WASHINGTON — Government programs such as food stamps and unemployment insurance have made significant progress in easing the plight of the poor in the half-century since the launch of the war on poverty, according to a major new study.
But the nation’s economy has made far less progress lifting people out of poverty without the need for government services.
The findings by a group of academic researchers at Columbia University paint a mixed picture of the United States nearly 50 years after Lyndon B. Johnson announced in his January 1964 State of the Union address that he would wage a war on poverty. They also contradict the official poverty rate, which suggests there has been no decline in the percentage of Americans experiencing poverty since then.
According to the new research, the safety net helped reduce the percentage of Americans in poverty from 26 percent in 1967 to 16 percent in 2012. The results were especially striking during the most recent economic downturn, when the poverty rate barely budged despite a massive increase in unemployment.
While the government has helped keep poverty at bay, the economy by itself has failed to improve the lives of the very poor over the past 50 years. Without taking into account the role of government policy, more Americans — 29 percent — would be in poverty today, compared with 27 percent in 1967.
For the White House, where President Barack Obama and top advisers have been briefed on the study, the research suggests that Congress must preserve the safety net as a critical tool to help the poor — at the same time that additional steps are taken to make sure that lower-income Americans earn high-enough wages to escape poverty.
“It gives you a deep appreciation for what public programs do today and how much more they do today than in the past,” said Jason Furman, chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “But it also gives you a sense of how little progress we’ve made on incomes and raising incomes in the past several decades and the importance of doing that going forward in order to continue to make progress on poverty.”
Scott Winship, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said the safety net plays an important and helpful role “during downturns, but then when the economy turns around, the expanded safety net has acted as a poverty trap, in essence lulling people and preventing them from pursuing work.”
