Four Charts That Will Tell You All You Need To Know About "The War On Poverty"

Here's a chart that I've probably posted a dozen times.  It shows how poverty was dying nicely, all on its own, until LBJ declared war on it. 
Then poverty started feeling better, was taken off life support, and is now doing quite well. 

 

Here's another chart showing the amount spent by Federal anti-poverty agencies per poor household in 2011.  It comes to more than $61,000 per poverty-level household.  These numbers were bitterly contested when first released by The Weekly Standard, but they are what they are. 

 

Here are two more charts showing the wealthiest counties in the USA  Check out the counties around Washington D.C. 
This is where the 1% lives. 

By name....

From The Atlantic Monthly, hardly a Tea-Party periodical....

To be clear, this isn't telling you that the richest people in America live one commute from D.C.  In fact, parts of Connecticut, New York, and California are much, much richer than the richest parts of the Greater DC Area. Instead, it's telling you that these counties, of varying sizes, have the highest median income, because there is a striking concentration of high-earning (if not quite vertiginously rich) households around the district.

On the Virginia side, Falls Church City (#1 richest county in the country) is enveloped by Arlington (#7) and east rim of Fairfax County (#5), which borders Loudoun (#2) on its west side. From Loudoun, you pass south through Prince William (#13) to Stafford (#9).

In Maryland, encircling Washington, you have, clockwise from the noon position, Montgomery (#12), Howard (#4),  Anne Arundel (#24), Calvert (#23), St. Mary's (#29), ​and Charles (#18). All of these counties border each other, forming a kind of reverse-C (or Hebrew Fe) around the District.

A staggering amount of the money we send to Washington D.C. stays there.   (We send it there because all truly civilized societies provide welfare, safety nets, free educations, free transportation, and free internet wireless, or so they tell us....)

So.... Is the system working? 

The Greatest Achievement In History

From the great Arthur Brooks, of The American Enterprise Institute:

The achievement shown on this chart is possibly the greatest accomplishment in history.

"What did it? The United Nations? US foreign aid? The International Monetary Fund? Central planning?
No.
It was globalization, free trade, the boom in international entrepreneurship. In short, it was the free enterprise system, American style, which is our gift to the world.
I will state, assert and defend the statement that if you love the poor, if you are a good Samaritan, you must stand for the free enterprise system, and you must defend it, not just for ourselves but for people around the world.
It is the best anti-poverty measure ever invented."

(And we did it by not really trying!  If you keep the bureaucrats, academics, government munchkins, and other trolls busy chasing their tails, there is no limit to human accomplishment.) 
 

Why you'll never hear The Idiot talk about REAL income inequality

Check out this chart.  All of the numbers are adjusted for inflation. 

It compares the kickoff of LBJ's War On Poverty income stats to those of 2009.  (And yeah, the Evil 1% somehow started doing a lot better in 2009 when Obama got elected.  I wish I had those numbers on here.) 

Everyone is doing better than they were.  Granted, they would be doing better if LBJ had never been born, because trillions and trillions were wasted on redundant government programs rather than productive industry and services. 

But seriously.... are the numbers on that chart something to get worked up over? 

Go here to read the article from which these stats came. 

Let's move on. 

Do you earn more than $34,000 per year? 

Then you are in the Evil 1%.  Yes.  If you pull in 34K, you are in the top 1% of earners in the world. 

When The Idiot gives his next State Of The Union speech, he won't mention this.  He will only talk about income inequality amongst U.S. voters, and how if more power is given to Team Blue, he'll spread around high income voters' stuff a lot more. 

Barack Obama will never, ever mention how our (relatively) free market capitalist system has so many of us so far ahead of the rest of the world that we sometimes think we're in last place. 

But check it out, from Dave Ramsey.  Yeah, $34,000 puts you in the Evil 1%. 

And if you only earn enough to be considered "poor" in the USA, you could still be in the Evil 14%. 

Worldwide average income is probably someplace between $6,000 and $7,000 per year. 

How much inequality do you really want to eliminate?  Do you want to help the poor starving bastards in North Korea by giving their government all but $7,000 of your income?  Or had you rather see a rising tide of Free Market Capitalism lift every boat in the harbor? 

Libertarians just want to turn back the clock....

Engage an old leftie in political conversation, and he'll eventually resort to one of his favorite clichés.... 

"Libertarians just want to turn back the clock to a time when....." 

Insert: Black people were slaves.  Women were cattle.  The Lord Of The Manor had a right to your wife's virginity on the wedding night.  The Koch brothers could hollow out a volcano and plot to destroy your bibles with a death ray. 

