Matt Yglesias posts a good chart of the changing poverty demographics over the past forty years: Poverty declines sharply for seniors. For families
“„[P]overty among seniors declining thanks to Great Society expansion of retirement support programs. The other is a jump in poverty for non-seniors during the 1978-82 period that persisted throughout the Reagan-Bush years. This was in part driven by an increase in the proportion of female-headed households without husbands, but the same pattern appears withinthat subset. We then had a giant reduction in poverty among this group in the 1990s which was a combination of strong economic performance, “welfare reform,” and also the fact that the Clinton administration really wanted to make welfare reform work so threw lots of stuff — EITC expansion, SCHIP, etc. — at making it work. Then we saw a slow, steady erosion of that progress.