As one of their “Five Facts” offerings No Labels has posted “Five Facts on the Great Society” at RealClearPolicy, summarized in their infographic above.
Of the programs they mention two, Medicare and Medicaid, are considered conditional successes, the housing component was largely a flop and is nearly forgotten, while Head Start is controversial. The controversy is whether it’s effective or not. There is scholarship going both ways on it, the main bone of contention being whether gains made by children under Head Start persist.
The reason I characterize Medicare and Medicaid as “conditional successes” is that they achieved the objectives of ensuring health care for the poor and elderly but they have cost enormously more than had been projected. In 1965 U. S. per capita healthcare spending was more or less aligned with that of other OECD countries particularly Canada, France, and Germany. Now U. S. per capita healthcare spending is a multiple that of other OECD countries. The reasons for that are complicated. However, since subsidizing willingness to pay is inherent to the structure of Medicare and Medicaid, it’s fair to say that has been wildly successful.
The housing component of the Great Society was better than what had proceeded it—much of the public housing built in the 1940s and 1950s has been torn down—but characterizing it as a success would be an exaggeration.
The circumstances in 1965 and those today are tremendously at variance. Johnson had just won the most decisive presidential victory in nearly 150 years; President Biden’s victory is, shall we say, not quite that decisive. When the Great Society programs were enacted Democrats had held the House for a decade (and most of the previous 30 years); today it bounces back and forth between the parties and the Democrats’ House majority is perilously narrow. The Great Society programs passed with bipartisan support; you can’t precisely say that passing “Build Back Better” would be unprecedented but its only precedent for passing major social legislation along purely partisan lines was Obamacare.
I read No Labels’s post as a gentle admonition to the progressives in the House to take the victory on the infrastructure spending bill and otherwise pull back on their plans.
In case anyone wonders I remember 1965 vividly. I opposed Medicare and Medicaid on the grounds of, well, what has happened which I thought was pretty obvious at the time. I favored something more along the lines of the VA with much more limited objectives than Medicare or Medicaid.