Posted on 01/28/2014 9:25:11 AM PST by Kaslin
Before you can assess the success or failure of a program you must first understand the mission. Then, with the objectives of the mission in mind, one can measure success or failure.
If you set the bar low enough or modify the mission, then anything can look like a success. Conversely, everything fails if standards are sufficiently high.
Thomas Sowell discusses those ideas, in relation to the war on poverty, in Fact-Free Liberals.
Since this year will mark the 50th anniversary of the "war on poverty," we can expect many comments and commemorations of this landmark legislation in the development of the American welfare state.
The actual signing of the "war on poverty" legislation took place in August 1964, so the 50th anniversary is some months away. But there have already been statements in the media and in politics proclaiming that this vast and costly array of anti-poverty programs "worked."
The real question is: What did the "war on poverty" set out to do -- and how well did it do it, if at all?
Both President John F. Kennedy, who launched the proposal for a "war on poverty" and his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, who guided the legislation through Congress and then signed it into law, were very explicit as to what the "war on poverty" was intended to accomplish.
President Kennedy said, "We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence."
The same theme was repeated endlessly by President Johnson. The purpose of the "war on poverty," he said, was to make "taxpayers out of taxeaters." Its slogan was "Give a hand up, not a handout." When Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark legislation into law, he declared: "The days of the dole in our country are numbered."
Now, 50 years and trillions of dollars later, it is painfully clear that there is more dependency than ever.
Ironically, dependency on government to raise people above the poverty line had been going down for years before the "war on poverty" began. The hard facts showed that the number of people who lived below the official poverty line had been declining since 1960, and was only half of what it had been in 1950.
On the more fundamental question of dependency, the facts were even clearer. The proportion of people whose earnings put them below the poverty level -- without counting government benefits -- declined by about one-third from 1950 to 1965.
All this was happening before the "war on poverty" went into effect -- and all these trends reversed after it went into effect.
By any reasonable measurement of war on poverty mission statements made by presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the war on poverty was a miserable failure.
“You can lead a horse to water....”
Read that a fifty year war on decent hard working U. S. Citizens.
And sadly, it’s been a massive success.
23% of our workforce idle. Another 25% or so of it receiving half the wages it used to just a few short years ago.
The NSA telling us to turn our head and cough.
Cameras on every corner.
Well, at least the rectal probes haven’t been implemented yet.
Course we don’t know what Obama’s case is. Perhaps they have...
Of course, most of the failures are the Dem's core constituency. To placate these people, the Dems must rob the producers. Few will cry for the superrich. Most Dems consider themselves owed by the rich. They deserve the wealth they did not create.
Mr. Kennedy actually said that? I'm surprised he hasn't been posthumously kicked out of the democrat party.
Like anything from LBJ, an abject failure.
“War on poverty?” Many kinds of work are outlawed for the purpose of keeping new, small production shops from starting and eventually eliminating owner-builders. There’s no war on poverty. It’s a regulating, foreign manufacturing and currency class war against the impoverished in western culture. Many freedoms and families are being violated and destroyed by globetrotting lefties.
Exactly. America - as founded and designed- inherently was a war on poverty.
Actually, during that period, the average American made huge gains in their standard of living and wealth. Bigger gains than any other period of American history. But virtually every history class vilifies the wealth creators as inhuman beasts whose greed caused incredible hardships for the common people.
In his “History of the American People” Paul Johnson writes along these lines, pointing out the large increases in wealth and other measures of well-being of the common man during this time and concludes the section with “Where was the robbing?”
I remember an old joke I read somewhere about WWII. A young barefoot lad from up in a “holler” somewhere walked into the recruiting office to volunteer for the infantry. A doctor examined him and said, “Son, I’m sorry but the Army can’t use you because you have a very bad case of flat feet, you wouldn’t be able to march five miles with those feet.”
The young fellow looked at the doctor and said, “I shor hate to hear that, Doc, ‘cause I done walked forty miles to git here an’ I shor hate to walk back.”
In my opinion education is the SPECTACULAR failure that lies at the root of all the rest. It has been reported recently that studies show that a current bachelor degree is worth less in the job market than a public high school diploma was worth in the sixties. I know from conversations that recent college graduates in this area who majored in history could not pass an eighth grade history test from my era. Classical education seems to be very nearly nonexistent, what is left is some kind of training to produce compliant employees who will do as they are told.
It is pathetic to see how many spend years in a university running up student debts and then take a job that would have been scorned by an 18 year old high school graduate fifty years ago. I consider it downright criminal to do this to young people.
Yep. The leftists have control of our education system and our media, so it is very hard to get the truth out. Is there any source or website out there for kids to learn real history? We need a conservative kids site. I need something I can rebut the “education” my kids are getting.
btt
Or to put it in Lay-man's terms, if you had been trying to get laid for 50 years with no positive, hard results, would it be considered a success?
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