We won the War on Poverty. Really.

This is going to be short, but I want to get this core idea “out there” and then do some more reading on this later on:

The GOP Party Line on the War on Poverty is that we’ve lost, because we’re doing everything wrong. 

But that fails to recognize that there are two components to the concept of “poverty,” as in “living in poverty”: first, living in a state of acute material deprivation, and second, being dependent on government (means-tested) benefits to stay out of acute material deprivation.

The War on Poverty was intended to alleviate the former.  Consider the state of America in the 1960s — this was still a time when not everyone had running water, central heating (or, for that matter, a reasonably weather-proofed home), food on the table reliably, clothes without holes (or patches), etc.  Sure, I don’t have the details at hand, but this was still an era when blacks were leaving sharecropper shacks for Northern cities, wasn’t it? 

And, of course, in the year 2013 in America, there are a host of programs to provide exactly these items to the poor in the inner cities:  food stamps, school lunch progams, low-income heating programs, subsidized housing (though there is a serious issue with waiting lists, and lotteries to even get on the waiting list, for subsidized housing), disability benefits (with, in some cases, very easy eligibility) etc.  Stories of children going hungry generally stem more from family dysfunction than poverty itself.  In Appalachia, described by Kevin D. Williamson as “The White Ghetto” in a recent article, much the same story is true — he describes extreme joblessness but not extreme material deprevation.

But these welfare benefits don’t lift a person out of “poverty” as defined by the government, where only a person’s income counts, not government benefits, though various adjustments to the formulas have been proposed to add in these benefits.  And I’m inclined to think we need both measures:  how many people are suffering from inadequate nutrition, housing, clothing?  And how many are dependent on the government rather than able to provide for themselves?  The first situation we’ve largely remedied, but for the second, there’s a long way to go, and significant disagreements on the right solutions.

(OK — I’ve now done the 5-minute read of Wikipedia’s War on Poverty entry, and I’ll grant that the programs were a mix of cash outlays and “uplifting” programs, such as Head Start.  But I suspect that the focus was on material deprivation, and that the concept of “welfare dependency” didn’t really exist.)