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Townhall
Poverty
Won After 50 Year War
by
Jeff Crouere
Jan
11, 2014
On
January 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson made his famous call for a
national “war on poverty.” Eventually, this “war” would total
over $20 trillion in spending and include a myriad of both harmful
and ill-advised government programs. As with all liberal initiatives,
these policies were created with supposedly good intentions, to help
improve the plight of our impoverished Americans.
Instead
of solving the poverty crisis, we created generations of poor
Americans who are addicted to government programs and lack the skills
to meaningfully contribute to our economy.
When
LBJ’s “war” began, we had a poverty rate of approximately 17
percent, whereas today it is stuck at 15 percent. For a $20 trillion
investment, we have made scant progress as a nation.
According
to Derryck Green of the Project 21 Black Leadership Network, the
Great Society programs “effectively subsidized the dissolution of
the black family by rendering the black man's role as a husband and a
father irrelevant, invisible and — more specifically —
disposable. The result has been several generations of blacks born
into broken homes and broken communities experiencing social, moral
and economic chaos. It fosters an inescapable dependency that
primarily, and oftentimes solely, relies on government to sustain
livelihoods."
The
government programs that derived from the “War on Poverty”
include Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and food stamps. Despite all
of this spending, the results have been catastrophic. As noted by
President Reagan in his final State of the Union address, “we waged
a war on poverty, and poverty won.” Even liberal icon President
Franklin Roosevelt realized that government programs were not the
only way to defeat poverty, noting that they could become a
“narcotic.” So, after Roosevelt’s “New Deal” programs and
Johnson’s “Great Society” our country still has millions of
Americans impoverished and addicted to the “narcotic” of
government...
Read
the rest of the article at Townhall
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