ABSTRACT
The early 1960s witnessed a large and sudden increase in the concern of Americans about problems of economic poverty and disparities among blacks and whites, old and young, rural and urban, sick and well, South and North. The flow of income transfers and in-kind benefits to poor people has been documented, and the substantial contribution of antipoverty programmes to the well-being of low income families is now accepted. Many channels exist through which anti-poverty policies, and social welfare measures more generally, affect the non-poor population. To estimate the size of each of the impacts on the non-poor population over the 1965-1980 period, it is necessary to decide how much of the increase in Social Welfare Expenditures (SWE) should be legitimately attributed to the anti-poverty policies that began in the 1960s. A far more conservative possibility would assume that the demographic trends and equity-based concerns that were already in evidence in the period before 1965 continued apace in the post-1965 period.
