Lyndon B. Johnson submitting the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 to Congress

Because it is right, because it is wise, and because, for the first time in our history, it is possible to conquer poverty, I submit, for the consideration of the Congress and the country, the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  The Act does not merely expand old programs or improve what is already being done.  It charts a new course.  It strikes at the causes, not just the consequences of poverty.  It can be a milestone in our one-hundred eighty year search for a better life for our people. 

~ President Lyndon B. Johnson, "Special Message to Congress Proposing a Nationwide War on the Sources of Poverty," March 16, 1964

Kevin Duffy on open-ended government wars

We should be opposed to all government wars: on drugs, on poverty, on terror, on racism, on climate change and, yes, on Covid. They are always open-ended, unwinnable and come with crushing costs. The only winner: Big Government.

~ Kevin Duffy, tweet, August 13, 2021

Donna Hearne on the roots of federally-funded education

These revolutionary educational movers, movements, and ideas coalesced in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson created and passed, as a part of the "war on poverty," the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).  For the first time, education became an official federal program, even though it was not one of the legal areas for federal involvement specified in the Constitution.  This law cleverly authorized federally-funded education programs, administered by the states, effectively shifting decision-making from the local to the federal.  In 2002, Congress amended ESEA and reauthorized it as the No Child Left Behind Act.  Social justice planners were delighted and went to work.

~ Donna H. Hearne, The Long War & Common Core, p. 4

Jason Riley on the history of black poverty and the family in America

Jason Riley: Let's look at poverty. Between 1940 and 1960, black poverty in America fell by 40 percentage points... in 20 years. That's before the Civil Rights Act, before Voting Rights Act, before Brown v. Board of Education... Now it continued to fall through the '70s and '80s, but at a much slower rate. You had a much stronger black family coming out of slavery, throughout Reconstruction, into Jim Crow. Two parent households were much more likely among blacks than what you have today. And in some years, according to census, two parent households... the rate exceeded that of whites. The difference today, and I would argue largely as a result of these efforts to help blacks, you have seen the disintegration of the black family. And until blacks repair that damage - and there is significant damage there - I don't see how these other outcomes are going to improve. 

Nick Gillespie: What can the government do? 

Riley: It's not about what I want the government to do; it's what I want the government to stop doing. Stop raising the minimum wage and pricing blacks out of the labor force. Stop mismatching kids with schools in the form of affirmative action and setting them up to fail. Stop trying to replace a father in the home with a government check. 

~ Jason Riley, "Black Americans Failed by Good Intentions: An Interview with Jason Riley," 5:38 mark, Reason TV, September 3, 2014

Jason L. Riley on the challenges facing the black underclass

The sober truth is that the most important civil rights battles were fought and won 4 decades before the Obama presidency.  The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society.  Blacks have become their own worst enemy.

~ Jason L. Riley, Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed

Charles Murray on LBJ's war on poverty

In 1968, as Lyndon Johnson left office, 13% of Americans were poor, using the official definition. Over the next twelve years, our expenditures on social welfare quadrupled. And, in 1980, the percentage of poor Americans was - 13%. Can it be that nothing had changed?

[...]

The basic story we shall unravel comes down to this: Basic indicators of well-being took a turn for the worse in the 1960s, most consistently and most dramatically for the poor. In some cases, earliers progress slowed' in other cases mild deterioration accelerated; in a few instances advance turned into retreat. The trendlines on many of the indicators are - literally - unbelievable to people who do not make a profession of following them.

[...]

A government's social policy helps set the rules of the game... The most compelling explanation for the marked shift in the fortunes of the poor is that they continued to respond, as they always had, to the world as they found it, but that we - meaning the not-poor and un-disadvantaged - had changed the rules of their world. Not of our world, just of theirs. The first effect of the new rules was to make it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that were destructive in the long term. Their second effect was to mask these long-term losses - to subsidize irretrievable mistakes. We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

~ Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy: 1950-1980, pp. 8-9

Walter Williams on poverty, responsibility and welfare

The poverty we have today is spiritual poverty. Spiritual poverty is an absence of what traditionally has been known as various human virtues. Much of that spiritual poverty is a result of public and private policy that rewards inferiority and irresponsibility. Chief among the policies that reward inferiority and irresponsibility is the welfare state. When some people know they can have children out of wedlock, drop out of school and refuse employment and suffer little consequence and social sanction, one should not be surprised to see the growth of such behavior. Today’s out-of-wedlock births among blacks is over 70%, but in the 1930s, it was 11%. During the same period, out-of-wedlock births among whites was 3%; today, it is over 30%. It is fashionable and politically correct to blame today’s 21% black poverty on racial discrimination. That is nonsense. Why? The poverty rate among black husband-and-wife families has been in the single digits for more than two decades. Can anyone produce evidence that racists discriminate against black female-headed families but not black husband-and-wife families?

~ Walter Williams, "Today and Yesterday," LewRockwell.com, September 10, 2020

Bill Bonner on the progress of black Americans since the Civil War

For a hundred years following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, Blacks continued to make progress – more or less like every other immigrant group – learning skills, entering the professions, setting up their own businesses, and closing the gap between themselves and Whites. 

But then, do-gooders and world-improvers began to use Blacks in a novel way – with disastrous consequences.

In 1964, came the War on Poverty, which gave money to Blacks – but only if they didn’t marry and didn’t work. It also created a new, cronyfied Black elite – who figured out how to game the $21 trillion poverty/racism industry, getting jobs, grants, and special privileges for “minority” enterprises.

Then, in 1971, the War on Drugs brought a whole new level of violence, as gangs fought for market share. Drug laws put millions of Blacks behind bars… nurturing a criminal culture and making it harder than ever for many to get jobs in the normal economy.

And then came the funny money.

Over decades, it shifted manufacturing jobs overseas (it was easier and cheaper to buy things from overseas with fake money than it was to make them here). This, along with minimum wages, kicked the bottom rung out from under the laboring classes – Black and White.

And in 2009, the Federal Reserve kicked its program of money-printing into high gear… with a massive transfer of wealth from the middle and lower classes to the top 10%.

And if that weren’t enough, as mentioned above… the Fed has now gone all out… with huge bailouts to Wall Street, in which very few Blacks participate. Overall, by our estimate, in the last 90 days, the typical Black got only 1/33rd as much fake money as the top 10%.

~ Bill Bonner, "On Juneteenth, a Conversation on Reparations," Rogue Economics, June 19, 2020

Vasko Kohlmayer on government programs aimed to help black Americans

The immense lengths – involving both effort and treasure – into which this society has gone to help and accommodate black Americans are surely worth pondering.  In a healthy society, this would draw at least sporadic expressions of gratitude and appreciation.

~ Vasko Kohlmayer, "The Truth About America: Why We Are Not a Racist Nation," LewRockwell.com, June 12, 2020

Walter Williams on the cost of LBJ's War on Poverty

As of 2014, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution. If money alone were the answer, the many issues facing a large segment of the black community would have been solved.

~ Walter Williams, "Reparations for Slavery," LewRockwell.com, June 26, 2019