Why We're Really Winning the War on Poverty

Darek Thompson writhing in The Atlantic (emphasis mine):

In the forty years between 1970 and 2010, real GDP per person doubled, the U.S. spent trillions of dollars on anti-poverty measures, but the poverty rate increased by two percentage points. Just yesterday the Census reported 46.2 million people living in poverty in 2011.

That's the official story. But a new paper from Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan says it's missing everything. "We may not have won the war on poverty, but we are certainly winning," they write.

When they looked at poorer families' consumption rather than income, accounted for changes in the tax code that benefit the poor, and included "noncash benefits" such as food stamps and government-provided medical care, they found poverty fell 12.5 percentage points between 1972 and 2010.

The graph [above] tells the story. The official poverty rate (shown in DARK BLUE) is higher today than it was in the early 1970s. But when you measure after-tax income (RED) or consumption (GREEN), the story changes: Poverty rates have declined steadily, and dramatically, since the 1960s.

Read the whole thing.