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Lyndon Johnson on Welfare & Poverty
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1964: Food Stamps, initially 350,000 people, now 42 million
In 2010 came news that 41.8 million Americans were on food stamps and the White House was predicting that the number would grow to 43 million in 2011. It did: by February 2011, 44.2 million
Americans, one in seven, were on food stamps. In Washington, D.C., more than a fifth of the population was receiving food stamps.
To chart America's decline, the explosion in the food stamp program is a good place to begin. A harbinger of the Great Society, the Food Stamp Act was signed into law in 1964 by LBJ.
Initially, $75 million was appropriated for 350,000 individuals in forty counties and three cities. However, no one was starving in the 1960s.
Source: Suicide of a Superpower, by Pat Buchanan, p. 32
, Oct 18, 2011
FactCheck: Poverty rate has fallen under Great Society
Bill O'Reilly of Fox News said that the poverty rate has stayed about the same since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society of the mid-1960s. He said, "Obama believes Johnson's Great Society entitlements can elevate the poor to prosperity. They can't. In 1965,
the poverty rate stood at 14%. Now, after untold trillions have been spent fighting poverty, the poverty rate is 14.3%."The Great Society agenda included such ongoing programs as Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start--intended to improve the health care,
Nutrition, & education; and focused on elderly poverty, which is down to 13%. That said, we'll take O'Reilly's statement on its own terms:
He uses the wrong numbers. The poverty rate was 17.3% in 1965, not 14%. So the poverty has fallen by 3
percentage points, or by about 1/6 its original level.
Counting different years shows even more decline. In 1962, the poverty rate ranged was 20%. In pre-recession 2007, it stood at 12.5%. Comparing 1962 and 2007, the poverty rate dropped by over 1/3.
Source: FactCheck on 2011 Presidential primary by PolitiFact.com
, Jul 26, 2011
FactCheck: Poverty rate has fallen under Great Society
Nutrition, & education; and focused on elderly poverty, which is down to 13%. That said, we'll take O'Reilly's statement on its own terms:He uses the wrong numbers. The poverty rate was 17.3% in 1965, not 14%. So the poverty has fallen by 3
percentage points, or by about 1/6 its original level.
Counting different years shows even more decline. In 1962, the poverty rate ranged was 20%. In pre-recession 2007, it stood at 12.5%. Comparing 1962 and 2007, the poverty rate dropped by over 1/3.
Source: FactCheck on 2011 Presidential primary by PolitiFact.com
, Jul 26, 2011
Announced "War on Poverty" in 1965
President Lyndon Johnson famously announced the War on Poverty. From 1965 to 2008, total spending on this "war" reached nearly $16 trillion in 2008 dollars. And what did we get in return? Soon after the War on
Poverty programs were adopted, the years-long decline in American poverty suddenly stopped. By 2009 the poverty rate stood at 14.3%--about where it was when the War of Poverty began. In 1960, nearly
2/3rds of low-income households were headed by persons who worked, but by 1991, the proportion had fallen to 1/3, with only 11% working full time, year round. With the government providing so much in free welfare, many people chose not to work.
Welfare recipients who go to work lose their benefits as their income rises. This is effectively an extra tax on work that must be paid on top of the usual array of federal, state, and local taxes.
Source: A Nation Like No Other, by Newt Gingrich, p.109
, Jun 13, 2011
Great Society required business community's support
LBJ sensed intuitively that if his plans for the Great Society were to be realized he must have in his corner the business community. He would be hard-pressed to gather congressional support for the massive funding he was looking for if the business
and industrial leaders of the country looked sourly on his course of action. A robust economy was the rock on which he would build his society. So he did what he always did when he began to construct his dreams for what he believed to be
the right decision to be made; he "reasoned" with those he needed as allies.There came to the White House, in waves of meetings and dinners and luncheons, the premier captains of the American industrial empire. He sought them out, singly and together.
He paid court to them, listened to them, persuaded them their advice was essential and their power necessary to the momentum of the economy, and of course, the Johnsonian legislative program.
Source: A Very Human President, by Jack Valenti, p.199
, Dec 1, 1976
Rent supplements cost less than public housing
At a staff meeting, LBJ admonished his staff: "These men have to go back and get re-elected every two years. Just telling them rent supplements is fine is not enough. Most of them will tell you 'how can I explain that one?' and they're right. Get the
facts on all the subsidies the government pays to farmers & to every damn interest sucking on the public teat. Our argument ought to be, look, we pay blank dollars per person to subsidize these various interests. Why can't we pay much less per person to
provide a poor family with a home? It will cost the government less, rent supplements versus public housing. Make it all in dollars and cents, so that when he gets back home he can go on TV and say, 'Folks, I saved you a lot of tax dollars the other day
when I voted for rent supplements. It's going to save the taxpayer blank dollars per person per year.' Now, few people will get upset if you tell them you are saving them money, if at the same time you are not taking anything away from them."
Source: A Very Human President, by Jack Valenti, p.190-191
, Dec 1, 1976
1964: declares unconditional war on poverty
Anti-poverty went into the 1964 State of the Union message, first in emphasis, and it was expressed in language which made the program, whatever plans the Kennedy administration may have had, an LBJ measure. "This administration," declared Lyndon
Johnson like a trumpet call at the Alamo, "today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon nor strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won.
We must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant-worker camps, in Indian reservations, in the boom towns & in the depressed areas."Most Johnsonian was the core of the message.
Social legislation plus economy--the blend was heavily emphasized near the start of the speech, and the President touched on it at every opportunity.
Source: Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson, by Eric F. Goldman, p. 46
, Mar 1, 1974
Page last updated: Apr 28, 2013
