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Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Burkhauser, Richard V.; Corinth, Kevin; Elwell, James; Larrimore, Jeff Working Paper Evaluating the Success of President Johnson's War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure IZA Discussion Papers, No. 12855 Provided in Cooperation with: IZA – Institute of Labor Economics Suggested Citation: Burkhauser, Richard V.; Corinth, Kevin; Elwell, James; Larrimore, Jeff (2019) : Evaluating the Success of President Johnson's War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure, IZA Discussion Papers, No. 12855, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), Bonn This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/215251 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. www.econstor.eu DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES IZA DP No. 12855 Evaluating the Success of President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure Richard V. Burkhauser Kevin Corinth James Elwell Jeff Larrimore DECEMBER 2019 DISCUSSION PAPER SERIES IZA DP No. 12855 Evaluating the Success of President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure Richard V. Burkhauser James Elwell Cornell University, NBER, AEI and IZA Joint Committee on Taxation Kevin Corinth Jeff Larrimore Council of Economic Advisers Federal Reserve Board DECEMBER 2019 Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world’s largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. ISSN: 2365-9793 IZA – Institute of Labor Economics Schaumburg-Lippe-Straße 5–9 Phone: +49-228-3894-0 53113 Bonn, Germany Email: [email protected] www.iza.org IZA DP No. 12855 DECEMBER 2019 ABSTRACT Evaluating the Success of President Johnson’s War on Poverty: Revisiting the Historical Record Using a Full-Income Poverty Measure* We evaluate progress in President’s Johnson’s War on Poverty. We do so relative to the scientifically arbitrary but policy relevant 20 percent baseline poverty rate he established for 1963. No existing poverty measure fully captures poverty reductions based on the standard that President Johnson set. To fill this gap, we develop a Full-income Poverty Measure with thresholds set to match the 1963 Official Poverty Rate. We include cash income, taxes, and major in-kind transfers and update poverty thresholds for inflation annually. While the Official Poverty Rate fell from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 12.3 percent in 2017, our Full- income Poverty Rate based on President Johnson’s standards fell from 19.5 percent to 2.3 percent over that period. Today, almost all Americans have income above the inflation- adjusted thresholds established in the 1960s. JEL Classification: D31, H24, I32, J3 Keywords: poverty in the united states, income measurement, in-kind transfers, tax credits Corresponding author: James Elwell Joint Committee on Taxation 502 Ford House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 USA E-mail: [email protected] * The views in this paper reflect those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Joint Committee on Taxation, their staff, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. Elwell’s work on this research was funded by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation while he was a graduate student at Cornell University. Part of this work was undertaken while Burkhauser was employed by the Council of Economic Advisers and Larrimore was on detail at the Council of Economic Advisers. 1. Introduction In his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson said: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America” (Johnson 1965, p. 114). In a speech two months later, he outlined his terms of engagement: “… I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory. There are millions of Americans—one fifth of our people—who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the gates of opportunity have been closed” (Johnson 1965, p. 376). Fifty-five years have passed since President Johnson declared the War on Poverty. Even so, policymakers and academics still debate its outcome. For example, President Reagan said in his 1988 State of the Union address that “the Federal Government declared war on poverty, and poverty won” (Reagan 1990, p. 87). Similarly, in 2014, Congressman Paul Ryan wrote that “the poverty rate is the highest in a generation” (Ryan 2014). Others have pointed to substantial progress, while making clear that President Johnson’s War on Poverty is not over. For example, the Council of Economic Advisers (2014) and Wimer et al. (2016) used an alternative poverty measure and found that poverty had declined by about 40 percent since 1967. The Council of Economic Advisers in 2018 suggest even greater progress and stated, “Based on historical standards of material wellbeing and the terms of engagement, our War on Poverty is largely over and a success” (CEA 2018, p. 29). No existing poverty measure is capable of accurately evaluating the success of President Johnson’s War on Poverty as he defined it. Specifically, current measures either do not evaluate progress relative to President Johnson’s baseline poverty rate of about 20 percent in 1963 or ignore important anti-poverty programs. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Official Poverty Measure (OPM) shows a reduction in poverty from 19.5 percent in 1963 to 12.3 percent in 2017. However, the entire decline occurred between 1963 and 1973. Over that period, the Official 2 Poverty Rate fell from 19.5 to 11.1 percent. Since then, it has never fallen below the 1973 rate. In 2017 it was 12.3 percent, indicating little progress since the early 1970s. This Official Poverty Rate was the evidence Reagan (1990) and Ryan (2014) cited for the lack of progress in the War on Poverty. Academic researchers, however, view the Official Poverty Rate as flawed. They often cite its failure to capture the increase in in-kind benefits and tax-based transfers. A 1995 report from a National Academy of Sciences Panel outlined the limitations of the Official Poverty Measure (Citro and Michael 1995). Based on this report, the Census Bureau now publishes a Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) that addresses some of these failures. Academics have also developed alternative poverty measures, including an Absolute Supplemental Poverty Measure (Absolute-SPM) (Wimer et al. 2016) and a Consumption Poverty Measure (CPM) (Meyer and Sullivan 2003, 2012a, 2012b, 2018).1 These alternate measures address some of the shortcomings of the Official Poverty Measure and show substantial reductions in poverty during the past 50 years. Nevertheless, we argue that these measures do not evaluate President Johnson’s War on Poverty as he defined it. In order to evaluate the War on Poverty, a poverty measure must meet three basic conditions. First, it must set its poverty thresholds so that its poverty rate in 1963 is equal to that set by President Johnson. This rate provides a uniform starting point for the share of people in poverty in 1963. Second, the 1963 poverty thresholds (also known as the “poverty line”) must remain 1 Although Wimer et al. (2016) call their measure an “Anchored-SPM,” we refer to it in this paper as the Absolute- SPM since it is an absolute measure that holds constant the real value of its poverty thresholds over time. As we will discuss later, we use this terminology to avoid confusion in this paper and to distinguish it from poverty measures anchored to the Official Poverty Measure. Wimer et al. (2016) instead anchor to the Supplemental Poverty Rate in a given year. 3 constant in inflation-adjusted terms. Third, it must incorporate the full array of anti-poverty programs, including in-kind transfers and transfers administered through the tax code. To fill this gap we create a poverty measure, which we refer to as the Full-income Poverty Measure (FPM). This measure maintains the same 1963 poverty rate as the Official Poverty Measure, matching Johnson’s baseline poverty rate (Johnson 1965).
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