Here's a fun "fact" offered by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at a CNN "town hall" this week:
We're in the 32nd year of the war on poverty. Trillions spent, and guess what? Our poverty rates are about the same as they were when we started this war on poverty 32 years ago.*
I will give Paul Ryan the benefit of the doubt and assume he simply misspoke when he said that the war on poverty started "32 years ago". That would place its origin in 1985, at the beginning of Reagan's second term; in fact, Ryan meant to say "52 years ago," which takes us back properly to 1965 and the beginning of Lyndon Johnson's one full term in office (to be even more accurate, Johnson announced the War on Poverty in January 1964 in his first State of the Union address, less than two months after the murder of John Kennedy).**
I will not here argue the many issues associated with the War on Poverty—e.g. whether or not it worked and, if not, why not? Instead I would simply like to rebut Paul Ryan's fantastical notion that the war on poverty has been going on ever since Lyndon Johnson announced it in these words:
This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort.
It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.
Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by State and local efforts.
For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office, from the courthouse to the White House.
The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.
Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.
Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.
But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.
Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice.
We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.
We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.
We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.
We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program.
We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.
We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon and not a bane to humanity.
We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.
We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in our hardest hit areas.
We must build more libraries in every area and more hospitals and nursing homes under the Hill-Burton Act, and train more nurses to staff them.
We must provide hospital insurance for our older citizens financed by every worker and his employer under Social Security, contributing no more than $1 a month during the employee's working career to protect him in his old age in a dignified manner without cost to the Treasury, against the devastating hardship of prolonged or repeated illness.
We must, as a part of a revised housing and urban renewal program, give more help to those displaced by slum clearance, provide more housing for our poor and our elderly, and seek as our ultimate goal in our free enterprise system a decent home for every American family.
We must help obtain more modern mass transit within our communities as well as low-cost transportation between them.
Above all, we must release $11 billion of tax reduction into the private spending stream to create new jobs and new markets in every area of this land.***
Without question, LBJ's proposed agenda was an ambitious one, some of which was enacted and much of which was not. As always, Wikipedia is a helpful guide to the basics, listing the major initiatives associated with the War on Poverty:
- The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 which created the Community Action Program, Job Corps and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), centerpiece of the "war on poverty" – August 20, 1964
- Food Stamp Act of 1964 – August 31, 1964[3]
- Elementary and Secondary Education Act - April 11, 1965
- Social Security Act 1965 (Created Medicare and Medicaid) – July 19, 1965
Anumber of these programs are with us today, although opposed from the first and railed against ever since by Republicans like Paul Ryan. Nevertheless, as a matter of federal policy and for all practical purposes, the War on Poverty—hamstrung from the outset by political turf battles, racial turmoil, and by our expanding military action in Vietnam--essentially ended with Richard Nixon's election in 1968; which means it lasted for perhaps five turbulent years.
What was the outcome of this brief war? Again, Wikipedia offers a hint:
In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level since comprehensive records began in 1958: from 17.3% in the year the Economic Opportunity Act was implemented to 11.1% in 1973. They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since. It is important to note, however, that the steep decline in poverty rates began in 1959, 5 years before the introduction of the war on poverty.
That seems a fair, albeit brief, assessment: poverty rates declined during the years the War on Poverty was being fought, though there may well have been other factors involved. The 1973 poverty rate of 11.1% cited above was almost precisely half of the 1959 poverty rate of 22.4%; it was also a substantial improvement over the 19% at which it stood when Johnson declared war.
Paul Ryan is correct, albeit accidentally, when he says that, over the past "32 years," we've made no progress fighting poverty; that's because the War on Poverty ended a decade before that and because—beginning with Reagan—we decided that tax cuts for the rich were the best way to help the poor. Say what you will about LBJ's War on Poverty—but please don't try to sell us the absurd notion that it's been going on for decades.
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*Republicans, and not just Paul Ryan, continue to be uncertain whether poverty is just as bad today as it ever was or whether today's poor aren't poor at all, coddled as they are by the federal welfare hammock and in possession of goodies like Obamaphones, microwaves, computers, and indoor plumbing. If it's the latter—if the poor are actually living it up on the taxpayers' dimes—then one would have to say that the War on Poverty has in fact succeeded.
**Michael Harrington's THE OTHER AMERICA, published in 1962, was widely credited with inspiring both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to take on poverty. I mention this because Michael Harrington was one of our last great public intellectuals, the likes of whom we could surely use these days.
***Imagine that: a Democratic President proposed tax cuts in hopes that the job creators would create jobs! Of course, Johnson's tax cuts were in addition to (rather than in place of) targeted anti-poverty initiatives: leave it to Democrats not to place all their economic eggs in one basket.
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