Fifty years ago, President Johnson launched the War on Poverty. And guess what? The poor lost.
Over five decades, the total of means-tested government assistance to the poor has soared over $20 trillion. That includes Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, cash welfare, subsidized housing, targeted tax credits and more. With all that, the poverty rate only declined from 19% to 15%.
Even worse, the truth is that poverty had been steadily declining before the “war” — and there’s a good argument this spending has set the poor back by undermining arguably the most important factor in avoiding poverty: a stable family.
In 1965, just a year after the War on Poverty was declared, out-of-wedlock births for black women stood at 24%. This high illegitimacy figure led Daniel Patrick Moynihan — then working in LBJ’s Labor Department — to warn of a growing sociological crisis in his remarkable “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
Moynihan’s reward for being an accurate-but-ignored Cassandra? Being told that the report was racist and to bury it.
Fast forward to today. As Charles Murray noted in “Coming Apart,” out-of-wedlock births to white women is now near 30%, well above the figure that so alarmed Moynihan about the black community in the 1960s. Meanwhile, despite — or because of — the War on Poverty, black out-of-wedlock births have hit 70% and the poverty rate is 28%, almost double the national average.
Why is this important? Well, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution note in “Creating an Opportunity Society” that the best anti-poverty measure is graduating high school, getting and maintaining a job, marrying and then having kids.
But you never hear that from the left. Their faith in government spending remains undimmed by results. The latest flavor appears to be Mayor de Blasio’s call for more spending for more programs such as “universal pre-K.”
The problem is that poverty is not about a lack of money. It is about the lack of the life skills people need to rise in society and provide for themselves and their families.
No army of bureaucrats spending trillions in tax dollars can ever substitute for the only real path to a middle-class life: hard work and personal responsibility, combined with a growing economy creating jobs and opportunity for all.