Today's US Poor Do Not Resemble The Poor Of 50 Years Ago: Overwhelming Majority Of Today's Poor Were Not Hungry For Even One Day Last Year: Live In An Air-Conditioned Home That Is Larger Than The Average Home In France, Germany Or England: Have A Car, TVs, A Dvd Player And Cable TV: Half Have Computers And A Third Have Flat-Screen TVs

From The Wall Street Journal, Opinion, "Robert Rector: How the War on Poverty Was Lost: Fifty years and $20 trillion later, LBJ's goal to help the poor become self-supporting has failed." by Robert Rector:

Not even government, though, can spend $9,000 per recipient a year and have no impact on living standards. And it shows: Current poverty has little resemblance to poverty 50 years ago. According to a variety of government sources, including census data and surveys by federal agencies, the typical American living below the poverty level in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. His home is larger than the home of the average nonpoor French, German or English man. He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player. More than half the poor have computers and a third have wide, flat-screen TVs. The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.

Do higher living standards for the poor mean that the war on poverty has succeeded? No. To judge the effort, consider LBJ's original aim. He sought to give poor Americans "opportunity not doles," planning to shrink welfare dependence not expand it. In his vision, the war on poverty would strengthen poor Americans' capacity to support themselves, transforming "taxeaters" into "taxpayers." It would attack not just the symptoms of poverty but, more important, remove the causes.

By that standard, the war on poverty has been a catastrophe. The root "causes" of poverty have not shrunk but expanded as family structure disintegrated and labor-force participation among men dropped. A large segment of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than when the war on poverty began.