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In 2012, the federal government spent $668 billion to fund 126 separate anti‐ poverty programs. State and local governments kicked in another $284 billion, brin

In 2012, the federal government spent $668 billion to fund 126 separate anti‐ poverty programs. State and local governments kicked in another $284 billion, bringing total anti‐ poverty spending to nearly $1 trillion. That amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three. Over, the last 50 years, the government spent more than $16 trillion to fight poverty. Yet today, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty. That’s scarcely better than the 19 percent living in poverty at the time of Johnson’s speech. Nearly 22 percent of children live in poverty today. In 1964, it was 23 percent. https://www.cato.org/commentary/war-poverty-50-despite-trillions-spent-poverty-won https://www.cato.org/commentary/war-poverty-50-despite-trill...

BMc2020 4y ago
[flagged]
- geodel 4y ago
  OK. Are the numbers wrong?
  - sitkack 4y ago
    It doesn't cite any sources, and it also omits time scales. It is basically impossible to fact check, which is by design. It looks quantitative, but it is just propaganda.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Likely. Libertarian-right and other right-adjacent sources often cite incomplete or incorrect numbers. The burden is on them to prove accuracy and, of course, good faith effort.
  - 93po 4y ago
    Yes, absolutely
totetsu 4y ago
The recent Last Week Tonight episode about USA welfare TANF funds covered how a lot of the money budgeted for poverty relief might not even be used for it.
baremetal 4y ago
homeless industrial complex
- steveBK123 4y ago
  I do feel sometimes we've moved into an era where government thinks the objective is spending money, not solving problems. You see this with homeless services, high speed rail, etc. The ability to write big checks is seen as a win, and the jobs it produces gets pointed to. The fact that so many remain unhoused and high speed rail remains unbuilt doesn't ring the alarm bells that it should. In NYC for example we've gone through some recent periods of spending $300/night to house homeless, migrants, hurricane victims, longterm in hotels. I am talking months to years. It's unfathomable to me that the feds/state/city are spending $100k/year run rate to house people temporarily where the end state is they get kicked out or moved somewhere worse. All this while other homeless live in communal shelters that are filled with violence and crime. For that price we could be paying 3 years of rent on a decent apartment anywhere outside Manhattan. We could be putting a down payment on a house for them & then employ them in some sort of works program at $20/hour. These are things that could actually allow them to start building their life back up.
  - baremetal 4y ago
    >For that price we could be paying 3 years of rent on a decent apartment anywhere outside Manhattan. We could be putting a down payment on a house for them & then employ them in some sort of works program at $20/hour. These are things that could actually allow them to start building their life back up. I'm not sure there is any incentive to solve the problem. And there is no accountability for anyone in government it seems, on either side of the aisle, at any level of government.
macintux 4y ago
Speaking as someone who’s been trying to help someone stay alive for several years, there is massive inefficiency and bureaucracy standing in the way of people actually getting help, presumably because we’d rather see many people suffer than a few people cheat the system.
- Kye 4y ago
  An accessible overview of some of the hurdles people face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJDk-czsivk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJDk-czsivk
- ianai 4y ago
  Then there's my dad. I had to fight him to apply for benefits when he became disabled. While waiting at the benefits office I overheard one person behind the glass say to the person working with us "you going to get those crackers [a slur for white people] some cheddar [slang for money]?" He was ultimately denied and, of course, didn't appeal - he just identified deeply with the rejection.
  - hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
    [dead]
  - steele 4y ago
    Beyond the bureaucratic nightmare, stigmatization of government assistance is terrible. When one considers the shape of wealth inequality in the US, the cruelty expressed by the prejudiced employee is likely due to their perception of the novelty and some entitlement to abuse the power dynamic. Not excusing or downplaying the event, marginalized people (including but not limited to those with disabilities) regularly experience indignities built into many institutions. Despite being visibly White, the concept US whiteness since it's inception has always been amorphous, exclusive by design, and generally adjusts definition based on the complicity to harm the 'other'.
    - dpbriggs 4y ago
hanniabu 4y ago
> That amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three. You're indirectly assuming it all gets passed down. If I were to guess I'd say only 70% does.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tmn 4y ago
  It’s kind of pointless for me to comment. But that comment in no way assumes it all gets passed down. They are just putting the number in perspective.
esotericimpl 4y ago
Ah yes, the old cato institution nonsense that we spend too much on anti povery programs. Reason being is because the rich siphon it all off for themselves. See: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.... Note the CEO of Columbia/HCA who committed the largest medicare fraud in history is now US Senator Rick Scott of Florida who just so happened to have plead the fifth 75 times during his questioning.
- megaman821 4y ago
  Is this supposed to be evidence that the government is using their anti-poverty money wisely just because it is a "self-own" by the Cato Institute?
