How we lost the "War on Poverty"

In my real job, when I’m not writing articles like this, I get to spend a good deal of time talking to thought leaders and policy experts about family issues. Most of those conversations are about marriage, fatherhood, adoption, and foster care, the structures and institutions that help kids grow up as whole and healthy as possible. A few weeks ago I was in one of those conversations and I decided to grill a friend about the role of government benefits.

Our conversation came on the heels of an article I had just read that put current food stamp usage at roughly 42 million Americans. I had also seen that more than 100 million Americans, nearly one in three, now receive benefits from at least one means-tested government program every month. I told him those numbers didn’t quite feel like what you’d expect from the richest country in human history.

He laughed, then got serious. “You’d think a country like ours, with the strongest economy the world has ever seen, would be the place we actually wiped out poverty. If anyone was going to pull it off, it should’ve been us.” He paused before finishing. “But we didn’t. You want to know why?”

I told him yes. It seemed like he had been waiting for someone to ask.

“Our families fell apart faster than the economy ever grew. If it hadn’t been for that, we might have wiped out poverty altogether.”

I’ve been turning that line over in my mind. I wondered if I looked at the numbers, would they agree with him? So I went back to 1964, where the whole story starts.

The Declaration

On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson stood before Congress and declared war. Not on a foreign power, but on poverty itself. “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” he told the nation. It was an audacious promise, and it was made by a country that had every reason to believe it could keep it.

Consider what America had just accomplished. On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright climbed into a rickety wooden and canvas biplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and flew for 12 seconds. Sixty-five years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. From 12 seconds of controlled flight to planting a flag on another celestial body. That is not an achievement. That is a kind of organized miracle.

It was also the age of the technocrat. The men who designed Johnson’s war, the same credentialed architects David Halberstam would later call “the best and the brightest,” believed with complete sincerity that every large problem was ultimately a management problem. You identified the variables, adjusted the inputs, and engineered the outcome. If that logic could get a man to the moon, surely it could ensure that every American had what they needed. Not a stable family. Not a father in the home. Those were not the variables they were solving for. They were solving for material sufficiency: food, housing, healthcare, cash. Eliminating poverty. Something you could measure, things you could transfer, and dollars you could count. So Johnson declared war, and America mobilized.

What followed was the most ambitious wealth transfer in human history, and almost certainly the greatest missed attempt at solving a social problem in the American experiment.

The War We Fought

The machinery of the Great Society was enormous. Between 1965 and today, federal and state governments have spent more than $20 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars on means-tested welfare programs. Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has calculated that this sum is approximately three times the combined cost of every war the United States has ever fought, from the Revolution through Afghanistan.

The programs that followed Johnson’s declaration read like an inventory of national intention. Medicaid was created to provide healthcare for the poor. Today it covers more than 75 million Americans. The food stamp program, now SNAP, was expanded to feed the hungry. Today it serves roughly 42 million Americans monthly. The Earned Income Tax Credit was created to reward work among low-income families. Section 8 housing vouchers were created to shelter the vulnerable. Supplemental Security Income, the Women Infants and Children program, the school lunch program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. The apparatus grew program by program, decade by decade, until federal means-tested spending exceeded $1.1 trillion a year in federal dollars alone, surpassing what the United States spends on national defense.

We did not merely try to solve poverty. We ran the most expensive social experiment in the history of human civilization.

The Record We Built

And it is worth pausing to appreciate what kind of country bankrolled that experiment. Because the war on poverty was not funded by a struggling nation. It was funded by the most productive economic engine the world has ever seen.

The United States today accounts for 26 percent of global nominal GDP with just over 4 percent of the world’s population. American companies hold roughly 50 percent of total global stock market value. Since Johnson’s declaration, the United States has given the world the internet, GPS navigation, the personal computer, the smartphone, the microprocessor, cloud computing, and the Hubble Space Telescope. American researchers have won 428 Nobel Prizes, more than a third of every Nobel ever awarded, more than the next four countries combined. We have produced roughly half of all billion-dollar startup companies the world has ever created.

