Poverty Can Be Greatly Reduced
Poverty is not natural. It is certainly not inevitable. We reduced poverty dramatically in the United States in the recent past. We can do it again.
From the 1950s through the mid-1970s, the United States cut poverty by 50%.
Here's how: a combination of government policies and market forces increased workers’ earnings year after year, while seniors’ pension benefits from Social Security also climbed.
Perhaps the biggest reason why poverty declined from the 1950s through the mid–1970s was the steady increase in earnings (adjusted for inflation). The following table shows vividly how the two trends—poverty falling, earnings rising—tracked each other.
Experts continue to debate how much President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty” during the late 1960s contributed to poverty’s rapid decline prior to 1973. But this much is clear: while America fought its War on Poverty, poverty was on the run.
The policies that cut poverty from nearly 25% to almost 10% of the U.S. population in the decades preceding 1973 may not be the ones we need in the 21st century. The city of Milwaukee and the state of Wisconsin have greatly changed; the nation’s economy is vastly different; and we face an intensely competitive global marketplace. The dramatically altered economic environment requires different anti-poverty measures.
