{"id":41010,"date":"2014-01-08T13:07:41","date_gmt":"2014-01-08T19:07:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41010"},"modified":"2014-01-08T13:08:08","modified_gmt":"2014-01-08T19:08:08","slug":"the-american-quagmire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41010","title":{"rendered":"The American Quagmire"},"content":{"rendered":"

This year, as the National Review’s<\/em> editors remind us, is the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of war on…poverty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, poverty – which had been dropping steadily since the end of World War 2, as the US enjoyed an unprecedented period of economic supremacy after the war – rose after Johnson “declared war” as part of his “Great Society”, which was little more than an extension and expansion of the New Deal.\u00a0 It dipped under Reagan, rose and then fell under Clinton, and\u00a0has reached a\u00a0new peak under\u00a0Obama<\/a>.<\/p>\n

P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic book A Parliament of Whores<\/em>, once half-joked that if we took the money our bureaucracy spends on poverty in all its forms – food assistance, housing assistance, medical aid, cash, WIC, all of it – and simply gave <\/em>it to the poor, we could raise ever single American’s income to above the poverty line, and save money in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem, of course, is that the War On Poverty was never really designed to fight poverty.\u00a0 Oh, there was an altrusitic motivation, to be sure – many Poverty Warriors do honestly believe their mission is to lead the poor out of perdition.<\/p>\n

But as with all of the left’s big initiatives, it’s really about consolidating and extending power. And so while the war on poverty has been a miserable failure at ending the misery of being poor, it’s been a magnificent success at extending the reach of the “progressive” stranglehold:<\/p>\n

No doubt programs such as Head Start were launched with a great deal of idealism, but as their ineffectiveness became apparent, it was not idealism that sustained them but political self-interest. Providing at best temporary relief to the poor, the permanent welfare bureaucracies benefit Democrats by creating thousands of well-paid positions for their political allies and subsequent campaign contributions for their candidates. Head Start today is a money-laundering program through which federal expenditures are transmitted to Democratic candidates through the Service Employees International Union, which represents many Head Start teachers. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents, among others, the welfare bureaucrats at the Administration for Children and Families, is a large political donor that gives about 94 percent of its largesse to Democrats. This is not coincidental. The main beneficiaries of the war on poverty have not been and will not be the poor; the beneficiaries are the alleged poverty warriors themselves. The war on poverty is war on the Roman model in which soldiers are paid through plunder.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perversely, the “War on Poverty” has institutionalized the things – single-parent households, terrible education – that truly entrench poverty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as we head toward a legislative session (in many states including Minnesota) where the Democrats will move to drag business into the role of paying for the War via massive hikes to the minimum wage, it’s worth remembering this:<\/p>\n

Democrats are scandalized that Republicans resist the expansion of welfare benefits, and Republicans are, or at least should be, scandalized that so many Americans need them. What looks like compassion in the short term is in the long term a refusal to deal with the problem: in some cases an inability to find sustaining work, in others a refusal to do so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s tempting, and tantalizing, to wonder – what would have happened had America not squandered so much of its hard-earned treasure on a “war on poverty” that ended up only entrenching and expanding poverty, and reinforcing the party of poverty, the Democrats?\u00a0<\/p>\n

How much more prosperous would be be today?\u00a0 How much less misery would there be?<\/p>\n

Read the NRO editorial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This year, as the National Review’s editors remind us, is the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of war on…poverty.\u00a0 Of course, poverty – which had been dropping steadily since the end of World War 2, as the US enjoyed an unprecedented period of economic supremacy after the war – rose after Johnson “declared war” as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41010"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41014,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41010\/revisions\/41014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}