In the New York Times today, Claire Bond Potter blames Ronald Reagan for the unraveling of the American social safety net:
Under Mr. Reagan, conservatives were finally able to begin dismantling the New Deal state and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. In 1981 and 1982, Mr. Reagan made more than $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs.... Democrats were complicit. In 1992, although he would try (but fail) to pass national health care, Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.”...By 1999, single mothers on “workfare” had sunk deeper into poverty.
Progressive Democrats did only marginally better. In 2012, Republicans accused President Barack Obama of unwinding decades of welfare-to-work provisions, with a new system of waivers, work requirements and block grants that states had to follow. And while his Affordable Care Act passed narrowly, under pressure from both parties, he abandoned universal health care.
Today the poverty rate hovers around 11 percent, about where it was in 1973, and economic insecurity now envelops the working poor and middle class.
This is wildly misleading. There's no question that Ronald Reagan was rhetorically opposed to social welfare programs, just as there's no question that conservatives say they want to pare back the safety net. But they haven't:
As for poverty, the only honest way to measure it is to look at earnings after accounting for social welfare benefits. After all, the whole point of those benefits is to reduce poverty.
Using that measure, in 1973 about 20% of the country lived in poverty. Today, that number is about 9%.
In other words, social welfare spending is up nearly 500% since Reagan took office and poverty has been cut in half. Is that still too little? Does it compare badly to our peer countries in Europe? Is it shameful that we still don't have a national healthcare system?
I'm inclined to answer yes to all those questions. You might differ. But for God's sake, can we at least agree to use real numbers when we talk about this? It's the minimal honesty we should expect from our public intellectuals.
Reagan had no intention of unraveling the new deal. The Great Society era yes. Whoever wrote this is a retard.
Pretty sure Medicaid counts as means-tested. And if it does, then that chart is as meaningless as other charts I've seen pointing to the fact that income for working households has gone up significantly over the decades, if one counts healthcare benefits as "income." Dramatically rising healthcare costs don't make working households feel like they're getting more income from their employers... and dramatically rising social spending on healthcare isn't going to make the poor or their advocates feel like enough help is being provided to the poor. Working or not, you can't feed/clothe/house yourself with healthcare benefits.
Good point about Medicare. Also the population is 1.46 times larger now than in 1980. Shouldn't we look at per capita spending?
Given by how much more the total has increased than the capita, while per-capita would change a few constants the main point of Kevin’s would still stand.
Actually not a good point about Medicare/Medicaid. Those do not appear to be included in the SPM measure. If you click the fine link and then look at the figures and data, you will see a spreadsheet which lists the programs which contribute to the measure. Neither program is listed as a line item.
At the time of the Johnson administration and the Great Society, private enterprise was doing very well, real wages were rising and inequality was decreasing. Of course this was despite - or perhaps partly because of - very progressive income-tax rates. It was thought that poverty was on the way out by itself, but the social welfare elements of the War on Poverty were supposed to accelerate this. Instead the tax-cut era started - actually in the Kennedy-Johnson administration with the tax cuts of 1965. This did not improve overall economic growth, while certainly contributing to the stagnation of wages and increase of inequality. Instead of decreasing as anticipated, the necessity for welfare programs increased and is now indispensable for the lowest-income people to live decently.
It was not the welfare system which failed, it was the private enterprise sector which because of tax-cutting on high incomes and deregulation directed more and more of what economic growth did occur to the topmost incomes.
Dude, economic growth before the tax cut was at a already historic high. It wasn't going to get any higher no matter what. The tax cut was irrelevant. Reagan and his highly paid artisan gang were just pissed they didn't qualify for the huge deductions producers got. The Great Society was doing something for the sake of it.
What would be the reaction if this was made painfully obvious? Healthcare costs are visible and newsworthy while the safety net is highly hidden from public view. If the numbers were, say, printed on a post card and mailed to every American, would the majority of people be happily surprised or angry/taken advantage of?
The increase is almost entirely due to rising medical costs. If we triple the price of insulin, its really deceptive to insist that diabetics on Medicaid are 3x better off.
The real problem in our country isn't the poverty level per se -- which of course we should always be working to bring down where possible -- but the fact that social mobility has grown increasingly harder since the Reagan years. Being born poor is is sad. Knowing that your kids and grandkids will probably be stuck at roughly the same socio-economic level is tragic. Access to healthcare and education is the biggest indicator of social mobility and we suck at both in the US.
