Of course it's obvious that we do an aboslutely terrible job of keeping families with children out of poverty. We do okay in the marketplace, but once it comes to government policies, everyone else leaves us in the dust. We barely lift a finger.
But what I found a bit surprising (I hadn't realized it before) was that, for all our focus on single-parent families as a focus of attention regarding poverty, America's social policies are much less effective in dealing with poverty in two-parent families. Of course, it's true that poverty rates are much lower in two-parent families to begin with. But for any two groups of poor families, one with a single parent, the other with two, our social policies will lift nearly three times as many single-parent families out of poverty as two-parent families.
And this got me thinking about a recent comment--I thought it had been by Peter Beinart, but my quick Googling attempt failed--that liberals needed to be taught they, too could be wrong, just like conservatives, as they had been wrong about welfare reform. Now, of course, it's an article of faith in Versailles that welfare reform was a great success, that liberals opposed it, and that liberals were all wrong. But the chart above suggests, "not so much." So I decided to take a closer look at the recent trajectory of poverty rates. Tables of what I found on the flip.
This data uses a different metric than the international comparisons, but it's internally consistent, and utterly reputable, as it comes from the US Census Bureau's Historical Poverty Tables for Families:
As can be seen, the single-mother household poverty rate is significantly higher than any other, and all rates have declined since 1996, the year that "welfare reform" was passed. But the rates for all families were declining before 1996, the 2007 rate for single-mother families are still quite high, and the rates have actually increased since 2000. So the results overall don't really look like much of a success. But, for a clearer picture, I decided to generate my own tables showing the change in percentage who are poor, using two different base years,: 1996 and 1992:
Here we see that welfare reform really did look good from 1996 to 2000, when it had the full force of the Clinton expansion bouoying the economy. Since those on the bottom are the last to benefit from an expansion, it was these years that one would naturally expect to be the best for single mothers. So "welfare reform" looked pretty good for reasons having nothning to do with the program itself.
From 2000 to 2005, however, things just kept getting worse, for single-mother households as well as all others. In the end, single-mother households did slightly better than all families, and much better than single-father households in terms of rate of improvement, but
but the figures are so close to the rate of improvement for married-couple families that it seems very hard indeed to argue that "welfare reform" made any difference at all. Any remaining doubt should be wiped away by the 1992 comparision:
Taking 1992 as the base year, we see two things immediately: first, the overall decline in poverty rates is higher for married couple families than it was for single-mother households. Second, the yearly rate of decline for single-mother households from 1992 to 2007 was higher than it was for 1996 to 2007. Both these figures indicate that whatever effect "welfare reform" may have had was overshadowed by other economic factors that were making things gradually better overall--but only very marginally, as the original figures in Table 4 make clear. There is no clear signal of "welfare reform" having any effect that rises above the level of background noise.
So much for yet another Versailles myth. The only thing that "welfare reform" managed to do was kick more women and children off of welfare. It did not move them out of poverty, which is what the rest of the civilized world recognizes as the actual purpose of social welfare programs for the poor. This is a perfect model of how conservative social programs "work"--they "work" by redefiing the problem to fit the conservative worldview ("getting women off of welfare" rather than reducing poverty), and then "solving" the fictitious problem, while leaving the actual problem unsolved.
It was the same with Saddam's WMDs, too, of course. We solved a made-up problem, and left al Qaeda even stronger in the end.
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