The Long Argument Over Whether the War on Poverty Worked

Lyndon Johnson had been president for less than seven weeks when he walked into the House chamber on January 8, 1964, to deliver his first State of the Union address. The country was still raw from the assassination in Dallas. Johnson used much of the speech to press for the civil rights bill and a tax cut that his predecessor had proposed. But the line that people remembered was a new one. "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America," he said. He added, in the same speech, that the war would not be short or easy and that no single weapon would suffice. Most of the people who quote the first sentence leave out the second. Twenty-four years later, another president, Ronald Reagan, stood in the same room and offered the verdict that has framed the argument ever since: the federal government, he said, had declared war on poverty, and poverty won. Both men were talking about the same numbers. The interesting question is whether either of them was looking at the right ones.

In short: Whether the War on Poverty "worked" depends heavily on how poverty is measured. The official rate, designed in the 1960s, ignores most of the aid the war created, so it makes the programs look ineffective. Newer measures that count that aid show large declines in poverty since the 1960s, especially among older people and, for one year in 2021, among children. The critics' deeper questions, about work, family and dignity, deserve answers that the numbers alone cannot give.

A ruler drawn on the back of a grocery list

The official poverty line was not handed down from a mountain. It was worked out in the early 1960s by an economist at the Social Security Administration named Mollie Orshansky, who had grown up poor in the Bronx. Her method was ingenious and modest. Surveys at the time showed that families typically spent about a third of their after-tax income on food. The Agriculture Department published a bare-bones "economy" food plan, meant for temporary or emergency use. Orshansky took the cost of that plan for families of different sizes and multiplied it by three. Families with less cash income than that were poor.

She never claimed it was a measure of a decent life. It was a measure of too little. The government adopted a version of her thresholds officially in 1969, and apart from annual adjustments for inflation, the core of the method has barely changed since.

That stability is both the official measure's strength and its trap. It lets us compare the same thing across sixty years. But the thing it measures is cash income before taxes. It does not count food stamps, because they are not cash. It does not count the Earned Income Tax Credit, because it arrives through the tax system. It does not count housing vouchers, school lunches or the value of Medicaid. Almost every major antipoverty tool the country has built since 1964 is invisible to it.

Think about what that means. If Congress doubles food aid tomorrow, and hunger falls, the official poverty rate will not move at all.

The ruler has other quirks. Its line is the same in Manhattan as in rural Mississippi, though rent is not. It assumes food is still a third of a family budget, when housing, child care and medical bills now take far larger bites and food a smaller one. And it ignores taxes entirely, so a family that pays more in payroll tax looks no poorer, while a family that receives a refundable credit looks no richer.

What the official numbers show, and the case built on them

The official poverty rate fell sharply in the decade after Johnson's speech, from about nineteen percent in 1964 to about eleven percent in 1973, the lowest it had been. Some of that came from a booming economy and some from new programs, especially rising Social Security benefits. Then the decline stopped. Since the early 1970s the official rate has bobbed up and down with the business cycle, roughly between ten and fifteen percent, without a clear long-term trend.

That flat line is the foundation of the critics' case, and the case is worth stating at its strongest.

The government has spent enormous sums on antipoverty programs since 1964, the argument goes, and the poverty rate is about where it was by the early 1970s. Something must be wrong. In his 1984 book Losing Ground, the social scientist Charles Murray argued that programs had changed incentives in harmful ways: that by making it easier to live without work or marriage, welfare had encouraged the very behaviors that kept people poor. Earlier, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the Johnson administration, had warned in a 1965 report about the breakdown of family structure among poor Black families, a report that set off a bitter fight over whether he was diagnosing a problem or blaming its victims. Later conservative writers pointed to falling work rates among men without college degrees as evidence of a culture of dependence.

The critics also make a point that progressives should take seriously on its own terms: poverty is not only a shortage of money. It is also isolation, insecurity and the loss of the dignity that comes from contributing. A program can raise a family above a line on paper and still leave it stuck.

A better ruler

In the 1990s a panel of the National Academy of Sciences recommended a new way of measuring poverty, one that would count the help families actually receive and subtract the costs they actually face, like taxes, work expenses and out-of-pocket medical bills, and that would adjust for the higher cost of living in some places. After years of development, the Census Bureau began publishing the Supplemental Poverty Measure in 2011, alongside the official one.

The new measure changes the picture of who is poor and why. Because it counts Social Security and subtracts medical costs, it shows how important Social Security is to older people. Because it counts refundable tax credits and SNAP, it shows how much those programs lift working families with children.

Researchers at Columbia University then did something clever. They took the new measure and ran it backward to the 1960s, holding the poverty line fixed in real terms so that the comparisons were fair. Their findings, published in the 2010s, were striking. With taxes and benefits counted, poverty had fallen substantially since the late 1960s. And when they removed government programs from the calculation, poverty in the later years was roughly as high as it had been at the start. The economy alone had not done the job. The programs had.

That is the core of the progressive answer to Reagan's line. Poverty did not win. The scoreboard was not counting the points.

