The War on Poverty

"Who's poor in America? 50 years into the war on poverty" written by Drew Desilver, who is a senior writer at the Pew Research Center, states that Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson used his first State of the Union address to urge “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.” It continues to say that "the War on Poverty, as the set of social programs enacted in 1964-1965 came to be called, was arguably the most ambitious domestic policy initiative since the Great Depression." It has been argues before if whether of not Johnson's programs for antipoverty helped people, or "trapped them into cycles of dependency", or possibly both. The Census Bureau has calculated that since 1964 to 2012 the poverty rate has only decreased 4%. A team of researches from Columbia University also calculated an "anchored supplemental measure which adjusted for historical inflation and they found that it decreased 10% from 1997 to 2012. Although, either way it is calculated, it is not a significant amount. The graph that is given in the article shows that today's poor age population is mainly in their prime working years, much fewer elderly are poor since 1966, and today's childhood poverty is still persistent. It also states that, poverty is still largest in the south and even though it has fallen among blacks, it has risen among Hispanics.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/01/13/whos-poor-in-america-50-years-into-the-war-on-poverty-a-data-portrait/