DarthSkywalker0
The Insane Jedi Master
Originally posted by lazybones
[B]A ten point drop in poverty is dreary? I'd say that's quite a good result, especially when you break it down further. Poverty among the elderly, for instance, plummeted from around 48% to 16%. Child poverty also experienced a notable decline after the 1996 welfare reforms, although progress in that area is more patchy.
When I called the 10% drop dreary, I was referring to the fact that most of the reductions were happening before the War On Poverty was implemented. Other then the 1996 cuts there has been no real drop on poverty there can be no substantial drop in poverty which can be attributed to the War on Poverty. You posted two graphics which illustrate a reduction in Elderly Poverty and Child Poverty.The first graphic demonstrated the fact that odious Social Security benefits and Medicare assistance do drop poverty. I do not think it is fair to say that these are the only mechanisms by which poverty can decrease. We can utilize the Personal Savings Rate to show how Social Security effected human action. To quote Forbes,
The Personal Savings Rate (which is calculated as a percent of disposable income) has fallen by more than half since 1967 (from 12.2% to 5.6%).
The problem here, of course, is that lack of saving precipitates a slower economy. Saving creates more money to invest in capital goods. The Keynesian will usually rebut by claiming that spending makes up the most significant percentage of GDP. The great economist Mark Skousen calculated Gross Domestic Expenditures. He did this as GDP estimates leave out the intermediary steps, goods-in-process at the commodity, manufacturing, and wholesale stages that all go into bringing a product to market.
To quote his findings,
I calculated total spending (sales or receipts) in the economy at all stages to be more than double GDP (using gross business receipts compiled annually by the IRS). By this measure—which I have dubbed gross domestic expenditures, or GDE—consumption represents only about 30 percent of the economy, while business investment (including intermediate output) represents over 50 percent.
This is the principle of Say's Law a law which is repeatedly misunderstood by Keynesians. Wealth is created from production, not consumption. Thus the decrease and savings drastically affect domestical economic flourishing. This, of course, does not mention the effect of the Social Security Tax. The economist Andrew Biggs ran the numbers on poverty without the Social Security Tax and actual social security,
If Social Security taxes were also eliminated – which would make sense, since there would be no Social Security benefits to pay for – then working-age households’ wage earnings would rise by about 6 percent. (The reason: employers generally offset the cost of their payroll tax obligations though lower wages to their employees.) Very roughly, this would reduce the number of Americans aged 18-64 in poverty by about 7 million. If you’re going to run a highly unrealistic numerical exercise, you might as well run it all the way through.
This is imperative as it demonstrates why the working-age American poverty rate has been relatively stagnant ever since the War On Poverty began.
Biggs continued the analysis and applied it to the entire populous,
If we wanted to make things slightly more realistic, we could factor in the effect of lower payroll taxes on households’ labor supply and earnings. Eliminating the 12.4 percent Social Security tax would be like doubling the Earned Income Tax Credit and applying it to every low-income household, not merely the single women with children who are the EITC’s principal beneficiaries. As other CBPP publications have correctly pointed out, “The EITC significantly increases recipients’ work effort, according to substantial research over the past two decades.” Research cited by the CBPP finds that the higher work participation encouraged by the EITC doubles the program’s static effects in reducing poverty. So the 7[which is apparently 10] million figure cited above might plausibly rise to 14[or 20] million.
He also discusses the repercussions of the change in policy,
Likewise, with higher take-home pay providing greater ability to save and the elimination of Social Security benefits providing (much!) greater incentive to save, we could expect that at least some of today’s poor would choose to save more for retirement. The poor by and large save little, but they don’t save anything. So again, this would reduce the number of retirees in poverty relative to the CBPP’s worst-case scenario.
These results are astounding. The elimination of the Social Security Tax creates a far greater boost in income the EITC. While I have more to say on this topic, I will save it for future responses. The second graphic expounds upon the reduction in child poverty. This graph merely proves my point. It indicates that the policies put in place by the government have failed in creating positive behavior. The only reason why so many citizens are not impoverished is due to government handouts. Self-sufficiency is a dying art. Here is a great podcast which discusses the culture which welfare inculcates: https://tomwoods.com/ep-644-how-not-to-help-the-worlds-poor/ The second thing which your graph indicates is the success in the welfare reforms of 1996 in reducing child poverty. This assists my argument.
All of the way until 1996, child poverty was higher then it was when these programs were first established. If you were correct, then poverty should have increased after the reforms. The reforms replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. We can see the decrease in welfare receipts to single mothers. The peak year of welfare receipts was 1976. During that year, 71% of single mothers received AFDC benefits.
Then in 1995, welfare receipt began what would become an unprecedented decline. In four years it fell 24 percentage points to a new historic low (going back at least to 1962). TANF receipt continued to fall after that, reaching 17 to 18% in 2008.** The 1996 legislation did indeed end welfare as we knew it.
Here is a graph which corroborates these claims.
To quote the Harvard Economist Scott Winship,
True, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit in 1993 and the fall in unemployment might have accounted for the decline in welfare receipt to 50% in 1996. But that would have put it at a level not seen since 1969. The subsequent drop has no precedent, and if you cover with your hand the post-1996 years in Figure 1 of this study of mine, you will see that no one would never have predicted what happened.
But I would still it is disingenuous to place the majority of said boost on EITC expansion. Most states had switched a federal waiver program which was created to create more work and greater independence. Another indicator that '96 welfare reforms are responsible for the decrease in Welfare Receipts is the unmarried mother unemployment rate.
So, while it would be foolish to say that the expansion in Earned Income Tax Credit does not affect child poverty, I think the success falls more resoundingly on the 1996 reforms. You are probably wondering, why I spent so much time analyzing these cuts. The main reason is that cutting welfare is the best way to eliminate child poverty and single motherhood. Lazybones would like you to believe the 1996 cuts weren't cuts at all. Let's detail exactly what the bill did.
Congress is cutting food stamps by $24 billion over six years, with $3 billion more cut by banning food stamps to legal immigrants. No food stamps for unemployed workers not raising children - no hardship exemptions.Congress banned the states from using Federal dollars to give the poor non-cash vouchers to families that exceed the five-year limit on cash assistance.It replaced the Depression-born program of Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC) with fixed annual grants to states for Temporary Assistance
to Needy Families (TANF) for six years, ending on September 30, 2002. It
imposed a citizenship requirement for many benefits. It reduced spending on
food stamps, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), child nutrition, and the
Social Services Block Grant (SSBG).
At the time of passage, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that
the law would cut mandatory federal spending by a net total of $54.1 billion
over 6 years.