The War on Poverty has Succeeded

In this round, I will be rebutting my opponent's three primary arguments. I want to thank my opponent for his thoughtful post.(Once again, graphs failed to load, to my frustration. Will post in comments)Many of my opponent's points are based on flawed statistical reasoning. Also, many of my opponent's sources - like Heritage and Cato - are ideologically opposed to any spending on poverty. While they are very good at putting together attractive graphs, they very often cherry-pick data to reflect their pre-existing viewpoint. When all relevant factors are taken fully into account, the War on Poverty has been an astounding success.The War on Poverty has Dramatically Reduced Poverty RatesWhen the United States began tracking poverty in 1959, the official rate was 22.4%. It stayed between 21.0% and 22.5% through most of the Kennedy administration. It fell just slightly to 19.5% the year Johnson took office. After the War on Poverty commenced, poverty plummeted to 12.1% by the time Johnson left office, and reached its lowest point of 11.1% in 1973. Poverty wouldn't rise significantly again until the Reagan administration, when it quickly shot back up to 15%. [1]My opponent emphasizes that poverty was already falling in the 50's, and suggests that the decline in poverty during the Johnson years was a continuation of a pre-existing trend, and that the War on Poverty not only failed to reduce poverty, but may even have fixed it at a higher level. But this is based on a misleading reading of the data:1) Reductions in poverty prior to 1959 are based on incomplete data.The sources for my opponent's chart are mixed-and-matched - data from 1959 onward is official Census data, but before 1959 - where my opponent shows the biggest drop - is based on a single researcher's estimate. Extending the data back even further illustrates why this quickly becomes absurd:As this chart demonstrates, "[a]pplying the current official poverty line to an earlier era is problematic," as there is a "well-documented tendency for poverty lines to rise in real terms as mean real income rises." As a society becomes richer, it generates "a higher material standard of living for even the poorest segment of society." By relying on an "unchanging standard" - particularly one developed in a period of unprecedented growth - my opponent "exaggerate[s] the long-term decline in poverty" prior to the adoption of official measures. [2]2) Poverty rates based on more accurate measures of income have continued to fall dramatically. My opponent is right that in the past 30 years, the poverty rate has seemed stuck around 15%. But the official poverty rate does not take benefits into account - if the government wrote a $100,000 check to everyone under the poverty line, the Census' official poverty measure would ignore that income and count them as poor. This isn't a failure of the War on Poverty, it's a failure of accurate measurement. In real terms, the poverty rate has fallen from 25.8 percent in 1967 to 16.0 percent in 2012. [3] 3) Governmental spending is responsible for lowering poverty ratesNot only has poverty dropped, but government spending is the reason. In the graph below, the green line represents market poverty; the black line, actual poverty. The entire green shaded area represents people lifted from poverty by the safety net - people who would be impoverished by market forces, if not for government spending. Today, that gap is larger than ever. [4]Early on, the effect of government programs is relatively small, but the gap rapidly widens. What does this mean for my opponent's case? Well, any reduction in poverty in the early post-war era can probably be attributed to the growing economy. But "the following decades, for the most part, have been characterized by slower economic growth than in the quarter century following World War II." [5]Thus, since 1973, market forces have been driving poverty up - and government spending has been the corrective keeping poverty low. "Poverty persists, not because the ideas of the War on Poverty planners were fundamentally mistaken, but because the changing economy increased economic hardships for many workers." [5]The Cost of The War on Poverty has Remained Steady and ReasonableMy opponent argues that the costs of the War on Poverty have increased dramatically. But he makes a critical error here that renders his conclusion invalid. My opponent compares total dollars spent - an absolute figure - to the poverty rate - a ratio. This would be fine if the population remained constant, but it hasn't - the US has more than doubled since 1950. Of course we're spending more on poverty reduction - we're spending more on everything, because there are more of us.The easiest way to correct for this is to look at anti-poverty spending as a percentage of GDP:This allows us to see what portion of our total economic output is being spent on poverty relief. After growing in the