After 50 Years, Washington Has Lost the War on Poverty
Fifty years ago, LBJ's speech writer, Richard Goodwin, was asked to strip naked and swim with a naked Lyndon Johnson.
Press secretary Bill Moyers, the only LBJ senior staffer who survived the administration with his reputation intact, also had to jump in. He still regales us with his opinions on PBS -- the last Wise Man of that era to do so. His war on personal poverty was highly successful.
While swimming with Johnson, Goodwin gave him a tip. Start something called "the war on poverty." Johnson loved the phrase. He used it, along with "the Great Society."
That society was not great. That war was lost.
Johnson lost the war in Vietnam. So did Nixon. Finally, Ford pulled out the troops.
No one in power in Washington suggests that the war on poverty has been lost, and that we should pull out the troops.
AN UPDATE AT HALF CENTURY
Here is an article on poverty. Drudge posted it, so it got coverage.
The Census has been tracking these data since 1959, when the percentage of children under 18 living in poverty was 26.9%. In 1964, when then-President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the War on Poverty, the percentage of children living in poverty was 22.7%. Since then until now, the percentage has decreased by only 6.2%."In 2012, over one in five children (21.3%) in the United States, some 15.4 million, were poor -- both their poverty rate and estimated number poor were statistically unchanged from 2011," said the CRS report. "The lowest recorded rate of child poverty was in 1969, when 13.8% of children were counted as poor."
So, after 50 years of welfare spending, the poverty rate has not changed. A variation of 6% is basically statistical noise.
The rate has risen since 2001. The article included a chart.
LOSING GROUND
In 1984, Charles Murray's book appeared, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980. The book established Murray as a major critic of the federal welfare system. Murray provided comprehensive statistical evidence that poverty had increased over the 15-year period after the War on Poverty program had begun.
Look at the chart. This is exactly what it reveals.
The book was savaged by the Establishment. How dare he! The defenders of the program said that his evidence was flawed, but in any case, if there had not been these programs, poverty would be worse.
Three decades later, nothing has changed statistically since LBJ signed the legislation.
Socially, a great deal has changed. Murray's 2012 book, Coming Apart: The Story of White America, 1960-2010, shows how much worse things are today. The lower-class whites are indulging in the same kinds of anti-family behavior today that blacks indulged in back in 1965, the year of the Moynihan Report: The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Wikipedia reports on that report.
Moynihan argued that the rise in single-mother families was not due to a lack of jobs but rather to a destructive vein in ghetto culture that could be traced back to slavery and Jim Crow discrimination. Though black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier had already introduced the idea in the 1930s, Moynihan's argument defied conventional social-science wisdom. As he wrote later, "The work began in the most orthodox setting, the U.S. Department of Labor, to establish at some level of statistical conciseness what 'everyone knew': that economic conditions determine social conditions. Whereupon, it turned out that what everyone knew was evidently not so."
The Left was outraged. It remains outraged.
From the time of its publication, the report has been sharply attacked by Black-American and civil rights leaders as examples of white patronizing, cultural bias, or even racism. The report has, at various times, been condemned or dismissed by the N.A.A.C.P., Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. Among the complaints lodged at the "Moynihan Report" are the stereotyping of the black family and black men, inferences of inferior academic performance by Black-Americans, portrayals of endemic crime and "pathology" in the black community, and a failure to recognize both cultural bias and racism in standardized tests. The report was criticized for threatening to undermine the place of civil rights on the national agenda, leaving "a vacuum that could be filled with a politics that blamed blacks for their own troubles."
Moynihan warned that if the rate of illegitimacy of the black families -- around 25% -- were to spread into the white community, the same sorts of family breakdown and poverty would appear. The rate in the black community has gone over 70%. The rate among whites is now well over 25%. It had been around 2% up until 1960. It was well under 5% in 1965. It has moved sharply upward ever since. (Murray, Coming Apart, p. 160)
The latest report reveals this.
"Children living in single female-headed families are especially prone to poverty," says the report. "In 2012, a child living in a single female-headed family was well over four times more likely to be poor than a child living in a married-couple family. In 2012, among all children living in single female-headed families, 47.2% were poor.""In contrast, among children living in married-couple families, 11.1% were poor," said the CRS report. "The increased share of children who live in single female-headed families has contributed to the high overall child poverty rate."
There was hope in liberal circles in 1965 that federal welfare programs would reduce poverty rates. This hope is long gone. Today, the likelihood of a reversal is gone. The social breakdown of the black family in 1965 has spread to the lower-class white community. It is much larger than the black community.
Federal money and bureaucracy cannot reverse attitudes toward the family -- attitudes that the welfare system has subsidized. The conservatives predicted this would happen. The Left said the conservatives were heartless. Their dire predictions would not come true.
They came true.
CONCLUSION
There is only one hope that the federal government could offer: an end to the programs. But Congress does not cut programs. It adds to them.
The middle-class tenured bureaucrats who administer the programs will fight budget cuts.
The war on poverty is a forever war . . . at least until federal bankruptcy ends it.