IT IS often said that efforts to fight poverty have failed. Surveys suggest only 5% of Americans think that anti-poverty programmes have had a big impact; 47% say they have had no impact or a negative one. And most people think that poverty is spreading—a view expressed by many politicians. In 2014, the current House Speaker, Paul Ryan, then chairman of the House Budget Committee, issued a scathing critique of welfare programmes arguing they “are not only failing to address the problem. They are also in some significant respects making it worse.”
Mr Ryan based that conclusion on data that may also inform popular scepticism about poverty programmes. In 2014 the US Census Bureau reported that the federal poverty rate was 15%, a drop of only 2.5 percentage points since Lyndon Johnson declared the war on poverty 50 years ago. But the method for calculating the official poverty rate is almost perfectly designed to obscure the effect of government programmes on the quality of life of poor people. And that is a shame, because better measures...Continue reading
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