VERBATIM POST
In 1964, when President Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in America, the poverty rate stood at around 19 percent.
Since then, total federal, state, and local
spending on anti-poverty programs has amounted to $15 trillion, yet the
poverty rate now stands at 15.1 percent, the highest level in nearly a
decade.
“Clearly we are doing something wrong,” according
to the Cato Institute, which has released a new policy analysis on
welfare spending that calls the war on poverty a “failure.”
The federal government will spend more than $668
billion on anti-poverty programs this year, an increase of 41 percent or
more than $193 billion since President Barack Obama took office. State
and local government expenditures will amount to another $284 billion,
bringing the total to nearly $1 trillion — far more than the $685
billion spent on defense.
Federal, state and local governments now spend
$20,610 a year for every poor person in the United States, or $61,830
for each poor family of three.
“Given that the poverty line for that family is
just $18,530, we should have theoretically wiped out poverty in America
many times over,” writes Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare
studies at the Cato Institute and author of “The Poverty of Welfare:
Helping Others in Civil Society.”
Most welfare programs are means-tested programs
providing cash, food, housing, medical care, or other benefits to
low-income persons and families, or programs targeted at communities or
disadvantaged groups, such as the homeless.
The federal government alone now funds 126
separate and often overlapping programs designed to fight poverty,
Tanner points out.
There are 33 housing programs run by four
different cabinet departments, 21 programs providing food or
food-purchasing assistance administered by three different federal
departments and one independent agency, and eight healthcare programs
administered by five separate agencies within the Department of Health
and Human Services.
The largest welfare program is Medicaid, which
provides benefits to 49 million Americans and cost more than $228
billion last year, followed by the food stamps program, with 41 million
participants and a price tag of nearly $72 billion. Other programs range
from Federal Pell Grants ($41 billion) down to lower-cost programs such
as Weatherization Assistance for Low Income Persons ($250 million) and
the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program ($20 million).
At least 106 million Americans receive benefits
from one or more of these programs. Including entitlements such as
Social Security and Medicare and salaries for government employees, more
than half of Americans now receive a substantial portion of their
income from the government.
“Clearly we are spending more than enough money to have significantly reduced poverty, yet we haven't,” Tanner concludes.
“The vast majority of current programs are
focused on making poverty more comfortable rather than giving people the
tools that will help them escape poverty.
“And we actually have a pretty solid idea of the
keys to getting out of and staying out of poverty: finish school, do not
get pregnant outside marriage, and get a job, any job, and stick with
it.”
