LBJ's Great Society Won the War on Poverty Posted on 12/16/2019 at 18:25:23 by Bill Crawford, (14)
The above-titled Bloomberg Commentary appeared in today's Denver Post.
Here is an excerpt:
"...In 1964, speaking at the University of Michigan, President Lyndon Johnson called for the U.S. to become a “great society.” That term came to be synonymous with the Johnson administration's raft of antipoverty programs, sometimes known as the War on Poverty. The Great Society initiative led to the creation of Medicare and Medicaid, the modern version of food stamps, Head Start, various jobs programs, expansion of many kinds of Social Security benefits, urban-renewal spending and a vast array of other social programs
Many now believe this War on Poverty was a failure. Among conservatives, it’s almost an article of faith that LBJ's welfare state fostered a culture of dependence that trapped people in the very poverty it was meant to eliminate. Meanwhile, on the left, many feel a sense of frustration that poverty is still with us, stubbornly stuck at about a seventh of the population.
But both those who think the Great Society was a fiasco and those who think it didn’t go far enough, ignore the very real improvements it brought about. Although poverty persists in the U.S., the kind of deep, grinding material deprivation that existed before Johnson’s presidency is much less common now.
First of all, according to official measures, poverty declined dramatically in the decades after LBJ’s Great Society speech. For black Americans, the poverty rate fell more than 10 percentage points, and for white Americans it fell almost as much..."
(I guess I had forgotten that Medicare came into being under LBJ).
