A recent article in The Economist magazine, commented on LBJ's fabled "War on Poverty." In the 1960's LBJ and his administration adopted a political goal to wipe out poverty, like the current administration's "War on Terror" Johnson had a particular difficult time identifying the enemy. The poverty line that was adopted and used to define what being impoverished meant (this poverty line is still used by the government today) is $18,660 for a family of four.
This number in no means truly addresses the actual cost of raising a family in America today. Mollie Orshansky, administrator of Social Security during LBJ's administration, determined the number by calculating the needs of a family's nutritional needs and multiplied by one-third, because families of that era on average spent a third of their income on food. The current threshold poverty amount is really the cost of feeding a family in the 1960's adjusted for current inflation. This is leading to criticism that there are a greater number of Americans that are living in poverty than the Census Bureau and the Dept. Of Health and Human Services account for.
The recent economic boom and welfare reform are agravating the problem. Due to the welfare reform initiatives enacted by Bill Clinton while the economy was booming several Americans who are in desperate need of assistance will not qualify. While the welfare reforms of the 1990's were heralded as reducing poverty, they are hitting the working poor the hardest -- those who work, but are unable to find work that pays a fair wage. Poorly designed welfare limits exclude the working poor from the needed relief that the government spends their tax dollars to provide.
This article was found at: http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3146724
2 comments:
Ask for help on getting that link to look better! Also, you need blank lines between paragraphs.
This is more of a macroeconomic topic - try to get one more microeconomic for next time around.
There is a lot of frivolity involved in how the government comes up with poverty numbers. And there are many Americans that are below where we currently draw that line.
However, it isn't clear how useful knowing that is. Our poverty line in the country is higher than the middle class income in many countries we regard as being comparable to us, and far beyond what most of the population of the world has. Does that make our poor really poor?
Wow, harsh words Ski-Doo...
Unfortunately Biancca, Ski-Doo's observation is supportable. It is a fact that obesity is more common among the poor. You make the perfectly reasonable argument that this is not true for individuals who are poor, but it is true on average. (FYI: a lot of arguments about policy end up with one side focusing on averages and the other on individuals). The reasons for this are poorly understood, and constitute a well known problem in the public health literature. One thing we do know is that it is a phenomenon of developed countries: once countries get rich enough, their poor start getting fatter.
I think that Ski-Doo makes a good point that people in the U.S. are offered a lot of advantages that should keep them from being poor. But that isn't the same thing as saying there shouldn't be any poor people because they are offered advantages not available to others. Bad luck exists and does not always even out, and people can be constrained into making choosing (optimally) between lousy alternatives.
Biancca's points are also correct. We do have poor people in this country who probably do not choose to be that way. Here I think the averages are important. Do we have less poor people or more? Do the people we define as poor have more or less? The preponderance of the evidence here is that, on average, our society is improving the lot of poor people. But that doesn't mean we are improving (or even can improve) the lot of every individual poor person.
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