It is a struggle to give people a chance
The war on poverty is not a struggle simply to support people, to make them dependent on the generosity of others. It is an effort to allow them to develop and use their capacities, swingtowns problemen as we have been allowed to develop and use ours, so that they can share, as others share, in the promise of this nation.
Since then, the U.S has spent $20 trillion on means-tested welfare programs. In 2011 alone, government spent more than $900 billion on 79 such programs-nearly $9,000 per year for each poor and low-income American. Two generations after Johnson’s speech, having spent such extraordinary sums of money, it is reasonable to ask how close we are to fulfilling LBJ’s goal of an America in which poverty has been eradicated.
By many measures, poor Americans are better off than ever before
Poverty takes many forms in America, but Dickensian squalor and destitution is not one of them: 80 percent of poor households have air conditioning; nearly 75 percent have a vehicle (31 percent have two or more); and 42 percent of poor households actually own their own homes. This is due in no small part to the overall rise in standards of living that benefits all citizens in free-market societies. The rising tide of capitalism does indeed lift all boats, although cash transfers through welfare programs admittedly also play a role. As The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield point out, “Not even the government can spend $9,000 per person without significantly affecting living conditions.”
LBJ did not propose an overbearing system of lifetime government handouts, but rather pledged to reduce welfare dependence, increase self-sufficiency, and set the stage for all to eagerly pursue the American Dream. He sold the War on Poverty to the American people by talking about opportunity-not dependence.
The promise of the War on Poverty was not, however, merely to prop up living standards through an ever-expanding welfare state
By this standard, the War on Poverty must be judged an abject failure. By ensnaring an ever-larger share of the population in the tentacles of the welfare state, it has left a significant portion of the population less capable of prosperous self-sufficiency than they were before LBJ declared his War on Poverty.
Far from eradicating poverty, the welfare state in fact traps people in poverty. It does so in two major ways: by undermining the family and discouraging work.
As the War on Poverty expanded benefits, welfare began to serve as a substitute for a husband in the home, and low-income marriage began to disappear. When Johnson launched the War on Poverty, 7 percent of American children were born out of wedlock. Today, the number is over 40 percent. As married fathers disappeared from the home, the need for more welfare to support single mothers increased. The War on Poverty created a destructive feedback loop: Welfare undermined marriage, and this generated a need for more welfare. Today, out-of-wedlock childbearing-with the resulting growth of single-parent homes-is the most important cause of child poverty.
The current welfare system also erodes the culture of work that makes the American Dream possible. Welfare may well “give” the poor many things, from cash to subsidized housing, but it also takes away a crucial ingredient of happiness: the incentive to work, to save, to improve oneself. Its no-strings-attached benefits constitute what Benjamin Franklin denounced as “a premium for the encouragement of idleness.”
Given its approach to poverty relief, the current welfare state thwarts the aspirations of those whom it tries to help. It fosters dependence in welfare recipients, which in turn often carries over to children. Studies have shown-not surprisingly but nonetheless quite tragically-that welfare is increasingly intergenerational.