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, GDP per capita grew from roughly $25,000 in 1970 to over $70,000 today, a nearly 180 percent increase in per-person wealth. The rising tide was real. The boats got bigger.

Given all of this, you would be excused for assuming we solved poverty. Given $20 trillion in transfers, given the greatest economy in history, given half a century of political will and institutional effort, surely the numbers would reflect dramatic, even complete, progress.

You would be wrong.

Did Anyone See This Coming?

Before we look at the numbers, it is worth asking a more uncomfortable question. Was there anyone who saw this coming?

Yes. His name was Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

In March 1965, just months after Johnson declared his war, Moynihan, then an Assistant Secretary of Labor, submitted an internal government report titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” He was not a conservative. He was a Democrat, a social scientist, and a genuine believer in the capacity of government to do good. But what he saw in the data troubled him deeply.

Moynihan wrote that a “tangle of pathology” was forming around the breakdown of the family, particularly in communities where fathers were absent and out-of-wedlock births were rising. He warned that no amount of economic investment would produce lasting progress if the family structure continued to deteriorate. He was not talking about money. He was talking about formation.

The report was pilloried. Moynihan was accused of blaming the victim, of cultural insensitivity, of overreach. His warning was buried under the weight of its controversy. The war on poverty proceeded without it.

Sixty years later, the data has confirmed everything he feared, and his warning applies not to one community but to every community in America.

(I wrote an article about this here if you want to dive deeper)

The Numbers We Cannot Ignore

In 1970, 11 percent of children were born outside of marriage. Today that number is 40 percent. Nearly four in ten children now enter the world without a married mother and father in the home. The marriage rate itself has fallen 59 percent since 1970. The United States now has the highest rate of children in single-parent households of any nation on earth, according to Pew Research, more than triple the global average.

Put it in human terms. In 1960, roughly 9 percent of American children lived in single-parent homes. By 1970, that figure had already climbed to 12 percent. Today it is 25 percent. That is approximately 19 million children growing up right now without their mother and father present in the same home. Nineteen million.

Over the same period, more than 100 million Americans, nearly one in three, now receive benefits from at least one means-tested government program every month. We are more prosperous than ever. We are more dependent than ever. Both of those things are true simultaneously, and that combination is the story.

How We Measure Poverty

Before going further, a word on how the country measures poverty, because the choice of measure is itself an argument.

The Official Poverty Measure, created in the 1960s, counts a family’s pre-tax cash income: wages, salary, Social Security, and cash welfare. It does not count food stamps, housing vouchers, Medicaid, or the Earned Income Tax Credit. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, introduced in 2011, counts those benefits as income. By the SPM, child poverty has fallen meaningfully since 1967.

The argument for the SPM is that it reflects what families actually have to spend. The argument against it, for our purposes, is that it counts dependency as income. A family of four lifted above the poverty line by $40,000 a year in government transfers has not escaped poverty. It has been moved from private poverty to state dependency. That is a real distinction, and this piece holds to it. Throughout, when a number describes the poverty rate, it is the Official Poverty Measure, the one that asks whether a family is earning its way out, not whether the government is covering the gap.

Why Spending Cannot Fix This

The connection between family fragmentation and persistent poverty is not subtle. The data on it is among the most consistent in all of social science.

The child poverty rate in families headed by a single mother is 36 percent. The child poverty rate in families where a child’s mother and father are married is 6 percent. Same country. Same economy. Same transfer programs. The difference is whether a child’s parents are married to each other.

Fifty percent of single-mother families receive means-tested government assistance. Just 14.7 percent of families with a married mother and father do. Brookings Institution researcher Richard Reeves studied this directly. Four out of five children born into the bottom income quintile, raised by their mother and father who remained married throughout their childhood, escaped poverty as adults. Children born into the same quintile and raised by an unmarried mother had a 50 percent chance of staying there. The same starting line. The difference was whether their parents were married.

