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Posted on 09/10/2008 10:10:57 AM PDT by IrishMike
Perhaps it is time to stop worrying about an exit strategy for the War in Iraq and formulate one for the War on Poverty.
No, it’s not the War in Iraq — it’s the War on Poverty. Incredible as it may seem, Americans transfer more than a trillion dollars each year to low-income families through a bewildering variety of programs, all in the name of fighting poverty and inequality. That’s about seven times the cost of the Iraq war.
How do we spend so much? In 2005, $620 billion was spent on more than eighty welfare programs funded by federal, state, and local governments. But low-income persons receive benefits from other government programs that are not designated as welfare programs. Most notably, they receive benefits from Social Security, Medicare, and the public school system.
I estimate that Social Security benefits for those in the poorest fifth of the population totaled $100 billion in 2005. Medicare provided another $115 billion, and educating the children of low-income families cost $105 billion more. (These figures do not measure total spending on these programs but only the expenditures benefiting those in the lowest fifth of the income distribution.) To these sums we may add $40 billion in uncompensated medical care and $78 billion in private charity.
Grand total: $1.058 trillion in 2005. It would be larger today.
To put a trillion dollars in perspective, it’s more than twice our total spending on national defense.
It’s larger than the total revenue collected by the federal individual income tax.
It’s about ten times as much as we spent on redistributive policies in the 1950s (in inflation-adjusted dollars).
It’s equal to the total before-tax cash income of middle-income households. That’s right, we transfer to the low-income population an amount equal to the entire income of middle-income households, that is, households in the middle fifth (40th to 60th percentile) of the American income distribution.
If a trillion dollars were simply given to those counted as poor by the federal government (37 million in 2005), it would amount to $27,000 per person. That’s $81,000 for a family of three, higher than the median income of all American families, and far greater than the poverty threshold of $15,577.
By any reasonable standard, a trillion dollars devoted to fighting poverty and inequality is a substantial sum.
What do we get for it? That is the question we should be asking our politicians in this election year as they urge us to spend still more on the War on Poverty.
When Lyndon Johnson inaugurated the War on Poverty in 1964, he assured the public that “. . . this investment [of tax dollars] will return its cost many fold to our entire economy.” Now that this “investment” has reached a trillion dollars a year we should evaluate whether the returns have, in fact, been large. Some questions to consider:
Is the low-income population more independent and self-supporting than before the War on Poverty?
Has the trillion-dollar expenditure eliminated poverty in America? Reduced it dramatically?
Has the trillion-dollar expenditure reduced inequality? Are the egalitarians grateful to the American people for their sacrifices in this area, or are they continually carping about increasing inequality?
Are more disadvantaged children being raised in stable two-parent families today than before the War on Poverty?
Are the children in low-income families getting good educations that prepare them for productive lives as adults? Have the racial gaps in educational achievement been eliminated or greatly narrowed?
Has illegitimacy been reduced in the low-income population?
Is crime lower today than in the 1950s, before the War on Poverty?
The answers to these questions, I submit, paint a bleak picture of the accomplishments of the American welfare state. While a nuanced interpretation of the evidence may identify a few positive returns on our “investment,” we have a right to expect a lot more for a trillion dollars a year. Perhaps it is time to stop worrying about an exit strategy for the War in Iraq and formulate one for the War on Poverty.
bump
One might, therefore, plausibly argue that we have in fact "won" the war on poverty, in the sense that even our poorest people are immeasurably rich by the standards of most of the world's poor.
If one defines "victory" by a count of Americans who are actually poor by material standards, the War on Poverty has been a great success.
Mr. Browning nevertheless states that we have not "won," and actually he's correct ... but for perhaps the wrong reasons.
A useful metaphor for the current state of the War on Poverty is that of a person on life support. The body can in most cases be kept alive indefinitely, but will die when the machines are unplugged. That's where things stand now, with welfare -- take away the welfare, and true poverty will once again be among us.
Mr. Browning merely hints at the reasons why we are not winning the War on Poverty -- it's not a matter of material support; if it were only that, we are clearly victorious.
The fact is, however, that our difficulties in the War on Poverty are cultural, not material. Just like the person on life support, the person on welfare must sink or swim on her own, once the support is removed -- and our current culture does not insist on people carrying their own weight.
