50 Years Since the War on Poverty: Looking Back and Looking Forward

On March 12th the Asset Building Program hosted the event, “50 Years Since the War On Poverty” and featured diverse perspectives to discuss where we’ve been and where we’re going. The first panel discussion set up a historical framework for understanding the social, economic and political conditions that created the War on Poverty and distilled lessons learned for future policy making. The second panel discussion took stock of where we are now and what a modern anti-poverty policy should include.

When reflecting on the short falls and progress we’ve made since the War on Poverty, Shawn Fremstad with Center for Economic and Policy Research suggested that we need to expand our scope of how we frame anti-poverty policy and how we measure its impacts. That is, there is a tendency to limit the War on Poverty to safety net programs and assess it solely based on the poverty rate. If we took into account other indicators like infant mortality and educational attainment rates, we would see that there have been improvements through a diverse and large set of investments that accompanied the programs we associate with the War on Poverty. But even when we consider the effectiveness of safety net programs in isolation, the supplemental poverty measure indicates that they are successful in lowering poverty rates.

Despite these successes, more needs to be done to help families attain financial security. Melissa Boteach with the Center for American Progress supported this vision by discussing several ways to modernize public assistance programs including, increasing funding, minimizing benefit cliffs and streamlining access. Elise Gould with Economic Policy Institute observed that wages have remained stagnant and spoke to how the minimum wage needs to be restored to a value that is reflective of the increased productivity and educational attainment of our time. And lastly, William Elliott, Director of Assets and Education Initiative at the University of Kansas, critiqued that both public assistance programs and economy are underperforming, therefore assets are critical to helping people climb up the economic ladder. The recommendation following his critique is to provide initial assets to promote accumulation of future assets and attain economic mobility. His comments are reflected in his report “Harnessing Assets to Build an Economic Mobility System.” In addition to improving each of these policies, the panelists concluded that it is instrumental that they work in concert with each other. Fifty years have passed since the War on Poverty and times have changed. Together, these approaches to anti-poverty policy will put us on a pathway towards sustained progress in the 21^st Century.