War On Poverty: Never-ending?
Arguably, the War on Poverty has had zero impact on the poverty rate, all the while destroying families. What are we doing?
The Poverty Numbers at a Glance
The War on Poverty started on January 8, 1964, when President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "unconditional war" on poverty. As I often say, when the feds declare war on anything, bend over, here it comes again; or BOHICA as we used to say in the Navy.
When Johnson declared “unconditional war” on poverty, the rate was at 19%, and had been falling steadily for five years running. In 1964, 36,060,000 million were in poverty, 22,970,000 by 1973. Was it the war that brought the poverty rate down, or simply a “natural” rising and falling of the poverty rate over time?
An eerily similar fall in the poverty rate took place between 2012 and 2023, from a high of 15.1% in 2010 to a low of 11.1% in 2023 (the latest year for which data is available.) The first question is, with the unconditional war on poverty ongoing, how did the rate rise to 15.1% in 2010 from a low of 11.3% in 2000?
You might also find interesting, that since 1959 we have broken below a poverty rate of 11.1% only once, to 10.5% in 2019.
Unintended Side Effect?
In 1965, 24 percent of black infants and 3.1 percent of white infants were born to single mothers. By 1990 the rates had risen to 64 percent for black infants, 18 percent for whites. Every year about one million more children are born into fatherless families. If we have learned any policy lesson well over the past 25 years, it is that for children living in single-parent homes, the odds of living in poverty are great.
It seems like a chicken and the egg question, but which came first, the poverty and welfare, or the child?
Here are a couple of quotes from one of my favorite economists, Walter Williams, who died at age 84 in 2020.
The No. 1 problem among blacks is the effects stemming from a very weak family structure. Children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes and end up in prison. They are also likelier to live in poverty-stricken households. But is the weak black family a legacy of slavery? In 1960, just 22 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Fifty years later, more than 70 percent of black children were raised in single-parent families. Here's my question: Was the increase in single-parent black families after 1960 a legacy of slavery, or might it be a legacy of the welfare state ushered in by the War on Poverty?
And…
There may be some pinhead sociologists who blame the weak black family structure on racial discrimination. But why was the black illegitimacy rate only 14 percent in 1940, and why, as Dr. Thomas Sowell reports, do we find that census data "going back a hundred years, when blacks were just one generation out of slavery ... showed that a slightly higher percentage of black adults had married than white adults. This fact remained true in every census from 1890 to 1940"? Is anyone willing to advance the argument that the reason the illegitimacy rate among blacks was lower and marriage rates higher in earlier periods was there was less racial discrimination and greater opportunity?
And on poverty in the United States in general…
There is no material poverty in the U.S. Here are a few facts about people whom the Census Bureau labels as poor. Dr. Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, in their study "Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America's Poor" (http://tinyurl.com/448flj8), report that 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly three-quarters have a car or truck, and 31 percent have two or more. Two-thirds have cable or satellite TV. Half have one or more computers. Forty-two percent own their homes. Poor Americans have more living space than the typical non-poor person in Sweden, France or the U.K. What we have in our nation are dependency and poverty of the spirit, with people making unwise choices and leading pathological lives aided and abetted by the welfare state.
The Fiscal Cost
This year <2019> the federal, state, and local governments will spend close to a combined $1 trillion to fund more than 100 separate anti-poverty programs. In fact, since Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty” in 1965, government efforts to fight poverty have cost more than $23 trillion.
So. Is it worth the cost, and why do we robotically continue to spend these taxpayer dollars without having even a whiff of concern over the outcomes, positive or negative?
Historical Poverty Tables: People and Families - 1959 to 2023, Census Bureau, Table 2 included above.
As usual, inform yourself, do your own research. As for me, this is clearly part of an even larger, if you can imagine that, redistribution plan to keep the masses in their place, dependent on government, and inclined to support any status quo that guarantees future payoffs.