Monday, August 3, 2015

Something Is Wrong Here

In the last 50 years U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion--trillion--on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.
There are 80 means-tested welfare programs on a federal level. These programs provide cash, food, housing and medical care to low-income Americans. Federal and state spending on these programs last year was $943 billion. (These figures do not include Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance.)
Over 100 million people, about one third of the U.S. population, received aid from at least one welfare program at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient in 2013.

Now the shocker: The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. A fascinating chart showing if converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S. More, the extraordinary increase in spending appears to have made no difference:
 
This kind of chart is attack-able. The various types of poverty are quite difference and charts such as these take them all together. (For example, having slum housing is a lot different than having no food.)
But the numbers are what we have.

Census counts a family as poor if its income falls below specified thresholds. But in counting family “income,” the Census ignores nearly the entire $943 billion welfare state.
The intake of protein, vitamins and minerals by poor children is virtually identical with upper middle class kids.
The typical family that the Census identifies as poor has air conditioning, cable or satellite TV, and a computer in his home. Forty percent have a wide screen HDTV and another 40 percent have internet access. Three quarters of the poor own a car and roughly a third have two or more cars.
Less than two percent of the poor are homeless.  Only one in ten live in mobile homes. The typical house or apartment of the poor is in good repair and uncrowded; it is actually larger than the average dwelling of non-poor French, Germans or English.

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