sitkack 4y ago
Catowashing a Fox News article that doesn't cite its sources. Please make your actual point and not hid behind a libertarian think tank. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/fy-2012-u-s-federal-budget-and-spending-3306318 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/fy-2012-u-s-federal-budget-a...
bradleyjg 4y ago
Poverty is a moving target. The level of absolute deprivation that was moderately common in the 60s is virtually unknown today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S._Clark%27s_and_Robert_F._Kennedy%27s_tour_of_the_Mississippi_Delta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S._Clark%27s_and_Robe...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- HarryHirsch 4y ago
  Whatever that means - only yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391868) the fact that US life expectancy on average is the same as the life expectancy of the citizens of Blackpool, England was discussed here. Blackpool is the most deprived city in the country, and that really says something - England isn't rich and has many post-industrial wastelands. Your statement is reminiscent of the prophet Ezekiel and his "Defiled Bread" (Ez 4:12-17), as that passage is called. Instead of human feces, Ezekiel got to use cowpats, but unlike you, the prophet still found it disgusting.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    Isn't there some speculation that this refers to what went into offerings at the Temple?
    - HarryHirsch 4y ago
      First time I hear of that theory, do you have any references into the literature? I have always interpreted the passage literally, as a reenactment of what the citizens of Jerusalem would have to endure while under siege by the forces of King Nebukadnezar.
      - selimthegrim 4y ago
        https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scatalogic-rites https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scatalogic-rites
GalenErso 4y ago
I'm not an expert on poverty, but I don't think it's as simple as concluding that anti poverty programs are a waste of money. For one, looking at the cumulative amount over time is a pointless metric. Second, we cannot deny that a lot of people were genuinely helped by these measures and managed to climb out of poverty and start giving back to society. Third, poor Americans still have a superior standard of living than most of the world. American poverty is its own league. "Even if you're stuck in the bottom 5% of the US income distribution your standard of living is about equal to that of the top 5% of Indians. Even if you're in the bottom 10% your standard of living is about the same as that of the bottom 10% in other rich countries (which, so we are told, care so much more and do so much more) like Sweden and Finland. And when we sweep everything together into some sort of quality of life measure the American poor are better off than the French or German poor." https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing-numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish... The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe/ https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric... "A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has discovered that after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and food stamps, the poorest 20 percent of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members. In other words, if the US “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest." Also, official data on US poverty may overestimate the problem. "US low-income households greatly underreport both their income and non-cash benefits" "There has been “a sharp rise” in the underreporting of government benefits received by low-income households in the United States. This “understatement of incomes” masks “the poverty-reducing effects of government programs” and leads to “an overstatement of poverty and inequality.”"
- ArnoVW 4y ago
  Comparing us revenues with eu ones is tricky. Yes, in raw dollars those poor are better off in the US. But, and I admit to not having read any of those links, my guess is that if you compensate for things like public transport, healthcare, education and other things, the US doesn't compare favorable when you're poor.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Put another way, the government has funded programs, programs that do well to perpetuate the programs, but too little to actually address the problem they were created to address. It's the Poverty Industrial Complex. That aside, with regards to the data / statistics you've sited, my understanding is, many experts believe the income levels set by the government to define the poverty line are artificially low. If the line was more realistic the poverty rate would be much higher. If this is even a slight bit true, then the government's "war on poverty" is another lost war.
wefarrell 4y ago
That article suggests high taxes are the reason for the increase in poverty from 1964 to 2012 yet taxes on the top tax bracket were cut in half over that period. It's clear as night and day that the reason why wealth inequality and poverty has been skyrocketing over the last 50 years is due to plummeting tax rates on the wealthy.
- rrdharan 4y ago
  That might be clear (perhaps even tautological) for wealth inequality; as others are discussing, it’s much less “clear” for poverty. You can certainly draw connections - wealth inequality leading to housing inequality leading to homelessness, but that’s a bit more complicated.
jnovek 4y ago
$20,610 is ~$1717/mo. I’ve been poor. I deal with chronic pain and, for a long while, it rendered me unable to work. First: $1717 is a very low amount of money to live on. I covered my costs in about $1200/mo while I received from room and board from family. It was extremely difficult to get my spending down to that, I had to default on loans and I expect it will take the better part of a decade to build credit again. Second: how does one obtain this $20,610? I was denied virtually every social program I tried to sign up for. I was only able to cover my costs thanks to the charity of others.
