- Mar 11, 2015
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Some fun facts about the Great Society".
The Great Society and War on Poverty caused two interrelated problems. First, they led to increased dependency on government and perverse incentives that have hurt the poor. One example of this is welfare payments to single mothers that provided a disincentive for having a father in the home (benefits are cut if there is a working male member of the household). This led to a stark increase in single-parent households. Despite how heroic a single parent may be in trying to raise a child, the number of single-parent households in poverty increased drastically from 1.5 million in 1960 to approximately 5 million currently. This is compared with approximately 2 million married households under the poverty line, which has been constant since 1964. The continued fragmentation of families in poverty has led to increased crime, drug use, school dropout rates, and vast social problems in urban and rural America.
A second problem has been the cost of federal programs to aid the poor. Taxpayers have spent $20 trillion since the mid-1960s to fight the war on poverty. This includes housing allowances, food stamps, welfare payments, education, health care, and other benefits. The cost is more than the cost of all the wars fought in American history from the Revolution to the present day. What have been the results of such spending? The poverty rate has not declined and remains the same as in 1964, and there has been an explosion in the amount of federal dollars (and state dollars) needed to fund all the programs. The resulting entitlement crisis (especially for Medicare and Medicaid) threaten to bankrupt the country as states spend an increasing amount of their budgets on education and health care spending for the poor.
Was the Great Society Successful? | Bill of Rights Institute
billofrightsinstitute.org
Let’s talk about the assistance to single women with children part of the Social Security Act. Title IV provided grants to states as Aid To Dependent Children. Eventually the name of the program was changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children. This was welfare folks. Assistance for single moms with children and no daddy at home. In 1935. Blacks were excluded.
Aid to Dependent Children functioned mainly to provide federal grants to help the states with mothers’ aid laws that began in 1910. The ADC plan was written by two ladies who had been former directors of what was at the time called the U.S. Children’s Bureau. The Children’s Bureau’s goal was to provide aid to all children whose mothers had no support from a husband no matter how they got into that position. From the Children’s Bureau in 1910 until 1965, no one talked about how the welfare state was wrong and created the disintegration of the white family. The program was not denigrated as something creating dependence on government; it was seen as essential assistance needed to help women without husbands who had children. Only when the law required that others besides whites be included did the story change to how the welfare state was wrong and destructive
The Social Security Act of 1935, Social Security History
Brad Plumer, A second look at Social Security’s racist origins, Washington Post, June 3, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...cond-look-at-social-securitys-racist-origins/
Linda Gordon and Felice Batlan, The Legal History of the Aid to Dependent Children Program, https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/public-welfare/aid-todependent-children-the-legal-history/
Almost everything you claim here is incorrect then divide 20 trillion by 62 years and consider the 18 trillion proposed for our military over the next 9 years. We have spent more than 20 trillion on the military over the course of 62 years.
The poverty rate in America declined from the 1960's until now.
In 1959, the poverty rate for all American families was 20.8 percent. For white families, it was 16.5 percent. For black families, it was 54.9 percent. In 1966, the American poverty rate was 13.1 percent. For white families, the poverty rate was 9.7 percent, and for black families, it was 40.9 percent.1In 2020, the poverty rate for all American families was 9.5 percent. Poverty for black families was 17.4 percent, and for white families it was 8.2 percent.
U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 1960 to 2021 AnnualSocial and Economic Supplements (CPS ASEC). Table 2. Poverty Status of People by Family Relationship, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 1959 to 2020, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/ poverty/data/historical/people.htm
“In 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, attributed racial inequality as well as poverty and crime in the black community to family structure, particularly the prevalence of families headed by single mothers. Not only did research at the time cast doubt on this causality, but evidence over the last the 50 years demonstrates that rates of child poverty, educational attainment, and crime do not track rates of single parenthood. Thus, even though the share of children living with a single mother rose for all racial and ethnic groups through the mid-1990s and has remained high since then, school completion and youth arrests for violent crimes have declined significantly, while poverty rates have fluctuated according to economic conditions. Family structure does not drive racial inequity, and racial inequity persists regardless of family structure.”
Amy Traub, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Meschede and Thomas Shapiro, DEMOS, The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap, pg. 10 https://www.demos.org/sites/default/files/publications/Asset Val ue%20of%20Whiteness_0.pdf
On August 15, 2013, The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice published a paper by Mike Males titled, “Why the Gigantic, Decades-Long Drop in Black Youth Crime Threatens Major Interests.” Males points this out in his report. “For nearly all serious and minor offenses, including homicide, rates among black teenagers nationally were lower in 2011 than when racial statistics were first collected nationally in 1964.
Mike Males, “Why the Gigantic, Decades-Long Drop in Black Youth Crime Threatens Major Interests,” The Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, August 15, 2013, http://www.cjcj.org/news/652
As we go further down the page we see that you have cosigned the usual nonsense from Lisa. Whites benefitted most from Great Society programs. Johnson made his comments in relation to signing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, not the Great Society programs. This thread is about what the government has done for whites. So stay on topic moderator and don't try hijack threads with nonfactual garbage.
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