Here's how I've  responded to that line. 

You're damn right I want to turn back the clock. 

LBJ famously declared War On Poverty fifty years ago today.  If you've read this blog for any time at all, you know that poverty was dying nicely without government help, but poverty made a full and complete recovery as soon as government tried to kill it. 

So yeah, we want to turn back the clock on this debacle to 1964 and start over.  (I don't think anyone has charted the depths which poverty has hit in the later years of the Obama administration.  Too depressing.) 

Speaking of taking a mulligan, how much do you owe?  I'm not talking about your debt on your house or your Amex, or your car, or your student loan bill. 

How freakin' huge is your share of what Obama is spending?  If you're a smart person and not even bothering to work any more, your share of the government's fifty-year spending spree is only around $50,000.00.  If you're one of the dwindling number of net taxpayers, your share is around $100,000.00.

Would you like to turn back the clock and make a few changes in this?  (BTW, the debt is now close to 17 trillion.  Remember the good old days shown here, when it was only 10 trillion?) 

Let's move on.  would you like to earn a dollar and be able to keep the dollar for longer than a few minutes without it losing value? 

The Federal Reserve was given the job of stabilizing the money supply way back in 1913.  Here's what has happened to the value of a dollar (as determined by the money supply) since 1971.  The red line represents the inflation rate - AKA the increase money supply. 

Want to invent a time machine, turn back the clock, and for the sake of everyone on a fixed income tell Tricky Dicky Nixon  to leave us on the gold standard? 

Let's move on to Nixon's dirty little War On Drugs, and what it's done to the incarceration rate.  (BTW, a white woman has a one in 111 chance of going to jail at some point in her life.  But for a black dude, it's a one in 3 chance.) 

Want to turn back the clock and convince Nixon that his War On Drugs is a bad idea?  Or is wanting to turn back the clock, under any circumstances, a sign that someone is a racist reactionary? 

Let's dive into that one a little further.  Here's a chart of the drug addiction rate vs the amount of Drug War spending....

Has it worked? 
No. 
Are we going to keep doing it? 
Well, do Barack and the Democrats rely on Narc, Jailer, DEA, Homeland Security, Torturer, Prison Contractor and Police Force votes to get elected? 
Yes. 
That's why we're going to keep doing this crap.  But check out the chart....

Speaking of wasted money....  Spending on public education has tripled since the early 1970's, and test scores are still flatter than the Global Warming trendline. 

Yes.  I'm guilty. 

I want to turn back the clock to somewhere around 1970 and say NO.  Please do not do this stupid crap.  Let people keep their own money because government will waste it. 
I'd rather see the money burned than see Washington D.C. misuse it for wars, bureaucracy, red tape and social programs that have done more harm than good. 
Don't burden people with your social engineering schemes, because they're not going to work.  You bureaucrats really aren't that smart. 

Libertarians want to turn back the clock.

Do you? 

Are you better off than a Vanderbilt?

Bryan Caplan, of the Library Of Economics And Liberty, just returned from the massive Biltmore estate, George Vanderbilt's massive North Carolina palace.

But how many  (of us) would actually want to trade places with George? Despite his massive library, (pipe) organ, and so on, I submit that any modern with a laptop and an internet connection has a vastly better book and music collection than he did. For all his riches, he didn't have air conditioning; he had to suffer through the North Carolina summers just like the poorest of us. Vanderbilt did travel the world, but without the airplane, he had to do so at a snail's pace.

Caplan goes on to write that Vanderbilt died at age 51 because of complications from an appendectomy.  Yeah.  An appendectomy.  He continues:

Vanderbilt clearly had it better than most of the people in his era. But the world has improved so much that, all things considered, the average American is now better off than this prince of the Gilded Age. I can't be sure, but I bet that George would have agreed. How much do you think he would have paid to live for a single day in your shoes?

Here's Radley Balko, commenting on his own trip to the Biltmore estate a few years ago....

Hackneyed libertarian observation: I couldn’t help but think that in most ways the average American today lives better than a baron like Vanderbilt did just a century ago, even by Biltmore standards.

Okay, so I don’t have awesome mountain views and milion-dollar tapestries in my one-bedroom Alexandria apartment. But much of what made the Biltmore so modern for its time — a swimming pool, a bowling alley, plumbing, a “fitness room,” elevators, refrigeration — most all of us at least have access to today. There aren’t many periods in human history when you can say that within a hundred years, that average man will live as “royalty” does.


