Winning the war on poverty; nope just a lot of fish. The self-destructive American.

2014

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson announced a war on poverty. At that time the poverty level in America was 19%. The Johnson Administration implemented Medicare, Medicaid, federal housing and other programs. Within ten years the poverty rate had dropped to 11.2%.

To many Americans that drop is success. In other words, by adding federal welfare type programs many people were technically no longer in poverty. But is that what LBJ meant or did he mean structuring programs that allow people to work their way out of poverty, rather than be supported in it? Perhaps I’m being generous to Johnson, but I take that idea from the words in his 1964 State of the Union address.

On the other hand after the drop, the poverty rate in America has stayed about the same at around 15% of the population. Many Americans see a somewhat permanent drop of 4% as success for the tens of trillions of dollars invested. Clearly poverty will never be zero, but it seems to me success would be more like a permanent rate in the 2% area not stagnated at 15%. If you were earning $10,000 a year and you now have food stamps, government supported housing and Medicaid, but your earning potential is still $10,000 aren’t you still living in poverty? Even worse, because of your lack of skills and dependency on government programs aren’t your children likely to be similarly trapped. How is that success?

We seem to have forgotten the old saying, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime.” We have given out a lot of fish, but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere in actually changing the face of poverty (which by the way looks quite different in America than in the rest of the world).

So what is our goal, to make people more comfortable living on a very low-income and keep them there (so politicians can rant and rave about inequality) or to make changes so that all these government programs go away because they are no longer needed? Today, despite the rhetoric, we seem hell-bent on providing more and expanded programs. Once collecting unemployment should it ever end? Did you know it is possible to collect both Social Security disability benefits and unemployment benefits concurrently? Just think about what that means.

If we had spent a small portion of what we spent on “safety nets” on education, skills training and adapting our workforce to a changing global economy and changing technology perhaps we could claim success in the war on poverty. And oh yes, we should also invest in simple education programs in family and life decision-making and personal finance. Those issues have as much to do with people trapped in poverty as does working for minimum wage.

Wall Street Journal Opinion Page, 1-13-14 One of the differences between the haves and the have-nots is that the haves tend to marry and give birth, in that order. The have-nots tend to have babies and remain unmarried. Marriage makes a difference. Heritage reports that among white married couples, the poverty rate in 2009 was just 3.2%; for white nonmarried families, the rate was 22%. Among black married couples, the poverty rate was only 7%, but the rate for non-married black families was 35.6%.

A 2012 study by the Heritage Foundation found that 28.6% of children born to a white mother were out of wedlock. For Hispanics, the figure was 52.5% and for African-Americans 72.3%. In 1964, when the war on poverty began, almost everyone was born in a family with two married parents: only 7% were not.