- ec109685 4y ago
  Likely most of that money goes to children and children’s family. It is misleading cato complains about general poverty but not look into where the money is going.
- gabereiser 4y ago
  In America, we don’t believe you are unable to work until you bring a lawsuit in front of a judge with evidence. Any social programs to give money to needy citizens is held up in bureaucratic red tape so they can get higher salaries (paid from funds allocated to the program) and waste more money. My son is autistic and is unable to work and it took four court appearances to get his social security benefits approved.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    I think there are many (probably most) people who are sympathetic to and willing to open the taxpayers’ coffers to support people who are genuinely and durably unable to work. I also think there are many (perhaps most) who are reluctant/unwilling to extend those same benefits to those are merely unwilling to work. So, we use bureaucrats and courts to confirm that a given situation is the former and not the latter.
  - jnovek 4y ago
    First: I’m sorry about your son’s experience. My impression is that something like a court appearance would be overwhelming for even an autistic individual with lower support needs. This is pretty much where I left off with social security. Luckily for me, not long after my rejection I found a treatment option that helped me get back to work. The timeline for my first appeal before a judge would’ve been a year or more.
aintgonnatakeit 4y ago
Per the Urban Institute, a less right-wing source, the poverty rate was 13.7% in 2021. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-projections https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-proj... So a minor investment in making people’s lives suck a little less has improved the rate by almost a third. I agree with the Cato Institute that we should invest more in the safety net.
RobotToaster 4y ago
So over 25 years the poor got the same amount wealthy bankers got in 2008? https://theweek.com/articles/479867/federal-reserves-breathtaking-77-trillion-bank-bailout https://theweek.com/articles/479867/federal-reserves-breatht...
- gruez 4y ago
  The dollar amounts aren't really comparable considering that anti-poverty spending is a handout whereas the bailout under TARP was in exchange for assets. >The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase toxic assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector [...] >Through the Treasury, the US Government actually booked $15.3 billion in profit, as it earned $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    In exchange for essentially worthless assets, no? Turning $426B in 2009 into $445B in 2014 comes out to an 0.76% ROI, so not exactly a good deal for anyone but the shareholders who didn't lose their shirts.
    - gruez 4y ago
      > In exchange for essentially worthless assets, no? Clearly not, considering they were able to sell it for a profit later. >Turning $426B in 2009 into $445B in 2014 comes out to an 0.76% ROI, so not exactly a good deal for anyone but the shareholders who didn't lose their shirts. I'm not claiming that it's a $0 bailout either. I'm only pointing out that $1 spent on anti‐poverty programs isn't comparable to $1 of TARP spending, so trying to directly compare the two like the parent poster was doing is misleading.
hestefisk 4y ago
By contrast, the US total budget request for military spend is $773B in 2023. That says something about the government’s priorities. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...
- dlp211 4y ago
  Defense spending is a third rail in politics.
- 818ikdhh 4y ago
  [flagged]
gabereiser 4y ago
The government authorized. Don’t say spend. Spend assumes it went where it was supposed to go. Authorizing and then absconding with funds is what really happened.
pessimizer 4y ago
The government is very good at filtering that money through processes and contractors that extract as much of it as possible. The main benefit of reducing the safety net to a basic income is the elimination of a massive amount of administrative overhead. As a random example of subsidy of the wealthy, every year, the government loses at least $70B to just the mortgage interest deduction, which is allowed for the first $750K of the value of up to two homes. That is $2,160 for every poor person in America, or $6,480 per poor family of three. edit: > Little of the deduction’s benefits go to households that have difficulty affording a home. Data from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey show that in 2011, 10.5 million homeowners faced what HUD calls “severe housing cost burdens,” meaning they paid more than half of their income for housing. Some 90 percent of those homeowners (and about 40 percent of all homeowners) had incomes below $50,000, yet JCT estimates for 2012 show that homeowners with incomes below that level received only 3 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction. At the same time, 77 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction went to homeowners with incomes above $100,000, almost none of whom face severe housing cost burdens. Some 35 percent of the benefits went to homeowners with incomes above $200,000; taxpayers in this income group who claimed the deduction received an average subsidy of about $5,000. https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is-ripe-for-reform https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is...
- ec109685 4y ago
  Only one home is deductible: “ The interest you pay on a mortgage on a home other than your main or second home may be deductible if the proceeds of the loan were used for business, investment, or other deductible purposes. Otherwise, it is considered personal interest and isn't deductible. Main home. You can have only one main home at any one time.”
