Now 50 Years Into It, the Democrat Party “War on Poverty” Has Been a Rip-Roaring Success

To distract the American public’s mind away from all the Obama scandals and failures – the economy, Obamacare, illegal IRS abuse of power, unconstitutional government spying, etc., etc. – Obama and the Democrat brain trust propagandists have decided to start talking about income inequality and the poor in America, as if it were still 1913 or 1933, or, hey, even 1964, when the “War on Poverty” began fifty years ago today. 

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation writes (link) about “How the War on Poverty Was Lost – Fifty years and $20 trillion later, LBJ's goal to help the poor become self-supporting has failed.” 

Some of the points Rector makes; all quotes from his piece:

·         On January 8, 1964, Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking.  "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America."

·         Fifty years later, we're losing that war.  Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. 

·         The original goal [of the War on Poverty], as LBJ stated it half a century ago: "to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities."

·         The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans.  Government spent $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and roughly 100 million Americans received aid from at least one of them, at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient.  Federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is 16 times greater than it was in 1964.  If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.

·         The official poverty rate persists with little improvement .... in part because the government's poverty figures are misleading.  Census defines a family as poor based on income level but doesn't count welfare benefits as a form of income. 

·         Current poverty [as defined by the federal government] has little resemblance to poverty 50 years ago.  According to a variety of government sources ... the typical American living below the poverty level in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV.  His home is larger than the home of the average non-poor French, German or English man.  He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player.  More than half the poor have computers and a third have wide, flat-screen TVs.  The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.

·         ... LBJ's original aim .... sought to give poor Americans "opportunity not doles," planning to shrink welfare dependence not expand it.  In his vision, the war on poverty would strengthen poor Americans' capacity to support themselves....  By that standard, the war on poverty has been a catastrophe....  A large segment of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than when the war on poverty began.

·         The collapse of marriage in low-income communities has played a substantial role in the declining capacity for self-support.  In 1963, 6% of American children were born out of wedlock.  Today the number stands at 41% [and, not mentioned in Rector's piece, the figure among blacks is about 70%].  As benefits swelled, welfare increasingly served as a substitute for a bread-winning husband in the home. ....  According to the Heritage Foundation's analysis, children raised in the growing number of single-parent homes are four times more likely to be living in poverty than children reared by married parents of the same education level. 

If one properly and correctly understands that the central aim of the Democrat Party puppet-masters running the so-called “anti-poverty” programs was to create and maintain a large number of people dependent on and beholden to the Democrats as the party of government benefits, people who would vote for Democrats as they in fact do, and as well to create tens of thousands of welfare program-related government jobs to be handed out by Democrats as patronage to workers beholden to the Democrat Party, jobsters who all would vote for Democrats as they in fact do, then the so-called “War on Poverty” has been a rip-roaring success.  A success, that is, for the liberal elites and the patronage army of the Democrat Party, but certainly not, tragically and predictably, for those utterly dependent and truly hopeless people in the now-permanent underclass,  created by and ever-entangled by the Democrat dependency strategy, which, to be successful, had to destroy the family structure and normalize the pathologies of the slum culture.      

Real Liberal “Chicago Values” in Action = “19 People Shot in Overnight Shootings Across Chicago”

Chicago’s hardball Ultraliberal Mayor Emanuel’s now infamous “Chicago Values” (link) on display:  “19 People Shot in Overnight Shootings Across Chicago” blares the Chicago Tribune web page headline (link). 

 

Since the ultraliberal took over, and hired as police chief an east coast guy who promptly took a puzzling, gratuitous, but nevertheless character-revealing swipe (link) at Sarah Palin, Chicago’s violence has skyrocketed, mostly in black and to a lesser extent Hispanic neighborhoods, though with notable instances of roving bands of minority youths violently flashmobbing in tonier spots.  By one measure, Chicago is, after years of despotic control by the Democratic Party, the "deadliest global city" (link).

All this in a city with some of the most restrictive gun control laws in America.  Despite the plain facts that much of the mayhem in the city over the years has been committed with knives, bats, and other non-projectiles, mostly by fatherless young men sustained by the loose requirements of the welfare state, and the relative dearth of gun violence in rural areas where many more people have guns, the reflexive liberal response to all this violence is to march (link) for more gun control and shout down critics who think that addressing a poverty of culture is part of the solution. 

Gotta keep those folks in the hoods fearful that Republicans are “gonna put them all back in chains”, as Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden recently told a largely black audience in Virginia, so they’ll keep voting for Democrats.

 

John M Greco     

The Endless Run of Liberal Anti-Violence Kabuki Theater

Sitting around talking and reading, my wife turns on the TV to catch the local weather; much too early, unfortunately.  A segment comes on featuring the latest installment of the endless Kabuki theater that is the liberal approach to combating street violence in our "inner cities".

Chicago's new mayor, Rahm Emanuel, wants to "take back the streets", yada, yada, yada.  So will he combat the astounding teen pregnancy rate, which will place yet another generation of very-lightly-reared and poorly-educated young black males on the streets, exactly the demographic causing today's violence?  Will he criticize the "gangsta rap" culture, so pervasive in black neighborhoods, that glorifies and romanticizes criminal behavior and is peddled by rich liberal media executives?  Will he arrest more bad guys and pressure liberal local judges to keep them in jail longer?  Will he lay off the legions of useless extra workers at the core of the Chicago Democrat party patronage system and channel the savings to hire more police to better patrol the streets?  Uhhh ....... Nah.

