We won the War on Poverty. Really.<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/we-won-the-war-on-poverty-really.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"We won the War on Poverty. 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{"id":663,"date":"2014-01-11T16:46:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-11T16:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/we-won-the-war-on-poverty-really.html"},"modified":"2014-01-11T16:46:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-11T16:46:00","slug":"we-won-the-war-on-poverty-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/we-won-the-war-on-poverty-really.html","title":{"rendered":"We won the War on Poverty. Really."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

This is going to be short, but I want to get this core idea \u201cout there\u201d and then do some more reading on this later on:<\/p>\n

The GOP Party Line on the War on Poverty is that we\u2019ve lost, because we\u2019re doing everything wrong.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

But that fails to recognize that there are two components to the concept of \u201cpoverty,\u201d as in \u201cliving in poverty\u201d: 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.<\/p>\n

The War on Poverty was intended to alleviate the former.\u00a0 Consider the state of America in the 1960s \u2014 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.\u00a0 Sure, I don\u2019t have the details at hand, but this was still an era when blacks were leaving sharecropper shacks for Northern cities, wasn\u2019t it?\u00a0 <\/p>\n

And, of course, in the year 2013 in America, there are a host of programs to provide exactly these items to the\u00a0poor in the inner cities:\u00a0 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<\/a>), disability benefits (with, in some cases, very easy eligibility)\u00a0etc.\u00a0 Stories of children going hungry generally stem more from family dysfunction than poverty itself.\u00a0 In Appalachia, described by Kevin D. Williamson as \u201cThe White Ghetto\u201d in a recent article<\/a>, much the same story is true \u2014 he describes\u00a0extreme joblessness but not extreme material deprevation.<\/p>\n

But these welfare benefits don\u2019t lift a person out of \u201cpoverty\u201d as defined by the government, where only a person\u2019s income counts, not government benefits, though various adjustments to\u00a0the formulas have been proposed to add in these benefits.\u00a0 And\u00a0I\u2019m inclined to think we need both measures:\u00a0 how many people are suffering from inadequate nutrition, housing, clothing?\u00a0 And how many are dependent on the government rather than able to provide for themselves?\u00a0 The first situation we\u2019ve largely remedied, but for the second, there\u2019s a long way to go, and significant disagreements on the right solutions.<\/p>\n

(OK \u2014 I\u2019ve now done the 5-minute read of Wikipedia\u2019s War on Poverty entry<\/a>, and I\u2019ll grant that the programs were a mix of cash outlays and \u201cuplifting\u201d programs, such as Head Start.\u00a0 But I suspect that the focus was on material deprivation, and that the concept of \u201cwelfare dependency\u201d didn\u2019t really exist.)<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"