Poverty has declined, though by less than the White House says
“TWO years ago Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, argued that Americans ‘are no better off today than they were before the war on poverty began in 1964’. The poverty rate, he explained, stood at 15%—the same as in the mid-1960s. Last month the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) reached a completely different conclusion. The war on poverty, it proclaimed, was ‘largely over and a success’, with only 3% of Americans now poor. Clearly, both cannot be right. In fact, neither is.”