Emanuel did the only thing Democrats know how to do well, their only trick, other than railing against guns, in their intellectually-exhausted playbook -- he held a street demonstration.  Through a dangerous black neighborhood he led yet one more of the innumerable "take back the streets" marches we've seen over and over again for decades.  That's their solution -- hold a demonstration, as if such will have the remotest effect on violent gang-bangers, and rail against guns, as if city kids aren't also killing each other with knives, bats, and fists, and as if white and east Asian kids across the country are also killing each other with remotely the same frequency with the guns, knives, and baseball bats to which they too have access.

Most major northern American cities have been run for a couple of generations by liberals, and they have made quite a mess of it.  They've earned a fat "F" in social policy, but give them credit where credit is due -- they deserve an "A" in street demonstrations, their cynically-hollow and useless gestures that can sure draw TV cameras and whip up a crowd. 

John M Greco

Detroit's Population Crashes as Ignorant Residents Flee the Liberal Paradise

"Detroit’s Population Crashes" shouts the Wall Street Journal headline (link) the other day.  For some this must be stunning and perplexing news.  After being run by liberals and controlled by unions for generations, in what by now should be a worker’s paradise and the envy of the world, Detroit is in shambles and going feral (link) as most residents and businesses of past decades have fled the city.

Expressing disbelief at the data, a major liberal union leader (but I repeat myself) lashed out at those who left: “This is a great city, with great, safe neighborhoods that have wonderful schools, with honest and efficient government, and with a highly skilled and hard-working labor force that any business would be lucky to have. That people have left here just shows you how stupid the average American is, to be incapable of recognizing this city for what it really is.” This is an unconfirmed report.

Writes Steven Malanga at City Journal in "Feral Detroit" (link):

Though some blame Detroit’s population losses on larger economic forces, economists Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer argue in a groundbreaking paper that the city’s problems are mostly self-inflicted. (The paper, called “The Curley Effect,” gets its name from legendary Boston mayor James Curley, who favored Irish residents and pushed other groups out.) After winning election in 1973, Detroit’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, consolidated his power, driving white residents, who had voted against him, out of the city by withdrawing services from their neighborhoods. Eventually, Glaeser and Shleifer write, Detroit became “an overwhelmingly black city mired in poverty and social problems”—and shrinking fast.

Meanwhile, proving that stupidity is both contagious and mutually reinforcing, the recently-arrived Italians and the long-entrenched unions who now own Chrysler are actually boasting in TV commercials that their cars are made in Detroit (link) -- "Imported from Detroit" is the new tag line.  Demonstrably, the Italians have actually never been there.

More from Henry Payne at National Review Online (link).

(The photo is from the poignant photo essay at the blog Sweet Juniper, also linked above)

John M Greco

Related Post:
Chrysler Boasts that Its Cars Are Made by Detroit Union Workers. Yes, That Detroit, Those Workers.

Democrat Voters Migrate to Republican Areas For Better Jobs, Safer Neighborhoods, and Better Services, But Then Still Vote For Democrats; Go Figure

A post by economist Mark J. Perry at Carpe Diem yesterday (link) about data which shows that Michigan was again the state with the most outbound migration got me thinking once again about the implications of business climate and employment levels on political parties. Data like this that I have seen in recent years (link) for the most part shows migration of workers away from higher-taxed, more unionized states with poorer business climates. Most workers seem to recognize in at least a part of their brains that non-government jobs come from successful businesses, and that more successful businesses are in some places than in others.

Once relocated in more promising areas, though, many voters counter-intuitively continue to support the failed policies that caused them to migrate in the first place. This past election cycle has shown us that North Carolina, for example, is less “Republican” than it has been due to migrants from northern Democratic states who have moved south in search of better economic conditions. So we have large numbers of people who in their new more-successful states vote in favor of the very kind of people and policies that have ruined the states they were forced to abandon.

This phenomenon happens at the local level as well. For years now there has been a migration out of Democrat-controlled Chicago and Cook County into the surrounding historically-Republican “Collar Counties.” People have been moving for the better (and more plentiful) jobs, the better schools, the better, safer neighborhoods, the better local governments, and the better services. And yet what do many of them do upon arrival? – they vote for Democrats.

Illinois State Senator Kirk Dillard, a Republican from Hinsdale in DuPage County, was quoted thus in the Chicago Suburban Daily Herald a few years back: “I always find it funny that Democrats run out to [Chicago suburban] DuPage County for the quality of life that we have … yet they want to change it and go back to a system that leads to higher crime, greater taxation and inferior schools.”

For years many Republicans assumed that migration from economically- and socially-failing Democrat-controlled cities and states out to relatively well-run Republican ones would cause Democrat migrants to switch parties, but that does not seem to be happening to the degree expected. Clearly party affiliation depends on multiple factors. But it is sad indeed to recognize that demonstrating better results is not enough by itself to compete for votes against the continual siren call of the inevitably spiritually- and politically-debilitating crypto-totalitarian Democrat nanny state. Democrat Party elites may have it at least a bit right in their cynicism about democracy and popular elections – they think most people are sheep, they treat voters like sheep, and they are continually rewarded for it.

Update 1/13/09: From Carpe Diem (link): "The eight states enjoying the greatest net in-migration of people from other states between 2000-2008 all have Right to Work laws. But of the eight states suffering the worst out-migration, only Katrina-hit Louisiana has such a law."

John M Greco