Does Welfare Cause Poverty?
Poverty has been a remarkably persistent problem in our society. In 1970, the poverty rate was 12.6 percent and in 2007 it was 12.5 percent. So why won’t this problem go away? Until the 1980s, most conservatives explained persistent poverty by pointing to the failings of poor people themselves. They maintained that people are poor because they are lazy, or don’t value education, or can’t resist drugs. But 1984 saw the publication of Losing Ground, a book which forever changed the way Republicans looked at poverty. The author, Charles Murray, wanted to figure out why liberal anti-poverty programs had failed. How we could spend billions on welfare and food stamps for several decades, and still have very little impact on the rate of poverty. How could anti-poverty spending go up and yet the number of the poor remain virtually the same? The answer, he concluded, was that it was those very government programs that were keeping people poor. As Murray explained it, government was not the solu
Poverty has been a remarkably persistent problem in our society. In 1970, the poverty rate was 12.6 percent and in 2007 it was 12.5 percent. So why won’t this problem go away? Until the 1980s, most conservatives explained persistent poverty by pointing to the failings of poor people themselves. They maintained that people are poor because they are lazy, or don’t value education, or can’t resist drugs. But 1984 saw the publication of Losing Ground, a book which forever changed the way Republicans looked at poverty. The author, Charles Murray, wanted to figure out why liberal anti-poverty programs had failed. How we could spend billions on welfare and food stamps for several decades, and still have very little impact on the rate of poverty. How could anti-poverty spending go up and yet the number of the poor remain virtually the same? The answer, he concluded, was that it was those very government programs that were keeping people poor. As Murray explained it, government was not the solu
