Marriage and Poverty, Welfare Reform, Welfare Spending and Work and Welfare
September 23, 2014
The War on Poverty: 50 years of failure
By
Robert Rector
"... When President Johnson launched the War on Poverty, he wanted to give the poor a "hand up, not a hand out." He stated that his war would shrink welfare rolls and turn the poor from "taxeaters" into "taxpayers." Johnson's aim was to make poor families self-sufficient - able to rise above poverty through their own earnings without dependence on welfare.
The exact opposite happened. For a decade and a half before the War on Poverty began, self-sufficiency in American improved dramatically. But for the last 45 years, there has been no improvement at all. Many groups are less capable of self-support today than when Johnson's war started.
The culprit is, in part, the welfare system itself, which discourages work and penalizes marriage. When the War on Poverty began, 7 percent of American children were born outside marriage. Today the number is 41 percent. The collapse of marriage is the main cause of child poverty today.
The welfare state is self-perpetuating. By undermining the social norms necessary for self-reliance, welfare creates a need for even greater assistance in the future. President Obama plans to spend $13 trillion over the next decade on welfare programs that will discourage work, penalize marriage and undermine self-sufficiency.
Rather than repeating the mistakes of the past we should return to Johnson's original goal. Johnson sought to help the poor help themselves. He aimed to free the poor from the need for government aid, rather than to increase their dependence. That's a vision worth recapturing.
- Robert Rector is a senior research fellow in the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.
Originally distributed by McClatchy-Tribune News Service