The cleanest experiments: older Americans and the 2021 children

Two episodes show the mechanism more plainly than any long-run average.

The first is old age. In the 1960s Americans over sixty-five were far more likely to be poor than working-age adults; official poverty among the elderly was above a quarter. Over the following decades Congress raised Social Security benefits, tied them to inflation in the 1970s, and created Medicare and Supplemental Security Income. Poverty among older Americans fell to around one in ten by the official count, below the rate for children. Nobody seriously disputes that this happened because of public programs. Older people did not suddenly change their behavior; the country changed what it guaranteed them.

The second is the expanded Child Tax Credit of 2021. As part of the pandemic relief law that year, Congress made the credit larger, made it fully available to families with little or no income, and paid it monthly. By the Supplemental Poverty Measure, child poverty fell in 2021 to the lowest level ever recorded. The expansion expired at the end of that year after the Senate could not agree to extend it. In 2022 the child poverty rate more than doubled.

There is no more direct test of whether cash support reduces child poverty. A policy was switched on, and poverty fell. It was switched off, and poverty rose.

The critics have replied that the 2021 credit was paid without a work requirement and might in the long run have drawn some parents out of work. The evidence from the months it was in place did not show a measurable drop in employment, but its supporters should admit that one year is a short test, and that the long-run effects of a permanent version are not known.

The surprising convergence

Here is a strange turn in the argument. In 2018 the Council of Economic Advisers under President Trump issued a report on work requirements that declared the War on Poverty "largely over and a success." The report used a broad, consumption-based measure and concluded that very few Americans remained in poverty by that standard. It made the claim in order to argue that programs should now require work, not to defend the programs. But the statement itself was a remarkable concession from a Republican administration.

Some conservative economists have gone further, arguing that when all income and benefits are counted against a 1960s standard of living, material poverty has been nearly eliminated. Many progressives answer that a 1960s standard of deprivation is the wrong yardstick for a far richer country, where a family without a car, a phone or internet access is cut off from work and school.

Notice what has happened. The two sides have quietly swapped positions on the numbers. Some conservatives now say the war worked, as a step toward cutting programs; some progressives warn that it has not finished, as a reason to keep them. The real disagreement was never about whether the programs move numbers. It was about what the country owes people at the bottom and on what conditions.

Where progressives should be self-critical

A fair accounting includes the left's own mistakes. Some War on Poverty programs, especially early job-training efforts, were rushed, poorly evaluated and expanded before anyone knew whether they worked. The old welfare system, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, did penalize work and marriage in its rules, sometimes harshly, and defenders were slow to admit it. The 1996 welfare law that replaced it, signed by a Democratic president, was a response to those failures as much as to conservative pressure, even if its time limits and block grants later left many of the poorest families with little cash help.

And the most successful antipoverty tools since the 1970s, the Earned Income Tax Credit above all, owe much to bipartisan design. The credit, created in 1975 and expanded under presidents of both parties, rewards work and lifts millions of families above the poverty line each year. It is the sort of program that reflects both sides' instincts.

Another uncomfortable truth: a large part of what makes people poor in the 2020s is the cost of housing, child care and health care, and some of those costs are driven by policy choices in progressive cities and states, like zoning rules that make it hard to build homes. A cash benefit cannot keep up with rents that keep climbing because nothing new gets built. Our page on affordability and the cost of living follows that fight.

What the long view says

Here's my reading of the sixty-year record, offered as an argument. Where the country decided to guarantee something to a group of people, and did it with simple, broad, automatic programs, poverty in that group fell dramatically and stayed down. That is the story of older Americans. Where help was meager, conditional and complicated, progress was slower and easily reversed. That is much of the story of children and working-age adults without children. The tax credit experiment of 2021 showed what was possible in a single year, and its expiry showed how fragile that possibility is.

Recent long-term research adds a reason to care beyond the annual numbers. Economists Hilary Hoynes, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Douglas Almond studied children who grew up in counties where food stamps arrived early, as the program rolled out county by county in the 1960s and 1970s. As adults, those children had better health and, for women, better economic outcomes. Help in childhood paid off decades later.

The question for 2027 and beyond is not whether the War on Poverty worked. It is whether a new Congress will treat the evidence as settled enough to act on. The fights over SNAP, Medicaid and the child credit are followed on our safety net page, and the trends in wealth and wages that shape all of them on the inequality page.

What you can do

• Look at the numbers yourself. Our inequality page shows the wealth shares of the top 1% and the bottom 50%, real wages and the minimum wage over time.
• Weigh in on the rules. Many changes to SNAP, Medicaid and housing aid arrive as federal rules. The public comment page lists rules open for comment now, closing soonest first, grouped by issue, with how to write a comment.
• Tell your representatives what you think about the Child Tax Credit. Find your U.S. representative, senators and state legislators, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes, on the representatives page.
• Help people claim what they are owed. Millions of eligible families miss the Earned Income Tax Credit every year. Free tax-preparation sites, often run by local nonprofits, need volunteers each winter.