What? There’s poverty in America? The latest statistics are in. The number of Americans living below the poverty line rose to a record 46 million in 2010, the largest in the 52 years since the Census Bureau has been publishing poverty estimates. How is this possible? The Great Society policies under Lyndon Johnson were supposed to eradicate poverty. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. The war on poverty became a war on the poor. Poverty was actually dropping when LBJ announced his program. Here’s what Ronald Reagan said in 1988 about the war on poverty:
What has all this money done? Well, too often it has only made poverty harder to escape. Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem. With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty: the family. Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families.
Trillions of dollars were pumped into programs designed to move people out of poverty into productivity. It didn’t work. Poverty was subsidized. When you subsidize something, you get more of it. If you pay people who do not work, more people will stop working. If you pay women who have children out of wedlock, you’ll get more illegitimate births. You don’t have to have a degree in economics from an Ivy League school to know this. In fact, if you do have a degree from of our nation’s most prestigious schools of economics, you probably don’t know this. CONTINUE READING
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