty programs make a significant positive difference in the lives of the poor and their children.

We acknowledge the long-standing support of the Institute provided by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation of the Department of Health and Human Services. Deborah Johnson, also of IRP, improved the paper markedly through her editing.

The authors, and not their organizations, are responsible for all opinions in this article, as well as all errors of omission and commission. Gottschalk explored this view using participation in the labor force as the example. Their discussion was very helpful in drafting this section.

A review of the assessments of job training efforts over the years is in Holzer The literature summarizing the effects of safety net programs, including food and nutrition, assistance, and work-related subsidies is in Waldfogel Research on the effects of neighborhood health centers is more limited, but see Bailey and Goodman-Bacon forthcoming , who find that the centers had major effects in reducing mortality.

The result was a significant rise in the amount that families could earn before losing cash benefits. The authors find that increases in Social Security coverage and benefits between and can explain the entire decline in elderly poverty over this period. The research suggested some nontrivial reductions in labor supply from income support programs. An early assessment of the incentive and distributional effects of income transfers is Danziger, Haveman, and Plotnik War on Poverty policy developments in civil rights, civil disorder, legal services, medical services, and community action.

These benefits include social insurance payments, including Medicare, which compose a large fraction of the total. See Burtless, ; and Congressional Budget Office, The use of this measure was criticized as failing to account for the fact that targeted income support payments tend to reduce work and earnings and generate other behavioral responses that would offset the income gains from public benefits. In addition to the development of these measures of the effectiveness of public income support policy, researchers also engaged in several other lines of research with direct ties to War on Poverty policy.

The several studies of potential labor supply effects, including the negative income tax experiments see footnote 10 are examples of this effect of antipoverty policy on research. In the process, advances in research methods accompanied the research; in addition to social experimentation, there were important developments in correcting for selectivity bias in studies of the effect of policy on behavior, disentangling the processes of education, discrimination, and labor market functioning as they affect the poor, and the construction of microdata-simulation models.

Haveman b discusses the full range of impacts of War on Poverty policy on social science research. The richest 1 percent alone absorbed nearly 60 percent of the total increase in U. Hence for the bottom 90 percent, the rate of income growth was less than 0.

Since , the wages of the top 1 percent of earners have grown by percent, while those of the bottom 95 percent have grown by about 15 percent. See Autor and Popkin, Rosenbaum, and Meaden See Burkhauser, Couch, and Glenn , and Neumark See Bernstein and Thomas and Sawhill Both articles were part of the debate on why marriage rates fell and whether marriage policy could reduce divorce and increase marriage. Experimental efforts to promote healthy marriage had disappointing results Wood et al.

These tax cuts also indexed standard deductions, and reduced tax burdens on very-low-income families. While the majority of the dollar effects were on higher-income earners, these tax reforms also had positive effects on low-income families. This expansion occurred in the face of assertions that the benefits enabled recipients to purchase nonessential, non-food items with the stamps.

Murray's main argument was that U. He emphasized the incentives in several antipoverty programs that, in his view, rewarded short-sighted behavior that is not conducive to escaping poverty in the long term; the disincentive to work was a prime example. Murray's arguments were critiqued in the Institute for Research on Poverty Focus publication Single-parent s The evolution of this experimental research during this period is described in Gueron Department of Justice There is a great deal of heterogeneity across states in the application of time limits which has been exploited in estimates of the effects of various provisions in PRWORA.

See Moffitt See Pavetti and Acs, While the individual programs are run by the states, these programs are required to meet program standards set by the federal government. State programs may be independent of Medicaid, or use federal CHIP grants to expand their Medicaid program; combinations of the two also exist. This expansion provides a true safety net for those families with very low incomes, who gain generous coverage without required premium payments. Also, families with incomes up to percent of the federal poverty line will be subsidized on a sliding scale basis in order to encourage them to purchase coverage via caps on insurance premiums and co-pays.

Moreover, health insurance premiums are capped for these families, again on a sliding-scale basis. Out-of-pocket payments are also capped for families with income below percent of poverty line. See also Bitler and Hoynes forthcoming. Low-income families had little or no federal tax payments at the time. As we have shown, in-kind noncash programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid, or housing assistance were yet to be enacted or were very small. It is worth noting that the number of persons living below the official poverty threshold has risen steadily, to 45 million in This is not surprising, given substantial population growth over this period.

Over time, an increasing proportion of low-income families owed federal taxes and a growing number of new assistance programs for low-income families did not provide cash, but provided in-kind benefits including Food Stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance. These led many to suggest that the resource definition should include some imputed dollar amount for the in-kind benefits that many families were receiving, and account for taxes paid. Adding this value to family's other resources would substantially increase their resources.