“I have come to believe that social policy faces an uphill battle as long as families continue to fragment and children are deprived of the resources of two parents.” — Isabel Sawhill, Generation Unbound (Brookings, 2014)

Harvard economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues studied every county in America, examining 35 variables to determine which communities produce the most economic mobility. The single strongest correlate was not school quality, not local GDP, not racial composition. It was the share of children living with both their mother and father. This finding held not just for children in single-parent families, but for all children in communities where fathers are absent. The presence of married mothers and fathers in a neighborhood raises the economic prospects of every child who grows up there.

This cannot be dismissed as a biased partisan conclusion. The bipartisan AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty, co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, concluded in 2015 that children raised by their married mother and father consistently outperform peers raised by a single parent across key outcomes, including educational achievement, social development, and employment. Left, right, center. The data does not have a party.

What the Experiment Taught Us

Here is what sixty years and $20 trillion have taught us. It turns out it is very expensive to replace the family, and the government has proved to be extraordinarily bad at it.

Look at the chart above. Four lines, each indexed to 1970, tell the whole story. Welfare spending rose 580 percent in real dollars, climbing from roughly $230 billion to $1.57 trillion a year in combined federal and state means-tested spending. Per-capita GDP grew 163 percent, from about $25,000 to more than $70,000. Out-of-wedlock births jumped from 11 percent of births to 40 percent, a 272 percent increase. And child poverty, the single number the war was declared to bring down, now sits seven percent higher than where it started.

Read that sequence again. We spent nearly seven times more in real dollars, we grew two and a half times wealthier per person, and the family fragmented to nearly four times its 1970 baseline, while child poverty crept from fifteen percent to sixteen. Every line on that chart climbed except the one the war was launched to lower.

We did not just fail to solve poverty. We built a system that, in some respects, made family formation harder by subsidizing the conditions that replace it. Dependency has grown alongside spending, family fragmentation has grown alongside prosperity, and the numbers do not care about our intentions.

The timing matters: the official poverty rate fell from 19 percent in 1964 to 11.1 percent in 1973. The rate in 2023 was 11.1 percent. Identical. Fifty years apart. Every major expansion of the welfare state came after that floor was reached: the nationalization of food stamps in 1974, Section 8 housing the same year, the Earned Income Tax Credit in 1975, the Medicaid eligibility expansions of the 1980s and 1990s, SCHIP in 1997, the ACA Medicaid expansion in 2010. More than $20 trillion in inflation-adjusted means-tested spending has been deployed against a poverty rate that was already at its modern floor before most of the programs existed.

This forces two questions that we have been reluctant to ask: The first is the one we have always argued about: should the government play a role in solving poverty? But the data now demands a second, harder question: can it?

If the primary driver of persistent poverty is family fragmentation, and if family formation is fundamentally a function of faith, culture, and personal decision-making rather than income transfer, then the tools of the state are not merely insufficient. They may be completely counterproductive.

The Only Way Forward

None of this means we abandon people in need. It does not mean we dismantle every program tomorrow. It means we stop pretending that the next program, the next dollar, the next policy will accomplish what 60 years and $20 trillion could not.

If we actually want to change the trajectory for the children who need it most, we are going to have to look past a silver bullet government solution. We are going to have to look past the next tax credit and the next program. We are going to have to accept that what got us here, the erosion of the home built on a child’s married mother and father, is also what is keeping us here.

That means strong, healthy, independent families, a mother and a father committed to each other and to the children they share, taking care of themselves and each other. Our only aim, then, can be creating the conditions that make that possible and educating people honestly toward that end, without apology and without retreat.

The married mother and father are not one variable among many. They are the variable; they are the foundation, the central institution whose strength makes every dollar go further and whose fragmentation hamstrings every program we have ever tried to build in their place. Until we begin solving for their health, until the strength of the married family becomes our goal rather than material provision, we will be stuck in a constant loop: more money, accelerating breakdown, and no progress worth measuring.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.