Near-Record Poverty Levels Sparks New Debate

President Johnson signs the Medicaid Bill,
a key component of the War on Poverty

Should we rekindle the highly-successful War on Poverty?

“To have hit 15.1 per cent is truly extraordinary,” said Alice O’Connor, a professor who studies poverty at the University of California, Santa Barbara [and is the author of the definitive work on 20th century poverty abatement, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in Twentieth-Century U.S. History.]

“We are entering territory which looks like the period before we even started fighting a ‘War on Poverty’ in the 1960s. It’s quite stunning. This is a terrible statement about the depths of the Great Recession but, even more, about the recovery, which has clearly left the poorest out completely.”