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Entrenched interests would have us believe it is inevitable, natural, complicated, and too expensive to eliminate. Don't be fooled.
The 50th anniversary of the War on Poverty brought with it the usual spate of tie-in books, scholarly conferences, and political debate. As the dust settles on the anniversary, the country's continuing conversation about poverty hasn't advanced much, largely because the event became an occasion to recirculate old and deeply problematic myths.
The old myths were trotted out despite some important new books that should have worked to dispel them. Most notably, Martha J. Bailey and Sheldon Danziger have recently released Legacies of the War on Poverty (Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), arguably the definitive analysis of what worked and what didn't, how our most cherished poverty-fighting institutions had their roots in that war, and why the expansive goals set out by President Johnson may yet be met. Likewise, Sasha Abramsky's The American Way of Poverty (Nation Books, 2013) is another fact-rich treatment of the peculiar features of U.S. poverty, a book that nicely tells it like it is.
But these books, important though they are, don't provide fundamentally new recipes for fighting poverty. To be fair, Legacies is more about evaluating where we stand than about developing a way out, while The American Way is healthily realistic about what's politically feasible at the moment, and thus settles for an agenda that, for the most part, puts existing policies on steroids rather than considering fundamental reform.
If we're serious about winning a second War on Poverty, however, we need to shake off the shackles of the seemingly realistic. The first step in doing so is to lay bare some common myths about what can be done.
Myth No. 1: Poverty is immutable. If one had to identify the single most vexing myth about poverty, most scholars would likely point to the oft-repeated claim that nothing can be done because, no matter what programs the country has thrown at the problem, the poverty rate remains intransigently high. As Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, put it, "After 50 years, isn't it time to declare big government's war on poverty a failure?" This type of claim is typically trumped up with official poverty data showing that, while the amount...