That’s rich: Poverty level under Obama breaks 50-year record

Thursday, January 9, 2014

That’s rich: Poverty level under Obama breaks 50-year record

The Washington Times

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Fifty years after President Johnson started a $20 trillion taxpayer-funded war on poverty, the overall percentage of impoverished people in the U.S. has declined only slightly and the poor have lost ground under President Obama.
Aides said Mr. Obama doesn’t plan to commemorate the anniversary Wednesday of Johnson’s speech in 1964, which gave rise to Medicaid, Head Start and a broad range of other federal anti-poverty programs. The president’s only public event Tuesday was a plea for Congress to approve extended benefits for the long-term unemployed, another reminder of the persistent economic troubles during Mr. Obama’s five years in office.
“What I think the American people are really looking for in 2014 is just a little bit of stability,” Mr. Obama said.
Although the president often rails against income inequality in America, his policies have had little impact overall on poverty. A record 47 million Americans receive food stamps, about 13 million more than when he took office.
The poverty rate has stood at 15 percent for three consecutive years, the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s. The poverty rate in 1965 was 17.3 percent; it was 12.5 percent in 2007, before the Great Recession.
About 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the federal government defined in 2012 as an annual income of $23,492 for a family of four.
President Obama’s anti-poverty efforts “are basically to give more people more free stuff,” said Robert Rector, a specialist on welfare and poverty at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
“That’s exactly the opposite of what Johnson said,” Mr. Rector said. “Johnson’s goal was to make people prosperous and self-sufficient.”

Read More Here

Follow @daveboyer

Enlarge Photo
President Barack Obama offers a toast during a State Dinner for British ... more >

Video:

Runtime: 01:28War on Poverty ... Still a Fight

The 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's announcement of "The War on Poverty" has, of course, brought umpteen assessments of the war's success (and failure). Officially, we haven't moved the needle much. By the Census Department's accounting, the US poverty rate has gone down just four points, from 19 to 15%, and economic inequality has soared. Conservatives argue that the minimal changes in poverty levels just don't justify all the spending on anti-poverty programs. Progressives ask, isn't 46 million people living in poverty still too many? Shouldn't we do more?

In the year's since Johnson's idealistic declaration, our focus on spending, and on raw data, has obscured a more human and qualitative view of poverty.
Johnson knew that the politics of poverty could be divisive and that talk of handouts could rub the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" believers the wrong way. In 1964, he spoke as strongly as he could about the way that solutions to poverty could lift the whole nation. He still faced opposition. Perhaps that's why his 1965 address arguing for passage of the Voting Rights Act also contains an even more resonant argument for the government's role in lifting the horizons of the poor. He makes clear the intrinsic connection we've glossed over: ending poverty is part of the campaign for human rights, not the welfare system.
As Johnson noted:

But I would like to caution you and remind you that to exercise these privileges takes much more than just legal right. It requires a trained mind and a healthy body. It requires a decent home, and the chance to find a job, and the opportunity to escape from the clutches of poverty.

Today, politicians of all stripes affect the pose of a regretful accountant when discussing welfare programs: they say "I feel your pain" on the one hand, and then turn around and declare "but the numbers don't justify the spending" on welfare programs. It's a sign of that disturbing migration of the middle to the far right that some critics don't even bother to put a scrim of compassion over their green eyeshades. Fox News' "Entitlement Nation" segment has boldly scolded children who benefit from free lunch programs.