Subtracting out-of-pocket expenditures on health care from income assumes that health care expenditures are unavoidable which may not be true in all cases , but should be indirectly affected by health insurance availability, since individuals with better health insurance are likely to have lower out-of-pocket expenditures when they become ill. See Levitan et al. A similar effort for the state of Connecticut is described in Zedlewski, Giannarelli, and Wheaton , and for Wisconsin beginning in by Smeeding and Isaacs For more information on these efforts, see Weinberg or Citro and Michael However, changing only the resource measure without adjusting the poverty threshold leads to poverty estimates that became hard to interpret, since the resource definition and the threshold definitions should be consistent.

For instance, if one is to count refundable tax credits tied to work like the EITC in the resource measure, the threshold ought to be adjusted for the cost of going to work, including child care and transportation costs. For a detailed description of the decisions behind the SPM calculation, see U. Census Bureau The latest release of SPM data can be found in Short Bush, and Obama administrations see Blank, While most other major federal statistics unemployment, GDP, labor force participation, consumer price index are regularly reviewed and updated, the official poverty measure is not.

Blank discusses several reasons why the official poverty measure in the U. Furthermore, over time the official poverty thresholds began to be used in legislation defining eligibility for major social programs. Food stamps, housing assistance, and Medicaid eligibility were in some way tied to a family's income relative to the official poverty threshold. This meant that any change in the poverty measure could eliminate eligibility for some number of people to important programs, while creating eligibility for others.

Not discussed here are a wide variety of approaches that have been proposed in the theoretical literature on poverty measurement but rarely implemented in practice. As poorer countries have become part of the EU in recent years, the problems with a purely relative measure have become more apparent, as some countries with much lower income levels show very similar poverty measures to countries with much higher income levels.

Bavier indicates that the trends in poverty are similar between the official poverty rate and expenditure-based poverty, if one uses a comprehensive measure of income. There is also an extended discussion of differences in the U. In medical expenses were above 10 percent of the household budget for elderly households at the median of medical expenditures and above 30 percent of the household budget for elderly households at the 90 th percentile of medical expenditures.

Medical spending for non-elderly households is a much smaller share of household budgets, less than 3 percent of the household budget at the median of expenditures and less than 12 percent of the household budget at the 90 th percentile. To the extent that these expenditures are on health insurance coverage e. See Shaefer and Edin Recent research has produced SPM estimates going back to , which provides a reasonable historical time series Fox et al.

The series based on an expanded concept of household resources indicates modest income growth for households at the bottom of the income distribution over the entire period; those based on a more narrow definition of income show no such gain. See also Autor Bitler and Hoynes investigate the responsiveness of poverty measures to the business cycle, finding official, but especially SPM, poverty rates were less responsive to unemployment rates during the Great Recession than at any other time after They attribute the muted response of poverty rates to unemployment rates to growth in resources from Food Stamp benefits, the EITC, and Unemployment Insurance.

Additionally, Larrimore, Burkhauser, and Armour find that increases in public transfers and decreases in tax liability were more important in mitigating the effects of earnings decreases for households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution during the Great Recession than in other economic downturns that have occurred since There is a large body of literature that focusses on explanations for these trends. Potential explanations for these changes in marriage, divorce, and fertility have focused on the effects the reduced specialization of women in traditional gender roles and resultant decreases in the gain from marriage Becker, , deteriorating marriage markets Wilson, , and the role of welfare benefits Murray, See also Oppenheimer, ; Lichter et al.

While it is hard to draw definitive conclusions from such a large body of literature, there is evidence that decreased specialization in traditional gender roles, marriage market conditions, and welfare benefit levels all play a role in influencing decisions about marriage and fertility.

What is also clear from the literature is that changes in gender roles, marriage market conditions, and welfare benefits cannot explain the large changes in marriage and fertility behavior observed across a broad spectrum of demographic groups. Decisions about marriage and fertility are complicated and the large changes in marriage that have occurred over the past 50 years are likely the product of complex interplay between changes in government policies and changes in the economy that affect potential gains from marriage, reinforced by changing social norms that may themselves be a product of changing behavior.

Researchers studying black-white wage gaps have identified three distinct periods. During the s the gap between black and white male wages increased. While black-white wage convergence was rapid in the s, there remains a large gap in joblessness, which is much larger if incarceration is taken into account. Trends in deep poverty rates on subgroups of the population are not shown in the paper; they are available from the authors, upon request.

Partly driven by increases in medical prices, Medicaid real per capita spending from to grew by percent, which dwarfs that in any other program. Per capita real spending on these programs grew by 48 percent, 28 percent, and 52 percent in the three periods to , to , and to , respectively.

Adding some fraction of these to the means-tested transfers would result in an even greater rate of growth over all periods. A large fraction of TANF spending after was on services. Total real spending, even including these additional expenditure categories, is still below the AFDC level.

The TANF program no longer has a significant impact on poverty, never rising above 0. Expenditure is averaged over all families in the groups described in the indicated row, regardless of whether they were recipients. However, Medicaid represents only part of the family's expenditure budget and should not be valued dollar-for-dollar.

