Today's Liberal News

Anne Kim

The Rise of Poverty Inc.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared “unconditional war on poverty,” and since then, federal spending on anti-poverty initiatives has steadily ballooned. The federal government now devotes hundreds of billions of dollars a year to programs that exclusively or disproportionately benefit low-income Americans, including housing subsidies, food stamps, welfare, and tax credits for working poor families. (This is true even if you exclude Medicaid, the single-biggest such program.