BTW -- countries with the best social mobility scores? All those socialist hellholes in Scandinavia (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index)
+1
Have these graphs been corrected to give costs per-capita-aided? And then normalized for inflation?
For the latter take a look at the sub-title of the chart.
I remember the "block grants" but couldn't remember whether it was Nixon or Reagan. A little googling turned up this: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/57626/310991-Block-Grants.PDF
Apparently Nixon used them, but sweetened the deal with added money. Reagan, not so much: "With the new programs, block grants made up
nearly 17 percent of federal aid. Unlike the Nixon block grants, the
Reagan block grants provided about 25 percent less funding than the programs they replaced (Conlan 1998)."
I guess money moved from programs to block grants still gets counted in the same category of social spending?
Austin and jdubs ask good questions as to whether Medicare/Medicaid costs are treated as cash income, which would distort income-after-taxes-and-benefits. But note that if rising costs of care are included when calculating the poverty level, the distortion does not affect the percentage of families or individuals living in poverty.
Chart is inflation corrected, though as others have noted, it is not per capita and health care costs in general have risen faster than standard inflation numbers.
Even though numbers have climbed, it may just mean we've been making a little headway. Cutting poverty numbers by more than half in 50 years is good news, but spending (inflation adjusted) went up 9x to do that, and that amounts to poverty reduction running at 0.2%age points a year.
Republicans may not have cut the safety net, but they have made it onerous to use it. Getting rid of that red tape would cost a little more, but greatly help more people out of poverty and even help more people off welfare.
If health care costs were higher than average inflation, then other costs were lower than average. You cannot say you need to adjust for higher health care costs without adjusting for lower other costs, which will exactly offset on average.
Re Medicare and medicaid and the first chart, since it was only means adjusted spending, I assume medicaid was included but not Medicare.
Correct MrDrum, Republicans never killed the welfare state… you never had a welfare state to kill!
A small reminder from your Swedish friend
Let me make a counter point to that chart and how kevin is using it from a left wing viewpoint.
Looking at the chart, you would think that for increasing social spending per year , it is Republicans who have been increasing programs more than democrats.
Highest by far is Bush #1 at 54% over just 4 years. And Clinton increased 2nd least just barely more than Reagan.
But you have to consider two things if want to infer the effect of presidential policies.
First , with unchanged policies and laws , social spending on means tested programs will decrease during good economic times when unemployment is low and increase in bad economic times. So a large part of the slower growth in Reagan and Clinton years is because the economy was mostly good. And Bush 1 had a recession, though mild, in his term and lost the election even though the upturn had started.
And congress matters too. Reagan had a democratic house and also senate many years. During Clinton years, Republicans finally took the house. The overall govt in Clinton years was not much more democratic than in Reagan years.
While I think Kevin is correct that the perception of republican president slashing social spending is exaggerated ( in reality, they never have managed more than to restrain the increase ), I have to say that chart unrealistically overstated that point.
The chart needs to be adjusted to be per-captia to be meaningful.
Well sure, the more details the better. But Kevin probably presumes most of his readers can google up the fact that the US population has increased about 50% since the mid 1970s. Which would imply real means-tested spending per capita has nearly trebled.
The issue of whether Republicans have succeeded in slashing antipoverty spending in the US (they haven't) is different, of course, from the issue of whether or not the US possesses a commitment to building an economy that works for everyone, including the poor.
The answer to the second question, of course, is a clear "no" and a big part of the reason is the absence in the US of a sufficiently robust level of non-means tested programs. In other high income countries, this kind of public sector spending keeps people from falling out of the middle class and joining the ranks of the poor. And yes, it is Reaganite anti-public sector ideology that has played a big role in America's failure in this regard. Also, as others have noted, a big chunk of the increase in means-tested spending is simply keeping up with healthcare costs. That's great if you're a Medicaid-covered poor person who's being effectively treated for a cancer that was incurable in 1977. Not so great if you're trying to keep a roof over your head in California in 2021.
2010 saw a big jump
Just as the early boomers were starting to retire and be on Medicare
Those born in 1948 turned 62 in 2010
And the chart reflects this surge of retirees nicely
Further comment
Lets keep the math simple.
Notice the upswing in the graph. Its mostly a steady climb upwards
Until the start of Obama's presidency then it rose
Medicare is the key'
Population demographics are throwing a lot of things off in Kevins postings
What was good in 1973 may not be so good today given that our population in 73 was 212M and today it stands at 329M
Inflation is not the only consideration.
All I can say is thank God the population growth has stabilized and is trending down in some countries...........