1fAWAwx

deep market poverty driven by the business cycle, there is little if any rise in
actual deep poverty due to the supports provided by the safety net.
Again, this phenomenon is especially visible during the Great
Recession, when the prevalence of deep poverty ticked upward by only 0.2
percentage points despite an increase in market deep poverty of 3.3 percentage
points. This corresponds to more than 9.5 million men, women, and
children prevented from living below half the poverty line during the Great
Recession. Over the 45 years shown in Figure 6-6, deep “market poverty”
actually rises from 14.9 to 18.8 percent. Despite that increase, the fraction of
those in deep poverty fell from 8.2 to 5.3 percent.
The Role of Antipoverty Programs: A Closer Look
This section presents further detail on antipoverty effects of specific
components of the safety net. In particular, it highlights the impact that
different groups of programs—cash transfers, in-kind transfers, and tax
credits—have on the poverty rates of different age groups. It also shows how
the relative importance of programs for nonelderly adults and children has
changed since the start of the War on Poverty.
The section then refutes the concern critics have raised that the existence
of safety net programs may undermine growth in market incomes as
well as our efforts to fight poverty. The social safety net has increasingly
been designed to reward and facilitate work increasing participation rates—
in many cases, requiring work. Even where programs are not explicitly
designed to require work, the highest-quality studies suggest that adverse
earnings effects of safety net programs are nonexistent or very small, in part
due to reforms over the past two decades that, for example, have phased out
benefits gradually with increases in earnings to minimize disincentives to
work.
Finally, this section presents findings on the level of economic mobility
of individuals born into poverty in the United States, and the results of
recent research showing the potentially large returns to social spending in
terms of long-term outcomes of children in families receiving support.
Antipoverty Effects of Specific Programs
This section illustrates the role that various antipoverty programs
have had in improving the well-being of different populations, and how the
relative impacts of these programs have evolved since the War on Poverty
began. It is based on an effectively “static” analysis that zeroes out income
derived from various public programs to ask what effect this would have on
The War On Poverty 50 Years Later: A Progress Report | 245