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The Great Society: Not So Great
...The key things to remember here are the LBJ launched the Great Society in 1964, and Ronald Reagan was inaugurated in 1981. Policies tend to take a year or two to go into effect, so the earliest changes we could plausibly credit to LBJ and Reagan are those that occurred after 1965 and 1982, respectively.

So what I see in this data is a period of steadily falling policy that began long before the Great Society. Unfortunately, we don’t have comparable pre-1959 data, so we can’t see how things looked during the 1950s, but my understanding is that the poverty rate had been falling steadily for decades before the Great Society was inaugurated. But in any event, something was already causing poverty to fall before LBJ announced his Great Society, and the best we can say is that his programs may have slightly accelerated the process.

But the thing about this graph that really undermines Matt’s story is the 1980s. The poverty rate hit bottom in 1978, increased sharply between 1979 and 1982, and then declined steadily, if slowly, from 1983 to 1989. If we’re going to be assigning blame based on eyeballing graphs (and again, I’m skeptical), surely the blame for this particular spike goes to the Carter administration, not “12 years of conservative rule.” The poverty rate in 1982, the first year we can attribute to Reagan policies, was virtually identical to the poverty rate in 1993, the last year we can attribute to Bush....