8I POLITICS The Conservative Response to the War on Poverty Discussion -- So Far Jared Bernstein: 01/13/2014 I'm finding some of the responses by conservative politicians, economists, et al to the War on Poverty discussion to be interesting and revealing. There's a lot of silliness, and worse, of course. I'd assign the Reagan quip ("we fought a war on poverty and lost") to that category, as well as the misleading $20 trillion talking point (see this Mike Konczal piece out today on this). But once they get past the canned stuff, there's some interesting substance. Progressives have largely been pointing out that, in fact, rigorous analysis shows both significant and even lasting progress against poverty, amidst steep remaining challenges. The anti- poverty effectiveness of the programs developed and expanded before and since the War on Poverty is easily seen in figures like the one I reprint below, showing the increased divergence between pre-transfer and post-transfer poverty rates (the figure also shows the increasingly irrelevant official rate, which leaves out a lot of what we've done to reduce poverty). Yet the fact remains that 16 percent remain poor. Conservatives--again, the ones who at least on occasion visit factville--do not deny the broad accuracy on the trends in the figure. But they question what is it that we've really achieved through all of this social policy? And their answer is that all we've really done is made the poor more comfortable in their poverty. As Sen. Rubio put it, "...our current government programs offer, at best, only a partial solution. They help people deal with poverty, but they do not help them escape it." Robert Samuelson claims that we haven't done much of anything to "catapult the poor into the economic mainstream." Precisely against President Johnson's warning, we've given the poor a handout, not a hand up. This critique too fails to stand up to scrutiny. First, the largest expansion of poor support