Britain's War on Poverty

8. Lessons for the United States and Other Countries

Chapter 8 Lessons for the United States and Other Countries B ritain’s war on child poverty is relevant not only for Britain but also for other countries that, in spite of their overall wealth, still face child poverty. This is particularly true of the United States, where, in spite of progress in the 1990s, child poverty rates remain stubbornly high and indeed reached a ten­year high in 2009. Reflecting this stalled progress in reducing child poverty is a wave of attention to poverty in the United States in the past few years that is unlike anything seen since the War on Poverty of the 1960s.1 As discussed in this chapter, the new U.S. antipoverty campaigns include local efforts led by mayors such as Michael Bloomberg in New York City, as well as national campaigns by groups such as the Center for American Progress. Reflecting this new wave of at­ tention and echoing the British pledge, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution in 2008 calling on the United States to cut poverty in half in ten years, a goal that Barack Obama endorsed during his presiden­ tial campaign.2 With the United States taking these kinds of steps toward what might be a new commitment to ending child poverty, this is an opportune mo­ ment to identify lessons from the British experience. Such lessons may also be relevant to reformers in other countries. Child poverty is on the agenda in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which have cited the antipoverty campaign in Britain as an example.3 Members of the Euro­ pean Union—which, as we saw in chapter 6, experienced increases in poverty at the start of the twenty­first century—have also been renewing their focus on child poverty.4 These countries too can learn from the Brit­ ish experience. Of course, there are many differences between countries, and we can­ not simply extrapolate from the experience of one country to another. In drawing out lessons from the British experience, we must be mindful of the specific context in that country and how it differs from other coun­ tries. However, just as lessons have been learned in the United States from welfare reforms in specific states (or indeed, in Canada), lessons can be drawn from the British reforms. We also have to be mindful of the current Lessons for the United states and other coUntries 167 economic context: the world is still in the grips of a major economic down­ turn. At the same time, however, the economic pressures make the need to identify and implement effective antipoverty policies all the more ur­ gent. the Start of a new war on poverty in the united StateS and other countrieS? The closing years of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty­first century saw a resurgence of interest in tackling child poverty in the United States as well as in other advanced industrialized countries that, in spite of their wealth, still have substantial numbers of children living in poverty. Although none have gone as far as Britain in establishing a goal for reducing child poverty and committing resources to meet that goal, there are signs in the United States and other countries of heightened at­ tention to the issue of child poverty. In the United States, President Barack Obama was elected on a plat­ form that stressed increasing supports for working families and middle­ class families (which in the United States is a broad category that often includes the working poor), as well as increased investments in children. Like Tony Blair when he came into office in 1997, Obama leads a party that has been out of office for some time and that has a number of pov­ erty­related initiatives it is eager to enact. Just prior to the election in 2008, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi convened a Children’s Summit, which, like the reviews convened by the Treasury in Britain, was a forum for fo­ cusing the attention of legislators and policymakers on children and on programs that might address child poverty. Obama took office in January 2009 in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Several of the measures that he and Congress implemented to address that economic crisis have involved ex­ panding programs (such as unemployment insurance and food stamps) that particularly benefit low­income families with children. Indeed, the stimulus package contained many of the anti­poverty policies...