War On Poverty

Citation:

Matthews, Dylan. "Everything You Need to Know about the War on Poverty."Wonkblog (8 Jan. 2014):              n. pag. The Washington Post. The Washington Post. Web. 1 Mar. 2016.

Summary:

This is a newsletter written by Dylan Matthews called "Everything you need to know about the war on poverty". It details the birth of the war on poverty and traces its activity from its inception to the present day. It was originally created as a movement by president Johnson in order to revers the increasing rate of poverty in America. In this movement, the programs for increased social security, medicaid, medicare, and food stamps were kick-started. These programs greatly reduced the number of people that lived on nothing and began a decrease in the overall rate of poverty. The back end of the newsletter compares statistics that show this decrease over time thanks to these programs, which proves that the war on poverty is working because of government intervention. 

Evaluation:

This newsletter was particularly useful and authoritative because it outlined the history of the war on poverty movement, which was based entirely off of historical facts. Afterwards there was a focus on the effects of the war on poverty and these were supported by charts and statistics. The author even went so far as to say that some statistics are not entirely accurate and listed the reasons why before providing something more accurate. The author communicated with a descriptive tone, as if telling a story in a specific chronological order, which helped to support the newsletter with structure. There is no telling if the author had any personal experience in either life or research too, but he uses research and historical facts to a degree that he seems justified in his writing anyway. However, that doesn't mean he is not biased. Whether he meant to or not, he does make one clear assertion. The war on poverty is working because the rate of poverty is decreasing. To back this up he used graphs and statistics. He did say that some evidence may not be accurate but did not provide such evidence. This suggests that he picked the evidence he did provide specifically to strengthen his assertion.