June 27, 2014
The NYT had an interesting piece on the persistence of poverty in eastern Kentucky and rural areas more generally. However the piece is seriously misleading when it refers to “the trillions of dollars spent to improve the state of the poor in the United States and promote development.” This comment would likely lead readers to believe that we are spending large amounts of money on anti-poverty programs. That is a very questionable claim.
Current spending on TANF, the main federal anti-poverty program is $17.4 billion, less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget. The budget for food stamps, which do not go exclusively to the poor, is around $75 billion or a bit less than 2.0 percent of federal spending. Other anti-poverty programs account for a considerably smaller share of federal spending.
In prior decades anti-poverty programs accounted for a larger share of the budget, but it is misleading to imply that they have ever been a major drain on the public’s tax dollar. Anti-poverty programs have always been dwarfed by spending on the military and social insurance programs like Social Security (which does have an enormous impact on poverty).
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