Posted on 09/22/2021 11:27:06 AM PDT by karpov
The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion proposal to expand the U.S. safety net is being described as a make-or-break moment for the Biden presidency. Regarding electoral politics in the short term, that may well be true. But some of us are more concerned about what it could mean for the country beyond the next election or two.
Liberals view a larger welfare state as an unalloyed good, but what’s the track record? Entitlement programs were dramatically expanded in the 1960s in the service of a war on poverty, yet poverty fell at a slower rate after the Great Society initiatives were implemented, and overall dependency on the government for food, shelter and other basic necessities increased. According to Howard Husock, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a coming book on housing policy, “The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It,” the median time a family spends in New York City public housing today is 19 years. And 10% of public housing residents in the city have been there for more than 40 years. Housing intended to help families through a rough patch has become a multigenerational trap for some.
Democrats are now aiming to create new entitlements and expand the existing ones, not only for the poor but also for the professional class. Workers making $200,000 a year would be eligible for a new national paid family and medical leave program. Earlier this year the American Rescue Plan Act expanded the child tax credit for households earning as much as $150,000. Liberals pitch these social programs in the name of helping underprivileged minority groups and reducing inequality, but the lesson of the 1960s is that government relief can put in place incentives that have the opposite effect.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
hite man speak truth. I was there.
Good article.
Few conservatives have the courage to say so, but the introduction of Medicare as part of the Great Society was one of the greatest mistakes our nation has made.
It made a huge slice of the population reliant on the government for their well-being, and huge subsidies inflated the costs of health care for everyone else.
Jason Riley is African American.
These incentives would have exactly that effect their authors intend—to enlarge the class of persons dependent upon the government, and therefore reliable democrat voters.
well, LBJ said 100years in 1964, will it really take another 40 years???
That and women’s liberation.
While America’s men were fighting in VietNam, their jobs — in the careers which black men were on the cusp of entering into — were given over to women.
Well, Daniel Patrick Moynihan had the foresight to call this out in 1965 when his report mentioned this: “By contrast [to white families], the family structure of lower class Negroes is highly unstable, and in many urban centers is approaching complete breakdown.”
Anyone think he’s wrong?
Full report on the black family crisis: https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/#chapter2
Why post all these pay site articles?
“Why post all these pay site articles?”
I do provide 300 words, and often others post a link to the full article on archive.is .
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