  - eigen 4y ago
    > Only one home is deductible > "other than your main or second home" 2 homes are deductible.
    - 4y ago
rgbrenner 4y ago
Here's an analysis of that claim: https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-AntiPovertySpending-PolicyBrief-r6-1.pdf https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-Ant... Here's Tanner's paper where he lists the programs he includes: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/american-welfare-state-how-we-spend-nearly-$1-trillion-year-fighting-poverty-fail https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/american-w... I'll include a few here: Pell grants, SSI, and Medicaid. Including healthcare is the only way to reach that number, since it's the source of the vast majority of that total.
- 93po 4y ago
  Searching for similar stats are all just people bitching about the welfare state, it seems like a completely made up stat.
- gruez 4y ago
  > Here's an analysis of that claim: https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-AntiPovertySpending-PolicyBrief-r6-1.pdf https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-Ant... Why should healthcare spending be excluded from "anti-poverty" spending? The fact of the matter is that in the US, healthcare is privatized and people have to pay for it directly or indirectly (ie. by their employer). Therefore if the government is helping to pay for it, it's an anti-poverty program. It's not any different than food stamps counting as anti poverty spending.
  - taosx 4y ago
    Private healthcare in US seems to be criminally greedy. Classifying healthcare spending as "anti-poverty" spending may lead to an inaccurate assessment of the effectiveness of these programs. Including healthcare spending in the evaluation of anti-poverty initiatives, it could potentially mask the true impact of more targeted interventions, such as food stamps, housing assistance, and cash transfers. This could, in turn, hinder the development of more effective policies and programs aimed at reducing poverty.
    - 4y ago
93po 4y ago
> In 2012, the federal government spent $668 billion to fund 126 separate anti‐ poverty programs. This is simply not true or at best, misleading. The 2012 expenditure was $3.6 trillion, and 70% of that was defense, social security, medicare, and interest expense. You're saying more than half of the remaining spending for the entire government was anti-poverty? That makes zero sense. I assume what you meant was 'authorized', and it was an amount spent over a long period of time. $20k per person, great. What percent actually gets to them? Maybe half at best? Great, so $10k. Over how many years? 5? Ok, so $2k a year at best estimates. Realistically it was less and over a longer period. Cool, poverty is solved.
kodah 4y ago
It's also notably harder to get to move up the economic ladder, the perception of employment stability, and trust in employment are dead in the American mind. My sister is a teacher who has a background in law, but she loves teaching. Sadly, teaching is what keeps her in poverty. It boggles my mind that those who craft new economic units are of some of the least paid. Maybe even more perplexing is that wealth inequality is geographic of all things: https://itep.org/the-geographic-distribution-of-extreme-wealth-in-the-u-s/ https://itep.org/the-geographic-distribution-of-extreme-weal... This is in part due to the fact that we continue to tax income rather than wealth, and those of vying for scraps are among the first to champion such policies. That all ties back to the first thing I said, which is that economic fluidity is a long ladder now.
Bud 4y ago
[dead]
tlogan 4y ago
This presents a highly complex challenge. It is really not so simple. Consider San Francisco, for instance. As a city with predominantly liberal and Democratic values, it is surprising that public schools have been closed throughout the year. And we all know how that had significant negative impact on underserved and economically disadvantaged children. While some fortunate children have responsible and hardworking parents that just take kids with them leave them in the car while they clean houses (first hand experience), this is not the case for the majority: not supervision at all. Addressing this issue is far from straightforward. When attempted to raise concerns, I was may labeled as anti-science and trumpy. I also mentioned that private schools have managed to remain open, their effor was to close them rather than finding solutions to support public education. I really do not know and I think nobody who is not poor cares. Regardless what they say.
smugma 4y ago
“There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education.”
- prottog 4y ago
  What an absolute gem! An example of both that there is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program, and a government program whose name only marginally reflects what it actually does.
  - dlp211 4y ago
    The program wasn't temporary, the assistance is. TANF was never meant to raise people out of poverty, it is a program designed to help those that fall on hard times to recover quickly, hence the job training.
gedy 4y ago
> Yet today, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty. That’s scarcely better than the 19 percent living in poverty at the time of Johnson’s speech. The poor then had much more thing poverty than we see today. Probably biggest change is more drug abuse now though.
AlbertCory 4y ago
You can look at an anti-poverty program fund flow as: money in ==> gov't processing ==> agencies providing service ==> service (the "agencies providing service" would be NGOs or local organizations.) You can look at your figures as "money in." The relevant figure is "service." It's a lot harder to get that number.
landemva 4y ago
> bringing total anti‐ poverty spending to nearly $1 trillion How much of that is spent on administering the programs and paying those administrators? May be more effective to simply consolidate it into a negative income tax.

