War on poverty programs list

For more information visit the Social Security Administration online. Department of Labor Unemployment Insurance UI programs provide benefits to eligible workers who become unemployed through no fault of their own and who meet certain requirements. The program is a unique federal-state partnership, based on Federal law, but administered by individual states. For more information about Unemployment Insurance, visit the Department of Labor online.

This pre-school education program was a part of the Economic Opportunity Act that was designed to reduce disparities among young children. The Head Start Act Amendments established the Early Head Start program, which expanded the benefits of early childhood development to low income families with children under three years old. The first Food Stamp program ran from , but the program we know today was established with the Food Stamp Act.

The program is now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and served Studies co-authored by Research Affiliate Hilary Hoynes found that SNAP contributed to increases in birth weights, but also found that the benefit is associated with fewer hours worked.

These health programs were established with amendments to the Social Security Act in Today, Medicare provides health insurance for people over 65 years of age and some younger than that but who have certain disabilities or diseases. Medicaid is a Federal and state partnership that provides health coverage for people with low income. During , enrollment in Medicare averaged about Approximately SSI is a Federal program that provides income people 65 or older as well as to blind or disabled adults and children.

WIC is a nutrition program that benefits pregnant women, new mothers and young children who live near poverty and who are at nutritional risk. WIC is not an entitlement program, so the number of people who receive the benefits depends on the amount Congress allots for the program from year to year. About 7. Signed on October 3, , by President George W.

The system of checks and balances in government was developed to ensure that no one branch of government would become too powerful. The framers of the U. Constitution built a system that divides power between the three branches of the U. The Great Recession was a global economic downturn that devastated world financial markets as well as the banking and real estate industries.

The crisis led to increases in home mortgage foreclosures worldwide and caused millions of people to lose their life savings, their jobs The Great Awakening was a religious revival that impacted the English colonies in America during the s and s. The movement came at a time when the idea of secular rationalism was being emphasized, and passion for religion had grown stale. Christian leaders often traveled First established in , the FBI has often been criticized for violating the civil rights of The three branches of the U.

According to the doctrine of separation of powers, the U. Constitution distributed the power of the federal government among these three branches, and built a system of checks and Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Medicare and Medicaid By the time Johnson took office, mainly two groups of Americans were uninsured: the elderly and the poor. Head Start and Education Reform To empower parents and make sure every child had a shot of success in life no matter their social or economic circumstances, Johnson, politician and activist Sargent Shriver , and a team of child development experts launched Project Head Start.

Recommended for you. How the Union Defended Washington, D. During the Civil War. Daniel Webster. The series based on an expanded concept of household resources indicates modest income growth for households at the bottom of the income distribution over the entire period; those based on a more narrow definition of income show no such gain.

See also Autor Bitler and Hoynes investigate the responsiveness of poverty measures to the business cycle, finding official, but especially SPM, poverty rates were less responsive to unemployment rates during the Great Recession than at any other time after They attribute the muted response of poverty rates to unemployment rates to growth in resources from Food Stamp benefits, the EITC, and Unemployment Insurance.

Additionally, Larrimore, Burkhauser, and Armour find that increases in public transfers and decreases in tax liability were more important in mitigating the effects of earnings decreases for households in the bottom quintile of the income distribution during the Great Recession than in other economic downturns that have occurred since There is a large body of literature that focusses on explanations for these trends.

Potential explanations for these changes in marriage, divorce, and fertility have focused on the effects the reduced specialization of women in traditional gender roles and resultant decreases in the gain from marriage Becker, , deteriorating marriage markets Wilson, , and the role of welfare benefits Murray, See also Oppenheimer, ; Lichter et al.

While it is hard to draw definitive conclusions from such a large body of literature, there is evidence that decreased specialization in traditional gender roles, marriage market conditions, and welfare benefit levels all play a role in influencing decisions about marriage and fertility.

What is also clear from the literature is that changes in gender roles, marriage market conditions, and welfare benefits cannot explain the large changes in marriage and fertility behavior observed across a broad spectrum of demographic groups.

Decisions about marriage and fertility are complicated and the large changes in marriage that have occurred over the past 50 years are likely the product of complex interplay between changes in government policies and changes in the economy that affect potential gains from marriage, reinforced by changing social norms that may themselves be a product of changing behavior. Researchers studying black-white wage gaps have identified three distinct periods. During the s the gap between black and white male wages increased.

While black-white wage convergence was rapid in the s, there remains a large gap in joblessness, which is much larger if incarceration is taken into account. Trends in deep poverty rates on subgroups of the population are not shown in the paper; they are available from the authors, upon request.

Partly driven by increases in medical prices, Medicaid real per capita spending from to grew by percent, which dwarfs that in any other program. Per capita real spending on these programs grew by 48 percent, 28 percent, and 52 percent in the three periods to , to , and to , respectively.

Adding some fraction of these to the means-tested transfers would result in an even greater rate of growth over all periods. A large fraction of TANF spending after was on services.

Total real spending, even including these additional expenditure categories, is still below the AFDC level. The TANF program no longer has a significant impact on poverty, never rising above 0. Expenditure is averaged over all families in the groups described in the indicated row, regardless of whether they were recipients.

However, Medicaid represents only part of the family's expenditure budget and should not be valued dollar-for-dollar. In addition, as Burtless and Svaton and the CBO have noted, if the value of Medicaid to low-income families is added to income, the value of employer-provided health insurance needs to be added to the income of higher-income families.

When both are added, the distribution of health insurance support is remarkably even over the income distribution. Consequently, the shift in medical support over time is unlikely to change the relative redistribution that has taken place.

