The governments official statistics on the rate of poverty prove you wrong. This census.gov website shows poverty on the decline from 1959 until 1969, when the spending on entitlements really took off. Since 1969, the rate of poverty is up. Sorry, you're just wrong.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/figure4.pdf
So, I ask again, if you're so enamored with the rate of poverty between the enactment of the GS in 1964 and 1969, are you good with our going back to that level of entitlement spending? If no, why not?
Reported for slicing and dicing a comment, the whole of which you need to argue. The whole comment is "There was no long term decline, except in poverty for the elderly, and that was because of Social Security." You cannot argue any long term decline or not from 1959. That makes reason stare. Also you are mistaking total numbers for the percentages. Go back and look, please, at your own stats.
Then you lack the ability to read a simple line graph. The poverty rate was 22-23% in 1959, when we began to collect official stats on poverty. By 1964, when we signed GS laws, it was 17%. How is that not a long term decline?
You lack the simple ability to understand that measuring poverty was a journey, not an absolute. It wasn't just throwing a switch and voila, we have numbers. Early figures were raw and less reliable as the definition of poverty and the methods for measuring poverty were being developed for statistical purposes. The major of data is gathered by the US Census, which happens every 10 years, so in 1959, the census data was a decade old. It wasn't until 1965 that the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity adopted the SSA thresholds as a working definition of poverty. There is no data available from 1960 to 1966 for those age 65 or older.
Current Measure
During the mid-1960s, Mollie Orshansky, an economist and statistician at the Social Security Administration (SSA), began publishing articles with poverty statistics for the United States, using a poverty measure that she had developed. Like any poverty measure, Orshansky's had two componentsa set of poverty lines or income thresholds, and a definition of family income to be compared with those thresholds.
Orshansky developed her poverty thresholds by taking the cost of a minimum adequate diet for families of different sizes and multiplying the cost by three to allow for other expenses. (The minimum diet she used was the Economy Food Plan, the cheapest of four food plans issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The factor of three was derived from a 1955 Agriculture Department survey.) Poor families were those whose yearly income was below the threshold for a family of a given size. She intended that the method be used for research, not to determine eligibility for antipoverty programs.
For the base year 1963, Orshansky's weighted average poverty threshold for a family of four was $3,128. She used the Census Bureau's definition of incomebefore-tax money income.
In 1965, the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity adopted the SSA thresholds as a working definition of poverty for statistical purposes and for program planning. In 1969, the U.S. Bureau of the Budget (now the U.S. Office of Management and Budget) issued a directive that made the thresholds the federal government's official statistical definition of poverty.
In 1967, the Census Bureau began to publish annual poverty statistics calculating the number and percentage of persons in poverty (the poverty population and the poverty rate) by comparing the Orshansky thresholds to families' before-tax money income, using data from the Current Population Survey that is taken every year in March. For these tabulations, the thresholds are updated annually for price changes and so are not changed in real (constant-dollar) terms; in other words, the 2009 weighted average poverty threshold of $21,954 for a family of four represents the same purchasing power as the corresponding 1963 threshold of $3,128.
In 2005, the Census Bureau fully implemented a new survey, the largest household survey in the United States, called the American Community Survey (ACS). The ACS collects detailed demographic, socioeconomic, and housing information, like the long-form questionnaire of the Decennial Census, from about 3 million addresses per year.