BMc2020 4y ago

[flagged]

geodel 4y ago
OK. Are the numbers wrong?
- sitkack 4y ago
  It doesn't cite any sources, and it also omits time scales. It is basically impossible to fact check, which is by design. It looks quantitative, but it is just propaganda.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  Likely. Libertarian-right and other right-adjacent sources often cite incomplete or incorrect numbers. The burden is on them to prove accuracy and, of course, good faith effort.
- 93po 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely

totetsu 4y ago

The recent Last Week Tonight episode about USA welfare TANF funds covered how a lot of the money budgeted for poverty relief might not even be used for it.

baremetal 4y ago

homeless industrial complex

steveBK123 4y ago
I do feel sometimes we've moved into an era where government thinks the objective is spending money, not solving problems. You see this with homeless services, high speed rail, etc. The ability to write big checks is seen as a win, and the jobs it produces gets pointed to. The fact that so many remain unhoused and high speed rail remains unbuilt doesn't ring the alarm bells that it should. In NYC for example we've gone through some recent periods of spending $300/night to house homeless, migrants, hurricane victims, longterm in hotels. I am talking months to years. It's unfathomable to me that the feds/state/city are spending $100k/year run rate to house people temporarily where the end state is they get kicked out or moved somewhere worse. All this while other homeless live in communal shelters that are filled with violence and crime. For that price we could be paying 3 years of rent on a decent apartment anywhere outside Manhattan. We could be putting a down payment on a house for them & then employ them in some sort of works program at $20/hour. These are things that could actually allow them to start building their life back up.
- baremetal 4y ago
  >For that price we could be paying 3 years of rent on a decent apartment anywhere outside Manhattan. We could be putting a down payment on a house for them & then employ them in some sort of works program at $20/hour. These are things that could actually allow them to start building their life back up. I'm not sure there is any incentive to solve the problem. And there is no accountability for anyone in government it seems, on either side of the aisle, at any level of government.

macintux 4y ago

Speaking as someone who’s been trying to help someone stay alive for several years, there is massive inefficiency and bureaucracy standing in the way of people actually getting help, presumably because we’d rather see many people suffer than a few people cheat the system.

Kye 4y ago
An accessible overview of some of the hurdles people face: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJDk-czsivk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJDk-czsivk
ianai 4y ago
Then there's my dad. I had to fight him to apply for benefits when he became disabled. While waiting at the benefits office I overheard one person behind the glass say to the person working with us "you going to get those crackers [a slur for white people] some cheddar [slang for money]?" He was ultimately denied and, of course, didn't appeal - he just identified deeply with the rejection.
- hsjqllzlfkf 4y ago
  [dead]
- steele 4y ago
  Beyond the bureaucratic nightmare, stigmatization of government assistance is terrible. When one considers the shape of wealth inequality in the US, the cruelty expressed by the prejudiced employee is likely due to their perception of the novelty and some entitlement to abuse the power dynamic. Not excusing or downplaying the event, marginalized people (including but not limited to those with disabilities) regularly experience indignities built into many institutions. Despite being visibly White, the concept US whiteness since it's inception has always been amorphous, exclusive by design, and generally adjusts definition based on the complicity to harm the 'other'.
  - dpbriggs 4y ago

hanniabu 4y ago

> That amounts to $20,610 for every poor person in America, or $61,830 per poor family of three. You're indirectly assuming it all gets passed down. If I were to guess I'd say only 70% does.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tmn 4y ago
It’s kind of pointless for me to comment. But that comment in no way assumes it all gets passed down. They are just putting the number in perspective.

esotericimpl 4y ago

Ah yes, the old cato institution nonsense that we spend too much on anti povery programs. Reason being is because the rich siphon it all off for themselves. See: https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.htm https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2003/June/03_civ_386.... Note the CEO of Columbia/HCA who committed the largest medicare fraud in history is now US Senator Rick Scott of Florida who just so happened to have plead the fifth 75 times during his questioning.

megaman821 4y ago
Is this supposed to be evidence that the government is using their anti-poverty money wisely just because it is a "self-own" by the Cato Institute?

sitkack 4y ago

Catowashing a Fox News article that doesn't cite its sources. Please make your actual point and not hid behind a libertarian think tank. https://www.thebalancemoney.com/fy-2012-u-s-federal-budget-and-spending-3306318 https://www.thebalancemoney.com/fy-2012-u-s-federal-budget-a...

