Work

“Did the “war” bring victory? On the one hand, today’s poor live vastly more prosperous lives by any material measure than the poor of the 1960s. Talk of citizens living over or under a “poverty line” is meaningless, Mr. Eberstadt shows, the de facto line having risen so dramatically upward—a fact that has little to do with government transfer payments and almost everything to do with rapid economic growth in the postwar period. On the other hand, antipoverty programs have left more or less the same proportion of the citizenry dependent on welfare and disinclined to join the workforce. So private-sector growth has made today’s “poor” rich by comparison with their forerunners two generations ago, even as government antipoverty measures have ensured that today’s poor, however well off by comparison, remain dependent and resistant to upward mobility. The War on Poverty hasn’t only failed; it has weakened virtues its originators took for granted.” – Barton Swaim