In his Wall Street Journal column Jason L. Riley characterizes the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (the “COVID-19 relief bill”) as including a reboot of the Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program:
Johnson’s stated goal was a reduction in dependency, not simply a redistribution of wealth to the poor. “The days of the dole in our country are numbered,†he declared in 1964. Alas, the opposite occurred. After his antipoverty programs were implemented, the proportion of people who relied on government aid to stay above the poverty line increased, a sharp reversal of the pre-Great Society trend.
Poverty rates at the time tell a similar story. It’s true that privation fell under Johnson in the 1960s, but that had already been happening for more than a decade before his war on poverty began. The poverty rate was approximately 30% in 1950 but had dropped to 18% by 1964. Moreover, as the scholar Charles Murray detailed in his landmark study, “Losing Ground,†the poverty rate would start to increase in the 1970s, after two decades of steady decline, and even as Johnson’s successors threw more and more money at creating new antipoverty programs or expanding the existing ones.
“The real [inflation-adjusted] annual expenditures of the 1970s were far larger—by many orders of magnitude, for some of the programs—than expenditures in the sixties,†Mr. Murray wrote. Yet “the number of people living in poverty stopped declining just as public-assistance program budgets and the rate of increase in those budgets were highest.â€
concluding
History shows that no government program has been able to match what people can do for themselves, and this applies equally to some of society’s most historically marginalized groups. No Great Society program was ever able to match the rate of progress made by blacks—in poverty reduction, income, homeownership or other measures—before that program’s implementation. Instead of helping, welfare-state expansions too often become lures and traps, inflicting damage that can last generations.
You can argue forever over what the impact of the Great Society Program might have been but you can’t argue that it didn’t change incentives or, much as you might wish it weren’t the case, that incentives don’t matter. I supported some aspects of it, for example the Head Start education program, until its failure to live up to cost-benefit analysis became undeniable. Whether a prudent use of the money or not, it’s still in place.
In my view we don’t need a new or bolstered social safety net as much as we need resolution of the contradictions already present in our government programs, particularly welfare, healthcare, education, immigration, and trade.
“In my view we don’t need a new or bolstered social safety net as much as we need resolution of the contradictions already present in our government programs, particularly welfare, healthcare, education, immigration, and trade.”
In what century do you envision this resolution?
I’m getting to the age where I’ve seen a lot of Presidents and Congresses come and go. Starting with LBJ its 10 presidents. And even more government programs that, well, just come.
Does anyone even stop to consider that politicians and advocates are still plying almost all the same issues they were in the 60’s: eliminating poverty, improving education, improving health care, curing diseases, providing good housing, equal opportunity, reduction in discrimination, income equality. The climate bell was rung in the 70’s. yada yada yada. How many problems have been solved? How many are objectively worse? And if cost / benefit is the standard, it becomes laughable, if it were not so sad.
I understand the pols, they need issues to run on. I don’t understand the voters, who apparently are the biggest bunch of suckers in the world. Its a serious question. Why do people robotically pull the lever for never fulfilled promises? Eloi wannabes? It makes Charlie Brown and Lucy look good by comparison.
They like the song. They don’t care who sings it.
Mickey Kaus has been replaying his hits as well (from his substack):
“AFDC seemed to be subsidizing an ‘underclass’ culture in which young women took it as normal when they had an out-of-wedlock child and got on the dole rather than delaying childbirth until they had jobs or got married. So-called ‘underclass’ communities (defined as neighborhoods with a lot of welfare recipients, broken or unformed families, high-school dropouts and low male labor force participation) were widely considered America’s greatest social problem, chronicled in books like Ken Auletta’s The Underclass, Ze’ev Chafets’ Devil’s Night, Nicholas Lemann’s Promised Land, and wrenching newspaper series like Leon Dash’s for the Washington Post. After the Los Angeles riots of 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton pledged to tackle this problem at its root through welfare reform that would ‘break the culture of poverty and dependence.’ Whenever Clinton got into trouble in the 1992 campaign, he’d run ads featuring his promise to ‘end welfare as we know it.'”
The issue of children growing up in households without social capital to do anything different from their parents is deeply disturbing to me. And while Kaus is suggesting that the past is predictive of the future, I worry that there is a whole new layer of support for things like universal basic incomes that appeal to an educated class that would enjoy the subsidies without recognizing the pitfalls.
I guess. But like a line from The Departed goes: “We deal in deception here. What we don’t deal in is self-deception.” And let’s face it, those music fans are paying a mighty big ticket price.
I’m looking on the bright side, though. We used to have kids in cages. But now we have Immigrant Reception Centers. Problem solved.
I am pretty old now. Have seen a lot of presidents come and go. Same promises. Cut taxes and they will pay for themselves. Cut taxes and regulations and we will have massive growth. Reform the welfare system nd welfare will go away. Privatize education and the results will be better. Make rich people richer and everyone else will do better. Liberalize trade and everyone will do better. How often have any of these worked? Do we see cost benefit analysis on these claims? Do we see any kind of self analysis ever on these claims?
Why do people just robotically pull that lever when what they say works just doesnt, at least not very often.
I am looking on the bright side though. We used to separate young kids from their parents on purpose, put them in cages, then lose track of the parents so we couldn’t reunite families. We now put unaccompanied older kids in cages. At least we arent separating families anymore. That is progress.
Steve
“the poverty rate would start to increase in the 1970s, after two decades of steady decline,”
This is just about the time the massive off-shoring of our industry, free trade, and large-scale immigration began. Automation and women entering the work force also started in earnest then.
Riley seems to imply that the Great Society and its follow-on programs. created poverty. That is a common trope on conservative sites: welfare destroys the work ethic and family. But loss of jobs for working class men seems a more likely cause, with the increasing welfare state being a response to de-industrialization.
Blacks left the South during both World Wars and afterwards, because there were good-paying jobs for semi-skilled and even unskilled laborers in Northern factories. My Canuck ancestors (my mother’s side) came south to New England for the same reasons in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Those jobs were there until the 60’s when Europe and Japan recovered and provided cheap manufactures. Now blacks and working class whites are left stranded in urban ghettos and rural towns.
The welfare state is the price for three generations of anti-working class policies supported by both parties.
That’s pretty much my take. Offshoring and a lot more slack in the labor market.
There were both push and pull forces at work. Immigration (mostly illegal) resulted in the jobs that Southern blacks had depended on drying up so they moved north.
Those policies actually have a name: the Washington Consensus.
I look at it from the point of view of the atomization of society which is pushed from both ends. Traditional sources of moral and social authority, support, and sources of meaning in people’s lives have been replaced by the promise of individual agency coming from an enlightened technocratic state. But the atomization of society into just a collection of individuals and interest groups has a dark side. I see (or at least I think I see) this manifest in all sorts of ways, including how and where people search for meaning in their lives, how they seek to solve conflicts and disputes, and the social milieu, especially among younger generations.