The war on poverty worked, in one chart

A continual frustration of anti-poverty advocates and wonks is that government efforts to cut poverty pretty much never show up as declines in the official poverty rate. That’s not because the government’s failing. It’s because the poverty rate looks at income excluding things like welfare, food stamps, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the like. So even if we instituted a blanket $10,000-per-person refundable tax credit for everyone in the country, the poverty rate wouldn’t change except insofar as that program affected pre-tax income.

The Census Bureau recognizes this problem and so produces something called the “supplemental poverty measure,” which takes government programs into account, along with a variety of other improvements over the official measure. Its main limitation has been a lack of historical data; while the poverty rate goes back to 1959, the supplemental poverty measure only goes back to 2010.

Thankfully, some researchers at Columbia have constructed historical values for the supplemental measure going back to 1967. They find that poverty before government programs kick in has actually increased since then; with government programs included, though, there’s a big drop in the late ’60s/early ’70s, followed by a plateau during the Reagan/Bush I presidencies, followed by another sharp decline under Clinton.

Click “Know More” to read more about the Columbia study.