The War on Poverty is Lost

 

Today, some 44 million Americans are on food stamps.

In 2007, it was 26 million. 

 

 

 . . . continued dependence upon relief

induces a spiritual and moral disintegration

fundamentally destructive to the national fibre.

To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic,

a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

(FDR in his 1935 State of the Union Address)

 

Harry "the war is lost" Reid:

Investors Business Daily Editorial:

 

.... Starting in 1964, when President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, a well-intentioned crusade to end poverty, the U.S. has spent an estimated $16 trillion trying to help the less well-off.

LBJ and other well-meaning Democratic politicians at the time also hoped that the burgeoning welfare state would make people more self-sufficient, a noble goal. It didn't work.

Today, some 44 million Americans are on food stamps. In 2007, it was 26 million. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently boasted that U.S. issues more than 80 million checks a month. But while the U.S. has more than 70 means-tested welfare programs [conducted under the auspices of 13 different federal agencies], the poverty rate today is higher than it was in the late 1960s.

How can that be? "(M)ost anti-poverty/welfare spending erodes work and marriage," wrote Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation economist, in a recent report. "As a result ... low-income Americans are less capable of self-support than when the War on Poverty began."

 

How clever to take the story back to its beginnings. 

 

See also this Heritage report on Welfare and Welfare spending [pdf]: 

Obama to Spend (another) $10.3 Trillion on Welfare

 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Thomas Malthus must be spinning in his grave. Or maybe not. Maybe he's lying there peacefully, grinning at the stupidity of Lyndon Johnson and all his ilk. In one of the great texts of modern economics (1798), Malthus established, by the most rigorous logic, that the belief that "the burgeoning welfare state would make people more self-sufficient" is fatuous in the extreme. Anyone interested in an up-dating of Malthus should read David Stove's recently published "What's Wrong With Benevolence" -- which proves as conclusively as anything can that welfare always begets more welfare. Stove, an Australian philosopher with a wicked sense of humor, produces example after example to show why welfare never has, never can, and never will produce self-sufficiency. One of the abiding tragedies of our current debt crisis is the fact that so much of the debt was incurred to do things that were certain to harm our country. LBJ's welfare program and its many later permutations are sad examples of money squandered and irreparable damage done.