Why we lost it, and why we’re continuing to lose it, despite many trillions of dollars. The only way to win the war on poverty is to end the war on the market and economy.
8 thoughts on “The War on Poverty”
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Why we lost it, and why we’re continuing to lose it, despite many trillions of dollars. The only way to win the war on poverty is to end the war on the market and economy.
Comments are closed.
The really crucial part is the definition of poverty.
We’ve basically set it up as “The lowest quartile shall be determined to be below the poverty line”.
Whereas what we -really- want is a concrete measure that’s a fixed point like “How many people are failing to meet minimal survival goals in air/water/food?”
There’s another crucial part: War. A country can wage war on another country. Part of a nation can wage war on another part of a nation in a civil war. Tribes can war upon each other, but a tribe against a nation is so lopsided it can’t even be considered a war. And a coalition of nations can wage war against a single nation or a coalition of other nations. In more recent times, nations have been able to wage biological warfare against natural pathogens like Polio.
But Poverty is an idea, not a nation or a coalition of nations or a tribe or a virus. It is an insidious idea, too, since it is both the government waging the “war, and the government which sets the Poverty line, in a very different place than 50 years ago. The War on Drugs is another “war” against an idea – these drugs the government says you may have, those drugs the government says you may not, and the government recommends you cure your boys of boyhood with Ritalin. They are both “wars” on ideas
I contend that the declaration of War should be only used for actual wars, and not used as a rhetorical device against ideas.
One trillion dollars divided by 50 million people: that’s 20 thousand dollars a year for every man, woman and child on welfare.
War on poverty, yer doin it wrong.
You’re not considering the considerable amount of that trillion dollars that goes to administrative overhead. Many years ago in a bout of insomnia, I turned on C-SPAN and listened to some congressional testimony. The speaker claimed that 80% of welfare spending was actually eaten up by the burearcrats and social workers who run the many, duplicative programs. Now I don’t know if that 80% number is accurate or not but when you add up the salaries, benefits and pensions of all the federal, state, county and local social workers and bureaucrats running the programs, it is a considerable amount of money. Just as many people on welfare have a vested interest in staying there, so do the social workers have a vested interest in keeping people in poverty.
Indeed. Ronald Reagan made a similar point 50 years ago in a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater – that the money being spent on solving juvenile delinquency, if divided by the total number of delinquents, would be enough to send each delinquent to Harvard.
I hate seeing charts which don’t explain how they came up with the figures in the first place. How was the poverty rate defined?
It was never about ending poverty, it was about buying votes for the democrat party.
And still is, Ctrot.