bradleyjg 4y ago

Poverty is a moving target. The level of absolute deprivation that was moderately common in the 60s is virtually unknown today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S._Clark%27s_and_Robert_F._Kennedy%27s_tour_of_the_Mississippi_Delta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_S._Clark%27s_and_Robe...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
HarryHirsch 4y ago
Whatever that means - only yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35391868) the fact that US life expectancy on average is the same as the life expectancy of the citizens of Blackpool, England was discussed here. Blackpool is the most deprived city in the country, and that really says something - England isn't rich and has many post-industrial wastelands. Your statement is reminiscent of the prophet Ezekiel and his "Defiled Bread" (Ez 4:12-17), as that passage is called. Instead of human feces, Ezekiel got to use cowpats, but unlike you, the prophet still found it disgusting.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  Isn't there some speculation that this refers to what went into offerings at the Temple?
  - HarryHirsch 4y ago
    First time I hear of that theory, do you have any references into the literature? I have always interpreted the passage literally, as a reenactment of what the citizens of Jerusalem would have to endure while under siege by the forces of King Nebukadnezar.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scatalogic-rites https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/scatalogic-rites

GalenErso 4y ago

I'm not an expert on poverty, but I don't think it's as simple as concluding that anti poverty programs are a waste of money. For one, looking at the cumulative amount over time is a pointless metric. Second, we cannot deny that a lot of people were genuinely helped by these measures and managed to climb out of poverty and start giving back to society. Third, poor Americans still have a superior standard of living than most of the world. American poverty is its own league. "Even if you're stuck in the bottom 5% of the US income distribution your standard of living is about equal to that of the top 5% of Indians. Even if you're in the bottom 10% your standard of living is about the same as that of the bottom 10% in other rich countries (which, so we are told, care so much more and do so much more) like Sweden and Finland. And when we sweep everything together into some sort of quality of life measure the American poor are better off than the French or German poor." https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonishing-numbers-americas-poor-still-live-better-than-most-of-the-rest-of-humanity/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/01/astonish... The Poorest 20% of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most European Nations https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-richer-than-most-nations-of-europe/ https://fee.org/articles/the-poorest-20-of-americans-are-ric... "A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has discovered that after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and food stamps, the poorest 20 percent of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members. In other words, if the US “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest." Also, official data on US poverty may overestimate the problem. "US low-income households greatly underreport both their income and non-cash benefits" "There has been “a sharp rise” in the underreporting of government benefits received by low-income households in the United States. This “understatement of incomes” masks “the poverty-reducing effects of government programs” and leads to “an overstatement of poverty and inequality.”"

ArnoVW 4y ago
Comparing us revenues with eu ones is tricky. Yes, in raw dollars those poor are better off in the US. But, and I admit to not having read any of those links, my guess is that if you compensate for things like public transport, healthcare, education and other things, the US doesn't compare favorable when you're poor.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Put another way, the government has funded programs, programs that do well to perpetuate the programs, but too little to actually address the problem they were created to address. It's the Poverty Industrial Complex. That aside, with regards to the data / statistics you've sited, my understanding is, many experts believe the income levels set by the government to define the poverty line are artificially low. If the line was more realistic the poverty rate would be much higher. If this is even a slight bit true, then the government's "war on poverty" is another lost war.

wefarrell 4y ago

That article suggests high taxes are the reason for the increase in poverty from 1964 to 2012 yet taxes on the top tax bracket were cut in half over that period. It's clear as night and day that the reason why wealth inequality and poverty has been skyrocketing over the last 50 years is due to plummeting tax rates on the wealthy.

rrdharan 4y ago
That might be clear (perhaps even tautological) for wealth inequality; as others are discussing, it’s much less “clear” for poverty. You can certainly draw connections - wealth inequality leading to housing inequality leading to homelessness, but that’s a bit more complicated.

jnovek 4y ago

$20,610 is ~$1717/mo. I’ve been poor. I deal with chronic pain and, for a long while, it rendered me unable to work. First: $1717 is a very low amount of money to live on. I covered my costs in about $1200/mo while I received from room and board from family. It was extremely difficult to get my spending down to that, I had to default on loans and I expect it will take the better part of a decade to build credit again. Second: how does one obtain this $20,610? I was denied virtually every social program I tried to sign up for. I was only able to cover my costs thanks to the charity of others.

