Perhaps the most stunning consequence of social welfare policies over the past 50 years is the gains made against poverty among seniors, and the comparative lack of progress for children.
Social Security and Medicare (and to a lesser extent Medicaid) have helped to bring the poverty rate for Americans 65 and older way down, from 28.5 percent in 1966 to about 9 percent in 2012.
Even as the US population has grown by 60 percent, the number of seniors in poverty has fallen from 5 million to fewer than 4 million.
Yet child poverty has hardly budged in the Census data. The poverty rate was actually higher in 2012 for people high school age or younger (at 21.8 percent) than in 1966 (when the rate was 17.6 percent).
Those raw numbers may belie the progress that’s been made. Parrott says the introduction of food stamps, arriving nationally during the 1970s, helped to drive down rates of severe malnutrition among children that “in some poor areas [had been] akin to Third World countries.”
Although poverty remained, by the late 1970s “severe child malnutrition and related health conditions were rare,” she writes.
Although the likelihood of a child being in poverty has edged up compared with 1966, children today make up a smaller share of all poor people now than back then (about one-third of the poor now, versus about 43 percent in 1966). The reason is that children make up a smaller share of the overall population. Where more than one-third of Americans were younger than 18 in 1966, today that figure is less than one-fourth.
Among working-age Americans, poverty has edged up. Some 13.7 percent of these Americans were poor in 2012, compared with 10.5 percent in 1966. This number had dipped in the 1970s and 1980s, then rose to about 11 percent before the recession deepened in 2008.
One factor behind this trend is the difficult job-market conditions facing men with low or obsolete work skills. A declining share of working-age men have jobs (although the proportion remains a relatively high 74 percent). Fourteen percent of them worked year-round for below-poverty wages in 2012, says Parrott, compared with 10 percent who did in 1973.
