Legacies of the War on Poverty

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241289754
• Author: Sung Ah Bahk,Robert Moffitt,Timothy M. Smeeding
• Date: 01 January 2024
• Subject Matter: Poverty and Antipoverty Programs

38 ANNALS, AAPSS, 711, January 2024

DOI: 10.1177/00027162241289754

Legacies of the

War on Poverty

By

SUNG AH BAHK,

ROBERT MOFFITT,

and

TIMOTHY M. SMEEDING

1289754ANN THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMYLEGACIES OF THE WAR ON POVERTY

research-article2024

We extend the work of Haveman et al., a comprehen-

sive analysis of the U.S. social welfare system’s evolu-

tion from the start of the War on Poverty through 2012.

Their work chronicled changes in the welfare system

and in poverty measurement and analyzed poverty lev-

els and trends. We extend the analysis through 2022,

finding that the poverty rate declined from 2012 to

2019 mostly because of improvements in the economy

and not from changes in the transfer system; in the

2019 to 2022 pandemic period, though, the opposite

occurred, as changes in poverty rates were mostly

driven by changes in government relief programs. The

decline in poverty from 2012 to 2022 followed a run-up

in poverty from 2000 to 2012, leaving the nation with

no improvement in poverty rates from the economy

since 2000. We conclude that significant future reduc-

tions in poverty will likely require further improve-

ments in the safety net.

Keywords: poverty; transfer programs; pandemic

recession; Supplemental Poverty Measure;

market income

The War on Poverty announced by President

Lyndon Johnson in 1964 was an epochal

event in the history of antipoverty policy in the

Correspondence: moffitt@jhu.edu

Sung Ah (Sue) Bahk is an assistant professor of eco-

nomics at American University. Her research focuses on

labor market transitions, labor supply decisions, ine-

qualities in the labor market, and poverty measure-

ment.

Robert Moffitt is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of

Economics at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint

appointment in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of

Public Health. His research focuses on the economics of

the labor market, the family, welfare systems for the

poor, and public policy in these areas.

Timothy M. (Tim) Smeeding is Lee Rainwater Distin-

guished Professor of Public Affairs and Economics, and

Hilldale Professor Emeritus, in the La Follette School of

Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

His research is on poverty, inequality, and socioeco-

nomic mobility in national and cross-national contexts.

LEGACIES OF THE WAR ON POVERTY 39

United States. It created new antipoverty programs, expanded existing ones, and

set the groundwork for other major programs introduced in the early 1970s.

Many volumes have been published on the importance of the War on Poverty,

chronicling the political events that led to its creation and the political forces that

shaped the evolution of the social welfare system in the succeeding years (for

example, Bailey and Danziger 2013; Katz 1989; Zarefsky 1986).

Haveman et al. (2015) conducted one of the most comprehensive accounts of

how the U.S. welfare system evolved over the 50 years after the beginning of the

War on Poverty and how the programs in that system have affected poverty in

different eras. The authors first discussed the programs created after the War on

Poverty (including job training programs, legal services, Head Start, Medicaid,

and Medicare) and how, in the decades that followed, in-kind transfer programs,

such as Food Stamps and subsidized housing, grew more than cash programs.

They also documented the trend in support away from those with no income and

toward those who are employed. Their work, which discussed the development

of the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) for more accurately measuring

poverty than the Official Poverty Measure (OPM), found that the SPM showed

a net downward trend in the poverty rate from 1967 to 2012, although punctu-

ated by periods of increases in poverty. They showed that transfer programs and

tax credits reduced the poverty rate by 14 percentage points in 2012 (their final

year of analysis) and that the antipoverty effectiveness of those programs grew

over time. Importantly, they found that without the effects of tax and transfer

programs, the poverty rate showed no long-term trend: in other words, the secu-

lar downward trend in poverty was entirely the result of growth in the effective-

ness of antipoverty programs. But, at the same time, they found that, although

antipoverty programs generated particularly large reductions in the poverty rates

of older adults, individuals with disabilities, and Black families, poverty rates

among children increased (although these subgroup trends used the OPM, not

the SPM). They further found that progress in reducing deep poverty (families

living with income less than half the poverty line) had been minimal.

Our article extends their analysis through 2022 and chronicles the same devel-

opments from their ending year, 2012, over the subsequent 10 years. We analyze

how the social welfare system has evolved over that period and how the antipov-

erty impact of the programs in the system has changed, and we study the relative

contributions of the economy and the tax and transfer system to levels and trends

in poverty over the period. We analyze poverty trends for different subgroups,

including groups defined by age and family structure, education, race and ethnic-

ity, family size, and also examine trends in near poverty and deep poverty. We

NOTE: The authors would like to thank the participants of the Authors’ Conference in

Memory and Honor of Rebecca M. Blank at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, February

22–23, 2024, as well as John Creamer, David Johnson, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach,

Christopher Wimer, and James Ziliak for their helpful comments. The authors would also like

to thank John Creamer, Liana Fox, and David Johnson for assistance with the treatment of

breaks in the CPS poverty series. This article is dedicated to the memory of Rebecca M. Blank

and to the memory of the other two coauthors of the paper that this work extends, Robert

Haveman and Geoffrey Wallace.