This series has reviewed Biden’s dismal record with regards to subsidies, inflation, protectionism, household income, fiscal policy, red tape, and employment.
Today, let’s add poverty to the mix.
We’ll start with a very depressing chart from Kevin Hassett about worsening poverty in the United States.
The chart appeared in National Review. Here are some excerpts from the accompanying article.
…the latest poverty figures…extremely grim. Inflation makes the purchase of necessities more costly, forcing those with less means to make difficult trade-offs. Poverty and deprivation can also create secondary effects driven by despair or necessity. …overall poverty increased in the short period between 2021 and 2022 from 7.8 percent of the U.S. population to 12.4 percent. While that top-line number is a stunning increase, the cross-sectional detail of the numbers highlights that specific groups have been hit harder than others. Female-headed households saw their poverty rate increase from 11.7 percent to 22.6 percent. Individuals without a high-school education saw their poverty increase from 19.7 to 29.7 percent. …Why the big jump? …When goods get more costly, the same amount of income gets spread thinner and thinner. While income could in principle rise to offset the higher cost of goods, that did not happen on average… The inflationary policies that contributed to the crisis were driven recently by President Biden and the Democrats… The latest numbers are only through 2022, and they likely worsened in 2023.
Kevin points out that some of the increase in poverty was caused by reduced redistribution (such as no more pandemic-era “stimulus” goodies and presumably no more per-child handouts).
So it would be interesting to find out if there was a breakdown of how much poverty rose for a bad reason (declining inflation-adjusted income) and how much it rose for a different reason (fewer goodies from Uncle Sam).
The goal, of course, is so have poverty decline because of economic growth and people becoming self-sufficient. It’s not progress, though, if poverty falls simply because people get a lot of handouts (something Biden used to understand).
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Image credit: Gage Skidmore | CC BY-SA 2.0.
