Every year about this time, there is a ritual in Washington in which the Census Bureau releases its annual poverty numbers and the punditocracy debates whether the President is to blame for the fact that we are making no progress against poverty. It happens every year regardless of who’s President.
The more interesting debates are usually quieter, if they happen at all, about other figures in the report. The following 2 graphs in the Census presentation struck me as the most important in terms of what they say about current policy debates.
In a departure from the “makers vs. takers” rhetoric the GOP frontrunner deployed in the 2012 campaign, candidates of both parties in the 2016 race are decrying stagnant middle class incomes and the rise of the super-rich. Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders have said things on this topic that sound nearly identical. But as the foregoing graph shows, this growing gulf between the rich and everyone else is nothing new. It’s a trend with a long history, pre-dating Reagan. The gulf isn’t really any wider now than it was at the end of the Clinton years, and yet that doesn’t diminish the stark reality that the modest gains below the 50th percentile have emerged as the thorniest public policy dilemma of our generation. This is what the 2016 debates should be about, but somehow CNN’s moderators in the last debate couldn’t figure out how to squeeze questions about this issue into the 3-hour-long slugfest.
This one shows the success we’ve had over time reducing elderly poverty. The Under 18 line isn’t just a measure of child poverty; it’s a measure of household poverty, since most kids who are poor are living with at least one parent or head of household. Entitlement reform isn’t as much of a topic in the current campaign, but it’s no less of an issue. The very programs that helped bring down that red line will play a role in keeping the blue and green lines steady or rising unless we figure out how to change them.
Source:
http://ift.tt/1MhohJs