For about 50 years we’ve been fighting a war on poverty. Initially, the poverty rate declined, before the start of the war on poverty. But over the last four decades the poverty rate has gone up and down, but is largely unchanged over this period. Spending on welfare programs, however, has continually risen, and rapidly in the past few years. The accompanying chart shows the poverty rate and welfare spending. The spending is per person in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, and doesn’t include spending on health care.
For more on this topic, see:
The American Welfare State: How We Spend Nearly $1 Trillion a Year Fighting Poverty — and Fail (Cato Institute)
Examining the Means-tested Welfare State: 79 Programs and $927 Billion in Annual Spending (Heritage Foundation)
The Failure Of The War On Poverty (FreedomWorks)
Does Welfare Diminish Poverty? (Foundation for Economic Education)