In addition, as Burtless and Svaton and the CBO have noted, if the value of Medicaid to low-income families is added to income, the value of employer-provided health insurance needs to be added to the income of higher-income families.

When both are added, the distribution of health insurance support is remarkably even over the income distribution. Consequently, the shift in medical support over time is unlikely to change the relative redistribution that has taken place.

This includes the TANF program and housing aid. The changes shown in Table 3 imply that pre-transfer poverty rates must have risen considerably more. Larrimore et al. They find that median income in the bottom quintile fell by 4 percent over that period but that this was a result of a 15 percent decline in income resulting from employment, earnings, and demographics counteracted by an 11 percent offset from increases in transfers and decreases in taxes.

While the bottom quintile does not map directly into the poverty rate, their analysis does demonstrate that transfers played a large role in preventing incomes in the lower part of the income distribution from declining during the Great Recession. Bitler et al. They find, like Larrimore et al. They find that past recessions had equally positive impacts on the level of overall poverty per unit change in the unemployment rate as in the Great Recession, although poverty was actually more cyclical in the Great Recession than in past recessions.

See Census Bureau National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. J Policy Anal Manage. Author manuscript; available in PMC Apr 6. Find articles by Robert Haveman. Find articles by Rebecca Blank. Find articles by Robert Moffitt. Find articles by Timothy Smeeding. Find articles by Geoffrey Wallace. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer.

Copyright notice. The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at J Policy Anal Manage. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. How has the measurement of poverty changed over this period?

Certain socioeconomic groups experienced much higher poverty rates, including those with family heads with the following characteristics: Nonwhite 48 percent Persons with less than 8 years of education 37 percent Females or single parents 48 percent , especially those with low education 89 percent for nonwhites, 77 percent for whites Persons aged 65 or more 47 percent or less than 25 years 31 percent Non-earners 81 percent Farm residents 43 percent Those living in the South 32 percent For persons living in families headed by someone with any of these characteristics, poverty rates were more than percent of the overall poverty rate of 20 percent.

Table 1 Percent of persons in families with income below the Federal Poverty Line, and Open in a separate window. From to Work-Based Reform and Retrenchment The period from through the s combined reform and retrenchment. From to Now: Large Expansion; Little Reform Since the millennium, public programs supporting low-income families have grown, with most of this growth coming during the latter part of this period. A Half-Century of Poverty Policy, In Brief Over the past 50 years then, the nation's view of the poverty problem has changed substantially, as has national government policy toward the poor.

Figure 1. Growing Criticisms of the Official Poverty Measure Within a decade of its creation, the official poverty measure began to be criticized and suggestions for alternative measurement approaches began to be heard. Some Progress Over the years, a variety of formal efforts recognized some of these issues in attempts to update and refine a new and improved poverty measure. Alternative Approaches to Poverty Measurement The SPM is an effort to update poverty measurement, but its approach is conceptually similar to Orshansky's with a poverty threshold based on expenditures on necessities and a resource measure based on family resources.

Poverty in the United States in A Snapshot Table 2 column 1 shows the official poverty rates in for the entire population and for subgroups.

Table 2 U. Poverty in The Composition of the Poor The third column in Table 2 provides information on the composition of the officially defined non-elderly poor in Deep Poverty The final column of Table 2 shows the fraction of the official poor that are living in deep poverty—those in families with pre-tax cash income of less than 50 percent of the official poverty threshold.

Trends in Poverty How much progress has been made toward alleviating poverty since the War on Poverty was begun 50 years ago? Subgroup Trends in Poverty Table 3 shows official poverty rates for demographic subgroups in , , , and unfortunately, SPM poverty rates for subgroups are not available going as far back as Year All Figure 3.

Expenditure per Capita, Non-Medicaid Means-Tested Programs, — real dollars Sources : Various governmental and administrative data series available from the authors upon request. Trends in Deep Poverty Deep poverty rates poverty rates in families with income below 50 percent of the official threshold have increased substantially over the to period.

Public Antipoverty Spending and Effects on Poverty The upper line in Figure 2 shows real per capita expenditure—federal, state, and local combined—from to for the 84 largest means-tested transfer programs in the U. Figure 2. Real Expenditure per Capita in Means-Tested Programs, — real dollars Sources : Top 84 Programs from Spar , Table 2 and 10 Largest Programs from authors, calculations from individual program statistics.

Figure 4. Changes in the Distribution of Aid and Effects on Deep Poverty Although support for low-income families has increased strongly over the last 50 years, the nature of the expansion changed after the late s and s. Impact of Transfer Programs: to Table 4 shows the total real expenditure per family from to panel A 83 and the same real expenditures for these programs from to panel B.

Figure 5. Impact of Transfer Programs: to The Great Recession saw another major shift in government support. Footnotes 1 Implicit in this perspective is the belief that participation of low-income citizens in programs and activities would change their perceptions regarding opportunities and hence change their behavior.

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