Scott Winship, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, home of the cop-loving, Sarah Palin-hating Heather MacDonald* and various other assorted right-leaning, tea-sipping double-domes, has a piece in the current Politico magazine that, shockingly concludes, “despite the alarm of the current debate about America’s poor, the country has actually reduced poverty more than we often appreciate—and that decline in poverty has been less about the liberal programs of the New Deal and Great Society and more about economic growth and center-right welfare reforms than is widely recognized.”
Since Scott is willing to run counter to Ronald Reagan’s famous snicker, “We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won,”† I won’t object too strenuously to his attempt to grab the lion’s share of the credit for reducing poverty for the “center-right.” Both liberals and conservatives like to deny that the “war on poverty” had any effect, the liberals because they don’t want to admit that the problem has diminished and conservatives because they don’t want to admit that government programs that help the poor can have any effect.‡
As Winship points out, the federal government’s data on the poverty rate do not acknowledge the impact of government assistance on family income, so it’s not surprising that government programs “have no effect.” He references a recent study by Christopher Wimer, Liana Fox, Irv Garfinkel, Neeraj Kaushal, and Jane Waldfogel, “Trends in Poverty with an Anchored Supplemental Poverty Measure,” that paints a very different picture—so different, in fact, that Winship doesn’t describe their conclusions in detail. It wouldn’t do to make government look too effective. But here’s what the study actually says:
Results are particularly striking for child poverty and deep child poverty. In 2012, government programs reduced both child poverty and deep child poverty by 11 percentage points. In 1967, by contrast government programs (through the tax system) actually increased child poverty rates, and reduced deep child poverty rates by only 4 percentage points. Estimates with the OPM would miss much of this poverty reduction, particularly in the modern period as after-tax and in-kind benefits have grown in importance.
Winship waxes dismayingly glib at times—purely speculative conservative talking points on the supposed causes of poverty are validated by the act of labeling them as “likely” to be true. And, a few sentences later, “likely” truths become gospel. He praises federal anti-poverty measures enacted in the 1990s without mentioning that it was Bill Clinton that made them happen.§ And, of course, he pumps up Manhattan Institute pretty boys Paul Ryan and Mario Rubio. But a conservative who admits that government programs helped reduce poverty, that the War on Poverty was, in good measure, a success? Hey, I’ll take that half loaf. I don’t have to buy the whole thing.
†Reagan thought this was funny because, basically, he despised poor people. Poverty, in his mind, was quite simply the moral judgment of God.
‡Programs that help the rich, of course, are very different.
§Clinton would not have been able to reform AFDC (now TANF) without Republican votes. Paleoliberals wanted the poor to be dependent on government because they loved handing out checks. It made them feel loved.