ec109685 4y ago
Likely most of that money goes to children and children’s family. It is misleading cato complains about general poverty but not look into where the money is going.
gabereiser 4y ago
In America, we don’t believe you are unable to work until you bring a lawsuit in front of a judge with evidence. Any social programs to give money to needy citizens is held up in bureaucratic red tape so they can get higher salaries (paid from funds allocated to the program) and waste more money. My son is autistic and is unable to work and it took four court appearances to get his social security benefits approved.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  I think there are many (probably most) people who are sympathetic to and willing to open the taxpayers’ coffers to support people who are genuinely and durably unable to work. I also think there are many (perhaps most) who are reluctant/unwilling to extend those same benefits to those are merely unwilling to work. So, we use bureaucrats and courts to confirm that a given situation is the former and not the latter.
- jnovek 4y ago
  First: I’m sorry about your son’s experience. My impression is that something like a court appearance would be overwhelming for even an autistic individual with lower support needs. This is pretty much where I left off with social security. Luckily for me, not long after my rejection I found a treatment option that helped me get back to work. The timeline for my first appeal before a judge would’ve been a year or more.

aintgonnatakeit 4y ago

Per the Urban Institute, a less right-wing source, the poverty rate was 13.7% in 2021. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-projections https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-proj... So a minor investment in making people’s lives suck a little less has improved the rate by almost a third. I agree with the Cato Institute that we should invest more in the safety net.

RobotToaster 4y ago

So over 25 years the poor got the same amount wealthy bankers got in 2008? https://theweek.com/articles/479867/federal-reserves-breathtaking-77-trillion-bank-bailout https://theweek.com/articles/479867/federal-reserves-breatht...

gruez 4y ago
The dollar amounts aren't really comparable considering that anti-poverty spending is a handout whereas the bailout under TARP was in exchange for assets. >The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is a program of the United States government to purchase toxic assets and equity from financial institutions to strengthen its financial sector [...] >Through the Treasury, the US Government actually booked $15.3 billion in profit, as it earned $441.7 billion on the $426.4 billion invested https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  In exchange for essentially worthless assets, no? Turning $426B in 2009 into $445B in 2014 comes out to an 0.76% ROI, so not exactly a good deal for anyone but the shareholders who didn't lose their shirts.
  - gruez 4y ago
    > In exchange for essentially worthless assets, no? Clearly not, considering they were able to sell it for a profit later. >Turning $426B in 2009 into $445B in 2014 comes out to an 0.76% ROI, so not exactly a good deal for anyone but the shareholders who didn't lose their shirts. I'm not claiming that it's a $0 bailout either. I'm only pointing out that $1 spent on anti‐poverty programs isn't comparable to $1 of TARP spending, so trying to directly compare the two like the parent poster was doing is misleading.

hestefisk 4y ago

By contrast, the US total budget request for military spend is $773B in 2023. That says something about the government’s priorities. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

dlp211 4y ago
Defense spending is a third rail in politics.
818ikdhh 4y ago
[flagged]

gabereiser 4y ago

The government authorized. Don’t say spend. Spend assumes it went where it was supposed to go. Authorizing and then absconding with funds is what really happened.

pessimizer 4y ago

The government is very good at filtering that money through processes and contractors that extract as much of it as possible. The main benefit of reducing the safety net to a basic income is the elimination of a massive amount of administrative overhead. As a random example of subsidy of the wealthy, every year, the government loses at least $70B to just the mortgage interest deduction, which is allowed for the first $750K of the value of up to two homes. That is $2,160 for every poor person in America, or $6,480 per poor family of three. edit: > Little of the deduction’s benefits go to households that have difficulty affording a home. Data from the Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey show that in 2011, 10.5 million homeowners faced what HUD calls “severe housing cost burdens,” meaning they paid more than half of their income for housing. Some 90 percent of those homeowners (and about 40 percent of all homeowners) had incomes below $50,000, yet JCT estimates for 2012 show that homeowners with incomes below that level received only 3 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction. At the same time, 77 percent of the benefits from the mortgage interest deduction went to homeowners with incomes above $100,000, almost none of whom face severe housing cost burdens. Some 35 percent of the benefits went to homeowners with incomes above $200,000; taxpayers in this income group who claimed the deduction received an average subsidy of about $5,000. https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is-ripe-for-reform https://www.cbpp.org/research/mortgage-interest-deduction-is...

ec109685 4y ago
Only one home is deductible: “ The interest you pay on a mortgage on a home other than your main or second home may be deductible if the proceeds of the loan were used for business, investment, or other deductible purposes. Otherwise, it is considered personal interest and isn't deductible. Main home. You can have only one main home at any one time.”
- eigen 4y ago
  > Only one home is deductible > "other than your main or second home" 2 homes are deductible.
  - 4y ago

rgbrenner 4y ago

Here's an analysis of that claim: https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-AntiPovertySpending-PolicyBrief-r6-1.pdf https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-Ant... Here's Tanner's paper where he lists the programs he includes: https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/american-welfare-state-how-we-spend-nearly-$1-trillion-year-fighting-poverty-fail https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/american-w... I'll include a few here: Pell grants, SSI, and Medicaid. Including healthcare is the only way to reach that number, since it's the source of the vast majority of that total.

