THE WAR ON POVERTY HAS CREATED MORE POVERTY

Fifty years ago this month, President Lyndon Baines Johnson declared war on poverty.  We’ve spent nearly three times as much to fight it as on all of America’s real wars combined.

We haven’t gotten much bang for all those bucks. At 15.2 percent in 2012, the poverty rate was the highest since 1965 (17.3 percent).

The federal government spends on "means tested" programs more than $19,000 for each man, woman and child classified as "poor." 

If a poor single mother with two children actually got all the money purportedly spent on her behalf, she’d have at least $6,000 more than the median income.

She gets nowhere near that much.  This fact, coupled with their sheer number (83, according to the Congressional Research Service) suggest poverty programs benefit chiefly the bureaucrats who run them.  Surprised?  I think not.

When other programs which are designated as anti-poverty programs but are not means tested are added in, the number rises to 126, says Michael Tanner of the CATO Institute.

"With astonishing consistency, middle class professionals, when asked to devise ways to improve the condition of lower class groups would come up with schemes of which the first effect would be to improve the condition of the middle class professionals," wrote War on Poverty architect Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Could this be why so many federal programs encourage behaviors which keep people poor? 

"Our research shows that if you want to avoid poverty and join the middle class… you need to complete high school, work full time and marry before you have children," said Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the venerable liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution.  "If you do all three, your chances of being poor fall from 12 percent to 2 percent."

In 2012, 7.5 percent of families headed by two married parents lived in poverty. In households headed by a single mother, the poverty rate was 33.9 percent.

Just 7 percent of births in 1964 were out of wedlock.  In 2012, 28.6 percent of white, 52.5 percent of Hispanic, 72.3 percent of black children were born out of wedlock.

William Galston, an adviser to President Clinton, said disincentives to marriage in federal welfare programs caused 15 to 20 percent of family disintegration. More like 50 percent, said Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute.

"If we had the same fraction of single-parent families today as we had in 1970, the child poverty rate would probably be about 30 percent lower," said Mr. Haskins and Ms. Sawhill.

"The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life," said economist Thomas Sowell, who is black.

The poverty rate among blacks is 16.1 percent, up from 12 percent in 2008.  The unemployment rate for December was 6.4 percent for whites, 13.7 percent for blacks.  Median income has fallen three times as much in black households as in white households.

If the war on poverty is ever to be won, there must be major reforms — beginning with a better definition of what constitutes "poverty." 

There wasn’t one in 1964, so LBJ asked Mollie Orshansky of the Social Security Administration to devise a formula for calculating where to draw the poverty line. To set the federal poverty threshhold for a family of four, she took the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s estimate of the cost for a basic diet, and tripled it. The Census Bureau still calculates the poverty rate in essentially the same way.

The Orshansky formula doesn’t take into consideration the predominant form of federal assistance, noncash aid, such as Medicaid, food stamps and subsidized housing.  Nor does it take into account technological improvements which raise living standards.

Income should be adjusted by adding welfare benefits, subtracting taxes, health care spending, and work related expenses, said the National Academy of Sciences in 1995.

If the income of those classified as poor had been calculated properly, the poverty rate in 2004 would have been 8.1 percent instead of 12.7 percent, said Douglas Besherov of AEI.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, wants to replace essentially all 83 overlapping federal programs with a Flex Fund administered by the states.  If less were spent on duplicative bureaucracies, there’d be more to help the poor. Freed from micromanagement from Washington, states could spend it in more innovative ways.

Policies that have encouraged destructive behaviors must be reversed.

"Aid should not be given unconditionally," said Mr. Haskins and Ms. Sawhill.  "New research in economics and psychology has shown that individuals frequently behave in ways that undermine their long-term welfare and can benefit from a government nudge in the right direction."

To make work more attractive than the dole, Sen. Rubio would replace the Earned Income Tax Credit with a broader wage subsidy paid to workers through their paychecks.

Rubio’s plan "doesn’t confuse poverty fighting with budget cutting, though spending will drop if poverty falls," said economist James Pethokoukis.  "It tries to raise the ceiling for work rewards rather than lower the floor for income support. It takes advantage of states as laboratories of policy innovation while still maintaining a federal funding role."

One can quibble about details, but how they respond to the substance of Sen. Rubio’s reforms will separate those who care about the poor from those who just pretend to.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.