In the USA, “The most powerful anti-poverty programme had no enrolment forms, caseworkers or spending bills. It was a growing economy that helped millions of people earn their way to a better life,” Tyler Turman writes.
America has spent more than $20 trillion on fighting poverty since the introduction of President Johnson’s Great Society programme in 1964. Sixty years later, how are we doing?
That depends, as it turns out, on how you measure it.
Last month, Senator Kennedy (R-LA) introduced a bill that would require the Census Bureau to report a new poverty metric as an alternative to the Official Poverty Measure (“OPM”) by including both cash and non-cash welfare benefits in its calculations.
As Kennedy points out, this is a much-needed fix. The OPM’s methodological weaknesses are well documented. Most notably, it ignores the hundreds of billions of dollars the government spends each year to assist low-income families through tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit and in-kind transfers such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing subsidies. In short, the OPM paints an egregiously inaccurate picture of material poverty in America....<<<Read More>>>...
