Sometimes just a little research reveals that a political pundit
doesn’t know what he’s talking about. A post by Bob ‘Nugie” Neugebauer at the Gem
State Patriot News blog on June 22, 2025 titled Idaho Faces Growth and
Ideological Challenges claims:
“Our nation’s welfare system represents a catastrophic
failure that has entrenched poverty rather than eliminating it. Since Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society programs, poverty rates have remained frozen around 15%
instead of continuing their post-World War II decline. This system rewards
dependency by incentivizing single-parent households, discouraging marriage,
and enabling able-bodied individuals to avoid work.”
Did he look that up or just borrow it from somewhere else? I
found an article by Rachel Bade at Politico on September 17, 2013 including
that headline. It is titled Pro Report, presented by POWERJOBS: Obama orders
security revie – Navy cut security to reduce costs – U. S. poverty rate frozen
at 15 percent – Uninsured rate declines. It says:
“U.S. POVERTY RATE FROZEN AT 15 PERCENT. One-in-seven
Americans still lived below the poverty line last year, several years out from
the recession. (The poverty line, FYI is just over $23,400 for a family of
four). That’s about the same as last year, and the sixth straight year without
improvement, according to an AP analysis. Although the unemployment rate sank
from 9.6 percent in 2010 to 8.1 percent last year, poverty didn’t, and that’s
unusual, analysts say: ‘Typically, the poverty rate tends to move in a similar
direction as the unemployment rate, so many analysts had been expecting a
modest decline in poverty,’ AP’s Hope Yen writes.”
There also is a 2017 book by Jon H. Widener titled The
Nexus: Understanding Faith and Modern Culture which says:
“In the US, the poverty rate was going down until President
Lyndon Johnson began the War on Poverty in the 1960s. Since then the poverty
rate has been frozen at 14 to 15 percent and has stayed there despite an outlay
of $20 trillion over all those years and despite the continuing outlay of $1
trillion a year. The unabashedly collectivist Obama administration continued
these policies during its eight years.”
Another article at Debt.org on December 21, 2023 titled Poverty
in the United States has a section titled Poverty Levels Over Time which instead
states:
“In the late 1950s the poverty rate in the U.S. was
approximately 22%, with just shy of 40 million Americans living in poverty. The
rate declined steadily, reaching a low of 11.1% in 1973 and rising to a high of
nearly 15% three times – in 1983, 1993, and 2011 – before hitting an all-time
low of 10.5% in 2019. However, the 46.7 million Americans in poverty in 2014
was the most ever recorded.”
I looked up a detailed report by Robert D. Plotnik et al. of
the Institute for Research on Poverty titled The Twentieth Century Record of
Inequality and Poverty in the United States (Discussion Paper 1166-98 July 1998).
Figure 3 on page 24 is shown above, with data for 1947 to 1996 (I added the
times for the Great Society). Since those programs ended in 1968 the poverty
rate ranged from 12% to 15% and never was frozen. In 1974 the rate hit a minimum
of around 12%, 3% lower than the 15% cited by Mr. Neugebauer.
How about more recently? There is a web page by Abigail
Tierney at statista on September 16, 2024 titled Poverty rate in the United
States from 1990 to 2023. A replot of her graph is shown above. The only time
the rate was ‘frozen’ at around 15% was between 2010 and 2014. It was ‘frozen’
at 12.6% from 2003 to 2005 and at 11.5% from 2020 to 2022. In 2019 (under Trump)
the poverty rate had fallen to 10.5%, which is 4.5% lower than the 15% cited by
Mr. Neugebauer. Clearly he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
The 1883 Josh Shaw painting of empty pockets was adapted
from Wikimedia Commons.
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