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to Great Debates
Did
the United States lose the war on poverty?
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Lyndon Baines Johnson had
a vision for America. During the 1964 Presidential campaign
he often spoke about it. He envisioned an America "where
no child will go unfed and no youngster will go unschooled;
where every child has a good teacher and every teacher has
good pay, and both have good classrooms; where every human
being has dignity and every worker has a job...." Johnson
called his vision the Great Society, and he committed his
administrating to waging a "war on poverty." |
To combat poverty, the federal
government raised the minimum wage and enacted a battery of programs
to train poorer Americans for better jobs. To assure adequate
housing, the government attacked urban blight, began a program
of rent subsidies, and set up a cabinet-level Department of Housing
and Urban Development. To promote education, the federal government
set up a system of college loans. To address the nation's health
needs, the federal government enacted Medicaid,to pay for the
medical expenses of the poor, and Medicare, extending medical
insurance to older Americans under the Social Security System.
When Lyndon Johnson left the presidency
in 1969, he left behind the legacy of a transformed federal government.
At the end of the Eisenhower presidency in 1961, there were only
45 domestic social programs. By 1969 the number had climbed to
435. Federal social spending, excluding Social Security, rose
from $9.9 billion in 1960 to $25.6 billion in 1968. Johnson's
"war on poverty" represented the broadest attack Americans
had ever waged on the special problems facing poor and disadvantaged
families. It declared decisively that the problems of the poor--problems
of housing, income, employment, and health--were ultimately a
federal responsibility.
When Johnson announced his Great
Society program in 1964, he promised to reduce poverty, alleviate
hunger and malnutrition, expand community medical care, provide
adequate housing, and enhance the employability of the poor. Did
he keep his promise?
| When President Johnson came
to office 22 percent of the nation's families lived in poverty
(down from 30 percent in 1950). The nation's largest programs
to assist the poor--Aid to Families with Dependent Children,
Social Security, and Food Stamps--provided meager benefits
to only a small proportion of the country's impoverished population.
AFDC paid just $388 a month (in 1980 dollars) to a family
of four; Social Security payments averaged just $184 a month
(in 1980 dollars); and food stamps reached just two percent
of the nation's poor. Medicare and medicaid did not exist.
Thirty-three million poor people competed for just 600,000
public housing units. |
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When Johnson left office, the
official poverty rate had fallen from 22 percent in 1960 to 13
percent - which is where the poverty rate remains today. AFDC
payments had risen to $577 (in 1980 dollars). Infant mortality
among the poor, which had barely declined between 1950 and 1965,
fell by one-third in the decade after 1965 as a result of the
expansion of federal medical and nutritional programs. Before
the implementation of Medicaid and Medicare, 20 percent of the
poor had never been examined by a physician; when Johnson retired
as president the figure had been cut to 8 percent. The proportion
of families living in substandard housing--that is, housing lacking
indoor plumbing - also declined steeply, from 20 percent in 1960
to 11 percent a decade later.
Despite these gains, Johnson's
critics charge that "in the war on poverty, poverty won."
Political conservatives argued that public assistance, food subsidies,
health programs, and child care programs weakened poorer families.
President Ronald Reagan voiced a common conservative viewpoint
when he declared, "There is no question that many well-intentioned
Great Society-type programs contributed to family breakups, welfare
dependency, and a large increase in births out of wedlock."
To support their arguments, conservatives
cite a close chronological connection between increased government
welfare expenditures and dramatic increases in female-headed households
and illegitimacy among the poor. Back in 1959, just ten percent
of low-income Americans lived in a single-parent household. By
1980, the figure had climbed to 44 percent. At the same time the
number of illegitimate births among the poor grew substantially.
Had the number of single-parent families remained at the 1970
level, the number of poor families in 1980 would have been 32
percent lower than it was.
Did the expansion of state services
contribute to rising rates of illegitimacy and single parenthood?
The answer to this question remains in dispute. On the one hand,
there is no empirical evidence that there is a correlation between
the level of welfare payments the number of children in single
parent families. Other studies have shown that increases in the
wages of the poor produce a sharp drop in female-headed households
- suggesting that it is low wages and unstable jobs, and not the
level of welfare payments, that are the major contributors to
family instability.
Some of the apparent deterioration
in poor families is illusory. If female-headed families made up
a growing proportion of the poor, this partly reflected a sharp
reduction in poverty among other groups. One of the consequences
of the Great Society was to dramatically alter the profile of
the poor. Increases in Social Security payments sharply reduced
the incidence of poverty among the elderly. The Supplemental Social
Security program introduced in 1973 greatly reduced poverty among
the disabled. As a result of reductions in poverty among the elderly
and disabled and increases in the number of single parent, female
headed households, poverty has been increasingly feminized.
And yet, if the war on poverty
accomplished more than its critics charged, there can be little
doubt that the Johnson administration failed to persuade Americans
that it had been successful. Beginning with the Presidential election
of 1988, the Republican party won five of six elections and controlled
the White House for sixteen of twenty years. Why?
A 1969 book entitled The Emerging
Republican Majority by political commentator Kevin Phillips
offered an answer. He claimed that the Great Society provoked
an angry reaction among large segments of the white working class
and middle class. Issues of race - such as affirmative action,
school busing, residential integration, and racial preferences
in job selection and government contracting - along with a reaction
against the antiwar movement, cultural permissiveness, crime,
cutbacks in local control of schools and neighborhoods, and liberal
Supreme Court decisions on subjects ranging from pornography to
the rights of criminal defendants, Phillips argued, had fractured
the political coalition that had arisen during the Great Depression
of the 1930s.
Questions to
think about:
1. Divorce
rates, illegitimacy rates, and single parenthood increased not
only among the poor but among the middle class as well. How
would you account for these changes in family patterns?
2. Certain
structural changes in the American economy have contributed
to high unemployment rates in central city areas. Identify these
structural changes.
3. Why, in
your view, has the poverty rate remained roughly constant since
1969?
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