The economy is not "awesome", but neither is it horrible. The truth is somewhere inbetween. It's improving. The number most are looking at is unemployment. It's back down to pre-COVID levels. Which is good. Obviously, poverty is bad.

Poverty (in terms of percent) has actually held pretty steady since the mid-60s. Which is surprising to me, but there's the chart:

census.gov - Poverty awareness month

This implies the "War on Poverty" didn't do much, because poverty was already on the decline before that "War" was declared. Which also is a bit surprising. But maybe it shouldn't be that surprising. "War on <fill in the blank>" never really works out. We throw money at it, politicians spout about it, but it doesn't really change the numbers that much.

Of course, the poverty level (i.e. what we consider 'poverty') has changed over the years, and they didn't put any error bars on that chart. But it's probably "close enough".