Chairman McDermott, members of the subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify on this important topic.
"We declared war on poverty, and poverty won," famously quipped Ronald Reagan. That was certainly the impression most Americans got from the media images of the flood-stranded poor in New Orleans. And that is surely the message from the continuing high rate of poverty reported by the federal government's official poverty measure. But poverty, or at least material deprivation, has declined sharply over the past forty years and that, in turn, should give us confidence that more progress is possible.
Each year, the Census Bureau reports on the nation's poverty rate, based on the number of people with incomes below the official poverty line, adjusted annually for inflation. In 2005, the poverty line, which varies by family size, was $15,577 for a family of three, and $19,971 for a family of four.[1] By this measure, in 2005, about 12.6 percent of the population, or about 37 million people, were reported as poor,[2] including 17.6 percent of children and 10.1 percent of the elderly.[3] That's essentially the same as the 1968 rate of 12.8 percent[4]--which is a big reason why people think so little progress has been made against poverty.[5] (Little noted, however, is that the poverty rates for the elderly declined considerably, from 25 percent in 1968.)[6] . . .
The full text of this testimony is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.
Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies at AEI.
