I'm kinda baffled by this and I'd love to hear y'alls thoughts.

> Deaton said the evidence of successful state intervention is all around even if governments sometimes get it wrong. He points to president Lyndon B Johnson’s 1964 “war on poverty” legislation pulling families back from the breadline and improving lives with food stamps, housing assistance, and federal health care for the poor and elderly among other programmes. The way poverty is measured means that the war on poverty can never be won by sending money to the poor. Deaton said {{rightwing}} politicians and economists fixed the numbers so they could claim, in the words of Ronald Reagan, that in the war on poverty, poverty won. Official income statistics left out welfare payments so those receiving them often appeared to still be living below the poverty line when, by other measures, government assistance demonstrably helped. No matter how successful antipoverty cash transfer policies are at reducing want, their effects do not show up in the official counts,” Deaton writes. "The way poverty is measured means that the war on poverty can never be won by sending money to the poor. This statistical stupidity, which the politics makes so hard to fix, is a constant source of mischief and misunderstanding.”

As a libertarian-leaning conservative I agree with literally every word (with {{one}} exception) so far.

> The way poverty is measured means that the war on poverty can never be won by sending money to the poor.

He's referring to the fact that the US Census explicitly excludes the vast majority of welfare transfers. It excludes all in-kind transfers (Housing, Food Stamps, Medicaid, etc) and all de-facto cash transfers (such as "refundable tax credits", which are deemed "negative taxes" and so are not counted as cash income, even if they result in a check in the mail). In other words, if your pre-tax income puts you $1 below the poverty line, the US government announces that you are in poverty--even though you are eligible for (and presumably receive) tens of thousands of dollars in welfare support in the form of free housing, free healthcare, free food, free early education for your kids, free cash through tax credits, and subsidized cell phone and internet access. Which is nuts!

Having made this critical insight, he apparently spins a lottery basket full of random leftist rhetoric and pulls out:

> Put another way, Deaton said, “the war on poverty has become a war on the poor”.

How does one come to this conclusion? The status quo benefits the poor more than an accurate reporting of the numbers would. The over-reporting of the poverty level enables the left to continue to harangue the need to solved a largely-solved problem. How could this possibly be construed as "a war on the poor"? The figures for incomes-by-quintile, once adjusted for wealth transfers and median household size, are not going to help the left. In "The Myth of American Inequality", Gramm et. al. argue that adjusted incomes for the lowest- and second-lowest are higher than the middle quintile, which is absolute insanity when you consider the massive difference in hours worked and taxes paid by the households in each quintile. Shining light on this will not help the left, who are already losing ground with the working class precisely because they have first-hand exposure to the insanity of these wealth transfers.

In my view, the only rational move for the left has already occurred, which is their general transition of their economic rhetoric from one focused on addressing the (actual) problem of poverty to one focused on addressing the (contrived) problem that is wealth inequality.