Paul Ryan's Poverty Ideas Are Factually Wrong

ABRIDGED ARTICLE:  

Published on Friday, October 26, 2012 by The Nation

Paul Ryan Takes a Side in the War on Poverty: He's Against What Works

by John Nichols

Please see original at http://www.thenation.com/blog/170844/paul-ryan-takes-side-war-poverty-hes-against-what-works

Paul Ryan has a right to be wrong. He can believe that anti-poverty programs don’t work. But he does not have a right to foster the fantasy that his opinion is grounded in reality. [snip]

Ryan says that: “In this war on poverty, poverty is winning.” [snip] Ryan wants us to believe that the “war on poverty”is what’s causing poverty.

The Republican candidate says:

With a few exceptions, government’s approach has been to spend lots of money on centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs.

The mindset behind this approach is that a nation should measure compassion by the size of the federal government and how much it spends.

The problem is, starting in the 1960s, this top-down approach created and perpetuated a debilitating culture of dependency, wrecking families and communities.

So, in Ryan’s opinion, the “war on poverty” that President Lyndon Johnson declared in 1964 as part of a broader Great Society initiative made matters worse.

But that’s just wrong.

How do we know? Census data.

In 1959, 22.1 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.

In 1969, 13.7 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line.

The poverty level has varied since 1969. It has gone as high as 15 percent. But it has never again gotten anywhere near where it was in 1959.

What changed during the 1960s to dramatically decrease poverty?

“Centralized, bureaucratic, top-down anti-poverty programs” like Medicare (1965), Medicare (1965), the initiatives launched with the Food Stamp Act of 1964 and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 programs such as the Jobs Corps (1964) and Head Start (1965).

Those programs worked.

Brilliantly.

They’re still working.

Brilliantly.

[snip] Paul Ryan has taken a side in the war on poverty. He’s against what works.