Let's combine that with some census data about what the poorest Americans own:

% Households with:	Poor 1984	Poor  1994	Poor 2003	Poor 2005	All 1971	All 2005
Washing machine	58.2	71.7	67.0	68.7	71.3	84.0
Clothes dryer	35.6	50.2	58.5	61.2	44.5	81.2
Dishwasher	13.6	19.6	33.9	36.7	18.8	64.0
Refrigerator	95.8	97.9	98.2	98.5	83.3	99.3
Freezer	29.2	28.6	25.4	25.1	32.2	36.6
Stove	95.2	97.7	97.1	97.0	87.0	98.8
Microwave	12.5	60.0	88.7	91.2	1.0	96.4
Color TV	70.3	92.5	96.8	97.4	43.3	98.9
VCR	3.4	59.7	75.4	83.6	0.0	92.2
Personal computer	2.9	7.4	36.0	42.4	0.0	67.1
Telephone	71.0	76.7	87.3	79.8	93.0	90.6
Air conditioner	42.5	49.6	77.7	78.8	31.8	85.7
Cellular Telephone			34.7	48.3	0.0	71.3
One or more cars	64.1	71.8	72.8 (2001)		79.5

These numbers were compiled by The Austrian Economists.  Here are more observations from The Austrians:

I think these data largely speak for themselves. The only categories where the poor have become "worse off" are in freezers (likely due to more being built into fridges) and now telephones, which is, of course, explained by the gains in cell phones. Stoves are down slightly, but that too could be due to swapping regular stoves for microwaves or even toaster ovens. In any case, it's a pretty small decline.


The overall lesson is clear: lives for Americans below the poverty line continue to get better in terms of what they are able to put in their households and have to make use of everyday. And do note that the average American household in 2005 was doing much better than its 1971 counterpart. MUCH better - and this doesn't even count medical advances and the like. So whatever one hears about stagnating wages and the like, the bottom line is ultimately what we can afford to buy and have in our households to improve our lives. By those measures, life for the average American is better today than 35 years ago, life for poor Americans is much better than it was 35 years ago, and poor Americans today largely live better than the average American did 35 years ago. Hard to square with a narrative of economic stagnation or decline.

What the current policy regime holds for the future remains, of course, to be seen. But to use Pete's terms: as long as the Schumpeterian horse of innovation and the Smithian horse of the gains from trade outrun the Government horse of stupidity, the winners will continue to be you, me and our children and grandchildren, even if the stupid horse is running a bit faster than it used to.

So the next time one of our government employees starts talking about the widening gap between the lowest 20% and the highest 5%, remember this.....

1) With every new innovation, somebody got to own it first.  This applies to iPads, microwaves, video cameras (once the $35,000.00 Christmas gift in the Neiman-Marcus catalog), televisions, cell phones and plumbing. 
2) You can't prevent the top 5% from owning something without slowing its eventual use by the bottom 20%.
3) Free Market Capitalism has done more to improve the lives of more people than any Statist scheme ever devised. 

Jesus and The Rich Young Ruler and Mandatory Compassion Outsourcing

Many of you are probably familiar with the story of The Rich Young Ruler: A guy comes up to Jesus and asks "What do I have to do to be saved?" Jesus says "Take what you have, sell it, and give the money to the poor". The guy sadly walks away, because he has lots of money that he doesn't want to part with.

That entire story is a mistranslation from the original Greek. I've spent the last 6 months working on this. I don't know how these textual errors have lasted for 2000 years, but I've set it all straight.
This is from Matthew 19:16-22.

16 Now a man came up to Jesus and asked, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to get eternal life?"

17 "Why do you ask me about what is good?" Jesus replied. "There is only One who is good. If you want to enter life, obey the commandments."

18 "Which ones?" the man inquired. Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony....

19 ....honor your father and mother, and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'

20 "All these I have kept," the young man said. "What do I still lack?"

21 Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, lobby for Hope and Change. Set up large programs administered by your government, in which other people are forced to give up their money to fulfill your agenda. Keep a lot of this money for yourself. Dole it out to your favorites. Give nothing of your own, for you know best how to use it, and nothing feels better than spending other people's money. Ensure that the multitudes retain their dependent victim status, and that they will be with you always. For such is the Kingdom Of God."
22 When the young man heard this, he went away rejoicing, for none of this would cost him a dime.

I'm sure that all of you are relieved to learn this. This new interpretation relieves you of all personal responsibility, and puts the burden on others.
I've found other passages that have been mis-interpreted, and I'll be getting to them later.

The painting of Jesus and the Rich Young Ruler came from here.