It's not that the cultural battle has been lost, precisely... it's that the cultural battle has barely been contested at all. There are a LOT of reasons for that, and fighting that battle would be very difficult.
But if we really want to win the War on Poverty, we have to open an offensive on the Cultural front.
It’s about time this was brought to the surface and thrust onto the national stage.
IMO, the “war on Poverty” has been a colossal failure.
We now have 4-5 generations of people who actually think that they sould have been paid by FEMA last week to leave New Orleans.
I am tired of trashing the people in this country who are accomplished and praising those who cannot do anything for themselves.
“What do we get for it?” Socialist Democrats get a vote to keep them in power. They need people to be dependent upon government.
confirmed by this soon to be classic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRq1XRxrQP4
-snip-
In the fifties, although blacks were still struggling for equal opportunities and were on the low end of the economic ladder, the black family was for the most part strong and stable. Two parent families were the rule, not the exception. They attended church together, had strong moral values, and did not comprise a majority of the prison population.
Compare that to the present state of the black community after 40 years of Liberal Socialism.
Our prisons are disproportionably black, unwed mothers and single parent families are the rule, black youths without a strong male role model other than rap stars and basketball players, roam the streets and are drawn into a culture of drugs and crime.
The following statistics are provided by Star Parker's Coalition of Urban Renewal, (CURE).
*60 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes.
*800,000 black men are in jail or prison.
*70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers.
*Over 300,000 black babies are aborted annually.
*50 percent of new AIDS cases are in the black community.
*Almost half of young black men in America's cities are neither working nor in school. What we have here is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.
What was the message of the social programs that came out of LBJ's Great Society? One of the most devastating to the family was that if an unwed woman became pregnant, moved out of the home of her parents, did not name or know who the father was, then Big Daddy in Washington would provide for all her essential needs. Ergo she no longer needed a husband or the support of her family.
In fact, the more children she had out of wedlock, the more money she would receive from the government. This program was the death knell for many families, especially in the black community.
Unfortunately many black men saw this as the best of all possible worlds. They could father as many children as they wanted, from multiple women, without ever having to accept the responsibility of fatherhood.
Many women rejected marriage in favor of a boyfriend who could slip in the back door and not jeopardize her government check.
-snip-
much of that money is eaten up by administrative costs, private contractors, corruption, waste, duplication of effort in 10 different government departments-—in short, it is a clumsy, wasteful bureacracy that swallows the money, not actual poor people.
Handouts just keep people from getting jobs and taking care of themselves. Government handouts don’t work. There are generations of families that have never worked.
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It would seem to make more sense to give the money directly to the "poor"
people and just cut a check for them. But it wouldn't make much difference.
Workfare works, but people either refuse to believe it or simply too lazy to implement it.
You can be wealthy and low-income at the same time, and you can also be be poor and high-income at the same time.
That was one of the most insightful comments I have ever read on FR.
I’ve been as poor as any person in this country but my home was never trashy or dirty. I didn’t have the means to go to expensive schools but I am hardly uneducated. I have few material goods but not one thing I do have was dishonestly obtained. I learned from others that not running afoul of the law saves a lot of money.
So by some definitions I am and have been poor all my life but I’ve never considered myself impoverished.
I’m sure most of the posters and readers know the difference.
Have I ever received any sort of government assistance? Sure, I’ve used programs that my tax dollars had supported but the key word is here is assistance not a livlihood, not living on others work when I could care for my own needs.
Assistance as a last resort and as a very temporary event, not as a means of avoiding the burdens and rewards of providing for myself.
Money has never reduced the poverty of character, spirit if you will, hence it cannot reduce the number of members of society who are poor due to their poverty.
Exactly.
A trillion dollars in the hands of small businesses would have created millions of jobs and done more for the war on poverty than all welfare programs put together. A more logical approach would have been to create tax free zones in areas of high poverty.
That was one of the most insightful comments I have ever read on FR.
Dittos the applause, logician2u. I like this part even more:
"OK, you can declare -- through presidential proclamation, since Congress hasn't been involved since 1941 -- war on these things, but you'd be hard-pressed to ever declare victory."
"That's the problem. Once begun, the war continues indefinitely, or until the nation becomes bankrupt as a result."
An argument of possible merit, depending on the numbers.
Goes up during Carter or Bush terms, eh?
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