Thread by @Noahpinion

1/Today's @bopinion post is about how LBJ and his Great Society won the war on poverty in America.

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

2/Most of our modern welfare state was created not by FDR, but by LBJ.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Soc…

3/Conservatives believe - very devoutly and ardently! - that the War on Poverty was a failure.

heritage.org/marriage-and-f…

But they are wrong. Thoroughly, comprehensively, tragically wrong.

It was a success.

4/First of all, just look at headline poverty rates. Obviously there was a big drop in the years after LBJ announced the War on Poverty.

5/OK but poverty is still with us, right? Despite (or because of?) our best efforts, 1/7 of Americans remain trapped in a state of deprivation, right? Right??

6/Well, yes and no. Poverty is not zero. But the official poverty measure omits income from a lot of LBJ's Great Society programs!!

vox.com/2015/9/16/9337…

7/But a team of economists have attempted to create their own poverty measure, which captures income from all sources, to see how many Americans are poor by the standards of LBJ's time.

Guess what they find?

nber.org/papers/w26532

8/The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!

9/You can play with their assumptions, but you get the same thing.

10/Their income breakdown shows that much of the drop in poverty was due to government programs, NOT to economic growth.

And also, notice how much of the poverty drop occurs AFTER growth slowed down in the 70s!

11/So poverty as defined in LBJ's time is way way way way way down in America. Almost nonexistent by now.

This may be one reason why we don't see cities exploding with rage anymore.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

12/Now, does this mean poverty in America is almost gone?

No! It just means that most of the poverty we're dealing with now is of a different kind than what LBJ was facing (and which he successfully stamped out).

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

13/Poverty today is mostly about precarity, risk, lack of dignity, exposure to violence, mental illness, etc. It's absolutely worth fighting, and we should attack it as vigorously as LBJ attacked the poverty of his time.

14/But if anyone tells you that we lost the War on Poverty, tell them no. We didn't lose at all.

(end)

bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…