This includes the TANF program and housing aid. The changes shown in Table 3 imply that pre-transfer poverty rates must have risen considerably more. Larrimore et al. They find that median income in the bottom quintile fell by 4 percent over that period but that this was a result of a 15 percent decline in income resulting from employment, earnings, and demographics counteracted by an 11 percent offset from increases in transfers and decreases in taxes.

While the bottom quintile does not map directly into the poverty rate, their analysis does demonstrate that transfers played a large role in preventing incomes in the lower part of the income distribution from declining during the Great Recession.

Bitler et al. They find, like Larrimore et al. They find that past recessions had equally positive impacts on the level of overall poverty per unit change in the unemployment rate as in the Great Recession, although poverty was actually more cyclical in the Great Recession than in past recessions.

See Census Bureau National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. J Policy Anal Manage. Author manuscript; available in PMC Apr 6. Find articles by Robert Haveman. Find articles by Rebecca Blank. Find articles by Robert Moffitt. Find articles by Timothy Smeeding. Find articles by Geoffrey Wallace. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Copyright notice.

The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at J Policy Anal Manage. See other articles in PMC that cite the published article. How has the measurement of poverty changed over this period? Certain socioeconomic groups experienced much higher poverty rates, including those with family heads with the following characteristics: Nonwhite 48 percent Persons with less than 8 years of education 37 percent Females or single parents 48 percent , especially those with low education 89 percent for nonwhites, 77 percent for whites Persons aged 65 or more 47 percent or less than 25 years 31 percent Non-earners 81 percent Farm residents 43 percent Those living in the South 32 percent For persons living in families headed by someone with any of these characteristics, poverty rates were more than percent of the overall poverty rate of 20 percent.

Table 1 Percent of persons in families with income below the Federal Poverty Line, and Open in a separate window. From to Work-Based Reform and Retrenchment The period from through the s combined reform and retrenchment. From to Now: Large Expansion; Little Reform Since the millennium, public programs supporting low-income families have grown, with most of this growth coming during the latter part of this period.

A Half-Century of Poverty Policy, In Brief Over the past 50 years then, the nation's view of the poverty problem has changed substantially, as has national government policy toward the poor.

Figure 1. Growing Criticisms of the Official Poverty Measure Within a decade of its creation, the official poverty measure began to be criticized and suggestions for alternative measurement approaches began to be heard. Some Progress Over the years, a variety of formal efforts recognized some of these issues in attempts to update and refine a new and improved poverty measure. Alternative Approaches to Poverty Measurement The SPM is an effort to update poverty measurement, but its approach is conceptually similar to Orshansky's with a poverty threshold based on expenditures on necessities and a resource measure based on family resources.

Poverty in the United States in A Snapshot Table 2 column 1 shows the official poverty rates in for the entire population and for subgroups.

Table 2 U. Poverty in The Composition of the Poor The third column in Table 2 provides information on the composition of the officially defined non-elderly poor in Deep Poverty The final column of Table 2 shows the fraction of the official poor that are living in deep poverty—those in families with pre-tax cash income of less than 50 percent of the official poverty threshold.

Trends in Poverty How much progress has been made toward alleviating poverty since the War on Poverty was begun 50 years ago? Subgroup Trends in Poverty Table 3 shows official poverty rates for demographic subgroups in , , , and unfortunately, SPM poverty rates for subgroups are not available going as far back as Year All Figure 3. Expenditure per Capita, Non-Medicaid Means-Tested Programs, — real dollars Sources : Various governmental and administrative data series available from the authors upon request.

Trends in Deep Poverty Deep poverty rates poverty rates in families with income below 50 percent of the official threshold have increased substantially over the to period. Public Antipoverty Spending and Effects on Poverty The upper line in Figure 2 shows real per capita expenditure—federal, state, and local combined—from to for the 84 largest means-tested transfer programs in the U. Figure 2.

Real Expenditure per Capita in Means-Tested Programs, — real dollars Sources : Top 84 Programs from Spar , Table 2 and 10 Largest Programs from authors, calculations from individual program statistics. Figure 4. Changes in the Distribution of Aid and Effects on Deep Poverty Although support for low-income families has increased strongly over the last 50 years, the nature of the expansion changed after the late s and s.

Impact of Transfer Programs: to Table 4 shows the total real expenditure per family from to panel A 83 and the same real expenditures for these programs from to panel B. Figure 5. Impact of Transfer Programs: to The Great Recession saw another major shift in government support. Footnotes 1 Implicit in this perspective is the belief that participation of low-income citizens in programs and activities would change their perceptions regarding opportunities and hence change their behavior.

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Wage inequality in the United States during the s: Rising dispersion or falling minimum wage? The Quarterly Journal of Economics. Welfare and the rise in female headed families. American Journal of Sociology. Our invisible poor. The New Yorker. Poverty has also been worsened by rising numbers of single-parent households and big jumps in the numbers of low-income men sent to prison for long stretches.

So many winds of economic and social change have pushed against efforts to boost the poor, that poverty would probably be considerably higher today without the accomplishments of the War on Poverty.

History can be a great teacher, but not when we learn the wrong lessons. It has taken researchers decades to analyze the accomplishments of the War on Poverty, but now we have good evidence. The original architects of the War on Poverty could not know which experiments would work and which would fall short.

Some critics overplay failures to proclaim that government cannot fight poverty. Now, as then, America faces big challenges, and we should learn from the past about the value of bold, creative experimentation. Read more in Martha J. SSN Key Findings. Share pdf twitter facebook.