Poverty is a subject that is constantly discussed in the United
States and there has been great effort applied to alleviating it.
Here is a chart showing recent numbers.
The poverty rate has been flat since about 1968. Why is that?
To me, there is one of two answers. Either poverty is endemic to a capitalist democracy and nothing can be done about it OR every program that been tried in the past 50 years has been poorly designed and/or poorly funded.
Major anti-poverty programs include Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, Food Stamps, housing subsidies, Head Start, job training programs. With all these programs in place, the poverty rate remains the same.
One could argue that the programs listed above may have prevented the poverty rate from being higher than it is, but that doesn't change the fact that they have not been able to help the bigger problem.
The devil is in the details. We need to drill down inside the poverty rate itself to understand the causes. For example, what percentage of the poverty rate is fluid, meaning it consists of people going into and out of poverty on a short-term basis. I will do that in a subsequent post.
Governments need to implement programs that have a sound basis for success,
otherwise they just waste money. The lessons learned from the welfare
experience of the 1970s is that throwing money at a problem has little chance
of fixing it.
