This year, as the National Review’s editors remind us, is the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration of war on…poverty.
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. It dipped under Reagan, rose and then fell under Clinton, and has reached a new peak under Obama.
P.J. O’Rourke, in his classic book A Parliament of Whores, 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 it to the poor, we could raise ever single American’s income to above the poverty line, and save money in the process.
The problem, of course, is that the War On Poverty was never really designed to fight poverty. 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.
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:
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.
Perversely, the “War on Poverty” has institutionalized the things – single-parent households, terrible education – that truly entrench poverty.
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:
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.
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?
How much more prosperous would be be today? How much less misery would there be?
Read the NRO editorial.
Heard Rush claim that out of every dollar taken from my paycheck to fight poverty, only 27 cents reaches a person in need. No time to research it now – anybody know if that’s true?
All the Democrat party is, is ineffectual Keynesianism and graft. A skimming operation.
JD; that sounds about right. I remember reading a study a few years ago that decried the high costs of government programs. Funny; if a charity had the admin costs that the government does, they would be shut down. Gotta love the double standard.
A shotgun perspective on the topic, also from NRO:
http://nationalreview.com/node/367822/print
Psssst… Promise Zones! That will solve EVERYTHING!
Joe, a liberal friend of mine made a similar claim about 20 years back, that about 75% of welfare program money goes to pay administrators. “oops”
As with Iraq, can we just declare victory and go home?
I find current claims of poverty somewhat misleading, at least in terms of origin. Currently, we are allowing a vast number of immigrants from many poor areas in the world to relocate here. The majority of these people come without resources, are culturally dissimilar to us, and lack even basic skills, such as language, to help them assimilate and become self-sufficient. On top of that is the large amount of illegal aliens, similarly ill-equipped, who enter our country unchecked.
Consequently, is it surprising that “poverty” is steadily increasing? It would be interesting to factor-out recent immigrants (perhaps within the last 50 years), legal and illegal, their offspring, and the various others we allow in based on the current immigrant’s status, when determining the true poverty rate. I suspect that the figure, if it were possible to determine (honestly), would be quite different from what’s currently being presented.
Yes, I know that “we are a country of immigrants.”
I read some years ago that the “messaging” in the 1960s about the WOP purposely showcased images and stories from poor whites in Appalachia. This was done by the Johnson administration because, although the WOP was really aimed at lifting blacks and Latinos out of poverty, they calculated that whites would only support the WOP if they thought its target was people like themselves. I am old enough to remember this. The posters in my elementary school (Parkview, in Fridley) showed poor hillbillies with starving kids sitting on broke-down porches. I vividly remember an exposition on the WOP at the Minnesota state fair, featuring pictures and stories from poor whites who desperately needed better schools, clinics, and plumbing (the WOP was big on plumbing).
I rarely watch the network news, but tonight, on CBS, I saw a longish story on Johnson’s War on Poverty — and it basically duplicated the propaganda of the 60s. It was all about poor hillbillies, and you know what? It worked. Clinics were built! Schools were improved! Because of the War on Poverty, poor white people have better teeth and better haircuts!
I am with Breitbart. There is nothing the right can do to put the country back on a path of prosperity and opportunity for all until they dominate the media.
The dispute that the public is the dupe of the media goes back to the beginnings of the republic.
Emery; I would add that the media, specifically New York newspapers, have been committing treason by publishing military secrets, going back to the Civil War. In many cases, soldiers were killed as a result of their reporting, which, in my mind and those of fellow veterans, makes them guilty of murder.
Similar to the War On Poverty…..what happens when the government offers free money to people. News is out of another massive disability scam in New York City. Public employees there falsely claimed psychological disabilities. Costing the federal gov’t (via social security) hundreds of millions a year.
As far as where much of the welfare money goes….I know a guy who works at a Cub Foods Liquor. Busiest day of the month there (by far) is the 1st. And he said they aren’t buying cases of Old Milwaukee. But getting the expensive stuff with their free government money.
“The dispute that the public is the dupe of the media goes back to the beginnings of the republic.”
I’m not even sure what this is supposed to mean. The current ‘progressive’ tilt of print journalism and broadcast news goes back to Jos. Pulitzer and the founding of CSJ. Political bias isn’t new, but the uniformity of political bias is newish and it has an origin point.
When I lived in LA, my church had an outreach in Compton, and we could always tell when the checks arrived, because people didn’t show up for free food. I don’t know that they were drinking top flight liquor, and certainly their clothes didn’t suggest they were shopping in the nicer stores in Palos Verdes, but they did know the ropes of the welfare system. They weren’t dumb people, but their incentives were simply to game the welfare systems set up for them. To their credit as well, many were looking for work.
Not dumb people, not evil people, but they simply had all the wrong incentives.
And the foods the Hispanics there brought and sold, and the taco stand, was to die for. Yum!
My busiest days as a bartender three decades ago were the first and third of the month. The establishment catered to a less than prosperous clientele. The owner explained that those were the dates that the welfare and Social Security checks came out.
Conversely, towards the end of the month I rarely poured from the top shelf and the customers, who sometimes bartered food stamps with each other, kept close watch over their beers. I learned a lot working at that place …