We fought a war on lies, and lies won

Trashing the War on Poverty, Reagan destroyed the social compact that built the postwar American dream

By Joan Walsh
Salon.com

Ronald Reagan gave America so many pretty sayings, but when it comes to social equality, he'll go down in history for his lyrical lie, "The federal government declared a war on poverty, and poverty won." (He said it many times, many ways; that exact quote is from his 1988 State of the Union address.)

Of course, Reagan was wrong. Poverty declined sharply after the war on poverty commenced. According to the Institute for Research on Poverty, in 1959 the individual poverty rate was 22 percent. It hovered there until about 1964, when it began to drop; by 1973, it was 11 percent. Then it began to climb again, to 15 percent in 1983. Thanks to the economic boom at the end of Reagan's tenure, it dropped by about a point, and then jumped back to 15 percent by the time President Clinton took office. Under Clinton, it fell to 11 percent. Under George W. Bush, it climbed back over 14 percent, and it has continued to inch upward under Barack Obama.

I pushed myself to see whether maybe poverty rates declined faster before the war on poverty than they did afterward. It's tough to do; the Census Bureau didn't keep detailed data on poverty until 1959, which is why you'll see that year used so often. But there were agencies and researchers studying poverty. In a majestic Dwight MacDonald New Yorker review of Michael Harrington's "The Other America," I found estimates for the years from the Depression through 1960. They're fascinating. It's clear the New Deal did little to reduce poverty; the war plus the postwar reconstruction was the real anti-poverty program: The number of Americans making under $4,000 (the poverty estimate in Harrington's book) dropped by a quarter from 1947 to 1953, and by another sixth by 1960. But as MacDonald (and Harrington) noted, despite America's affluence, the decline in poverty rates had slowed. A recession during the Kennedy administration pushed the rate up a little bit, but then, under Johnson, it began to plummet.

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