The Persistence of Poverty: Another Perspective

In my previous column, I lamented how the poverty rate in the United States has remained range-bound between 11 and 15 percent ever since the War on Poverty was launched in the 1960s.

On Aug. 21, economist and former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm and John F. Early, former assistant commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “Americans Are Richer Than We Think” (an article I highly recommend). Among the authors’ assertions is that the incidence of poverty in the United States is a...