93po 4y ago
Searching for similar stats are all just people bitching about the welfare state, it seems like a completely made up stat.
gruez 4y ago
> Here's an analysis of that claim: https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-AntiPovertySpending-PolicyBrief-r6-1.pdf https://poverty.umich.edu/files/2019/10/PovertySolutions-Ant... Why should healthcare spending be excluded from "anti-poverty" spending? The fact of the matter is that in the US, healthcare is privatized and people have to pay for it directly or indirectly (ie. by their employer). Therefore if the government is helping to pay for it, it's an anti-poverty program. It's not any different than food stamps counting as anti poverty spending.
- taosx 4y ago
  Private healthcare in US seems to be criminally greedy. Classifying healthcare spending as "anti-poverty" spending may lead to an inaccurate assessment of the effectiveness of these programs. Including healthcare spending in the evaluation of anti-poverty initiatives, it could potentially mask the true impact of more targeted interventions, such as food stamps, housing assistance, and cash transfers. This could, in turn, hinder the development of more effective policies and programs aimed at reducing poverty.
  - 4y ago

93po 4y ago

> In 2012, the federal government spent $668 billion to fund 126 separate anti‐ poverty programs. This is simply not true or at best, misleading. The 2012 expenditure was $3.6 trillion, and 70% of that was defense, social security, medicare, and interest expense. You're saying more than half of the remaining spending for the entire government was anti-poverty? That makes zero sense. I assume what you meant was 'authorized', and it was an amount spent over a long period of time. $20k per person, great. What percent actually gets to them? Maybe half at best? Great, so $10k. Over how many years? 5? Ok, so $2k a year at best estimates. Realistically it was less and over a longer period. Cool, poverty is solved.

kodah 4y ago

It's also notably harder to get to move up the economic ladder, the perception of employment stability, and trust in employment are dead in the American mind. My sister is a teacher who has a background in law, but she loves teaching. Sadly, teaching is what keeps her in poverty. It boggles my mind that those who craft new economic units are of some of the least paid. Maybe even more perplexing is that wealth inequality is geographic of all things: https://itep.org/the-geographic-distribution-of-extreme-wealth-in-the-u-s/ https://itep.org/the-geographic-distribution-of-extreme-weal... This is in part due to the fact that we continue to tax income rather than wealth, and those of vying for scraps are among the first to champion such policies. That all ties back to the first thing I said, which is that economic fluidity is a long ladder now.

Bud 4y ago

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tlogan 4y ago

This presents a highly complex challenge. It is really not so simple. Consider San Francisco, for instance. As a city with predominantly liberal and Democratic values, it is surprising that public schools have been closed throughout the year. And we all know how that had significant negative impact on underserved and economically disadvantaged children. While some fortunate children have responsible and hardworking parents that just take kids with them leave them in the car while they clean houses (first hand experience), this is not the case for the majority: not supervision at all. Addressing this issue is far from straightforward. When attempted to raise concerns, I was may labeled as anti-science and trumpy. I also mentioned that private schools have managed to remain open, their effor was to close them rather than finding solutions to support public education. I really do not know and I think nobody who is not poor cares. Regardless what they say.

smugma 4y ago

“There is a Clinton-era welfare programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. In 2020, poor families received just 22 cents in every dollar it disbursed. The rest was used by states to pay for things such as job training and even abstinence-only sex education.”

prottog 4y ago
What an absolute gem! An example of both that there is nothing as permanent as a temporary government program, and a government program whose name only marginally reflects what it actually does.
- dlp211 4y ago
  The program wasn't temporary, the assistance is. TANF was never meant to raise people out of poverty, it is a program designed to help those that fall on hard times to recover quickly, hence the job training.

gedy 4y ago

> Yet today, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty. That’s scarcely better than the 19 percent living in poverty at the time of Johnson’s speech. The poor then had much more thing poverty than we see today. Probably biggest change is more drug abuse now though.

AlbertCory 4y ago

You can look at an anti-poverty program fund flow as: money in ==> gov't processing ==> agencies providing service ==> service (the "agencies providing service" would be NGOs or local organizations.) You can look at your figures as "money in." The relevant figure is "service." It's a lot harder to get that number.

landemva 4y ago

> bringing total anti‐ poverty spending to nearly $1 trillion How much of that is spent on administering the programs and paying those administrators? May be more effective to simply consolidate it into a negative income tax.