Johnson administration, spending on welfare has been pretty consistent at about 2% of GDP since 1973. Despite a Great-Recession-related spike, poverty spending is already re-settling at the usual 2% level. [6]My opponent also cites a Cato Institute report for the contention that per-recipient spending on welfare for a family of three as of 2012 was nearly $60,000 per year. The source for this data? The "author's calculations." Author Michael Tanner has been known to exaggerate the benefits of welfare to individual recipients by, for instance, assuming that every household eligible for TANF is also receiving maximum housing subsidies, when in fact only 15% receive any. [7]It's easy enough to do the rough math. The United States government spent $397.8 billion on means-tested aid programs in FY 2013. [8] That same year, there were 109.6 million Americans receiving some form of means-tested aid. [9] The average individual benefit, then, was only about $3,630. Though our calculation is simplistic, it shows Tanner's numbers to be grossly exaggerated.My opponent's last chart in this section is calibrated to FY 2008, which was the beginning of the Recession-related spike, which is now settling back into the normal 2% level. My opponent's chart exaggerates the level of spending growth by relying on an outlying data point. [6]Finally, my opponent somewhat drops a point about the administrative costs of welfare into his next argument, which I will address here. First of all, my opponent does not cite a source for this chart, so no one can judge its accuracy. The most recent numbers I have been able to locate are from 1989-1993, which indicate that administrative costs overall were about 8.7% of total spending. [10] I'm happy to engage on this point further if my opponent can provide a source for the data.The Social Safety Net Provides a Path Out of PovertyLet's start by acknowledging the kernel of truth in my opponent's argument concerning "welfare traps" - it is possible to concoct hypothetical scenarios in which a person receiving a particular combination of benefits would lose more than they gain by obtaining a minimum wage job. These are bugs in the system. (One easy correction would be to raise the minimum wage...).But my opponent leaves the impression that these bugs are common, when they are not. On average, a working person on benefits will net $0.70 of every wage-dollar - about the same as the middle class. [11]If my opponent were correct, very few people on benefits would ever exit the system. But this isn't true - nearly 45% of American adults will use safety net programs for at least a year, but of those, only 16% remain in the system for five years or more. Thus, more than one quarter of Americans will use the safety net at some point in their life, and it will help them escape poverty. [12]Chronic poverty is rare in this country - a meaningful success in this War. Only 6% of people spend five consecutive years in poverty, and less than 2% will spend more than ten. If welfare were a trap, those numbers would be a lot higher. [12]Finally, my opponent argues that welfare discourages marriage and encourages single parenthood. The problem is with my opponent's use of the word "significant." A trend can be statistically significant (i.e., noticeable) without having very much effect. If you track my opponent's cited sources back to the original studies, however, the researchers acknowledge that "the magnitudes of these effects are small." [13]Women’s increased economic prospects, the availability of birth control, and changes in social norms have pushed back marriage ages and changed fertility patterns across all demographics. And indeed, at the times when marriage rates declined most significantly, benefits were going down - the inverse of what we would expect if welfare was a cause of these patterns. Indeed, "some research suggests that public income supports may increase marriage rates, possibly by helping low-income couples achieve the financial stability seen by some as a prerequisite for marriage." [5]ConclusionI have shown that my opponent's case relies on cherry-picked data and errors in statistical reasoning - some of which are, it seems, designed to be intentionally misleading by ideologically-driven authors at Cato and Heritage. When looking at the numbers in total context, the War on Poverty has dramatically reduced poverty rates over time, providing a necessary corrective to market pressures that would increase poverty. It costs us a pretty consistent 2% of GDP to accomplish this feat, and it has practically ended chronic poverty in the US and provided a path out of poverty for about more than one-fourth of Americans.[1] http://goo.gl...[2] http://goo.gl...[3] https://goo.gl...[4] https://goo.gl...[5] http://goo.gl...[6] http://goo.gl...[7] http://goo.gl...[8] http://goo.gl...[9] http://goo.gl...[10] https://goo.gl...[11] http://goo.gl...[12] http://goo.gl...[13] http://goo.gl...