Abstract
AbstractThere has been a growing discussion in recent years about rising inequality in the U.S. Yet, this discourse, in focusing on the fortunes of the top 1%, distracted attention from the design of policy initiatives aimed at improving socio-economic conditions for the poor. This paper examines the development of anti-poverty politics and policy in the US during the Obama era. It analyses how effective the strategies and programmes adopted were and asks how they fit with models of policy change. The paper illustrates that the Obama administration did adopt an array of anti-poverty measures in the stimulus bill, but these built on existing programmes rather than create new ones and much of the effort was stymied by institutional obstacles. The expansion of the Medicaid program, which was part of the ACA, was also muted by institutional opposition, but it was a more path breaking reform than is often appreciated.
Highlights
In 2014, President Barack Obama marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty with a statement outlining the successes of government action in reducing poverty in the United States (Obama, 2014), but Obama’s own administration rarely employed language that explicitly talked about poverty as a problem to be addressed per se (Daguerre, 2017; Fording and Smith, 2012)
By the end of Obama’s tenure, using adjusted numbers that tried to take into account households likely under-reporting benefits they received, the Center for Budget Policy and Priorities (CBPP) had increased its estimate of people kept out of poverty in 2010, as a result of ARRA and other Obama administration efforts, to 8.9 million (Sherman, 2016)
One feature of U.S social policy is the lack of any federal level experimentation with universal social programs for the non-elderly that captures the poor as part of an inclusive social safety net (Béland and Waddan, 2017)
Summary
In 2014, President Barack Obama marked the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s declaration of a War on Poverty with a statement outlining the successes of government action in reducing poverty in the United States (Obama, 2014), but Obama’s own administration rarely employed language that explicitly talked about poverty as a problem to be addressed per se (Daguerre, 2017; Fording and Smith, 2012). This paper shifts the emphasis back to poverty and looks at the actions taken by the Obama administration, using the tools of social policy, to provide respite to the most economically vulnerable Americans How successful were these actions in reducing poverty and the immediate economic insecurities associated with poverty in the United States? Data and Analysis As Obama entered the White House the Great Recession was reaping economic disruption with the threadbare U.S social welfare safety net ill prepared to take the strain In this context, the paper documents how the Obama administration, working with congressional Democrats, engaged with an array of efforts to expand the capacity of existing programs to secure the safety net more tightly. In 2008, according to the long established official poverty measure there were 39.83 million Americans in poverty, amounting to 13.2 percent of the population, and by 2014 those numbers had increased to 46.66 million and 14.8 percent (U.S Census Bureau, 2015)
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