War on poverty
The forty programs established by the Act were collectively aimed at eliminating poverty by improving living conditions for residents of low-income neighborhoods and by helping the poor access economic opportunities long denied from them.
[1] As a part of the Great Society, Johnson believed in expanding the federal government's roles in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies.
The legacy of the war on poverty policy initiative remains in the continued existence of such federal government programs as Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), TRiO, and Job Corps.
The project was designed to help end poverty by providing preschool children from low-income families with a program that would meet emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs.
[citation needed] A 2013 study published by Columbia University asserts that without the social safety net, the poverty rate would have been 29% for 2012, instead of 16%.
[19][20] According to the Readers' Companion to U.S. Women's History, Many observers point out that the war on poverty's attention to Black America created the grounds for the backlash that began in the 1970s.
The perception by the white middle class that it was footing the bill for ever-increasing services to the poor led to diminished support for welfare state programs, especially those that targeted specific groups and neighborhoods.
Many whites viewed Great Society programs as supporting the economic and social needs of low-income urban minorities; they lost sympathy, especially as the economy declined during the 1970s.
[23] As white middle-class Americans became more disgruntled about the “government handouts” that Black low-income communities were receiving, policymakers and legislators took action to respond to their concerns.
He proposed, and Congress enacted, whopping increases in the minimum benefits that lifted some two million Americans 65 and older above the poverty line.
In 1996, thanks to those increased minimum benefits, Social Security lifted 12 million senior citizens above the poverty line ... No Great Society undertaking has been subjected to more withering conservative attacks than the Office of Economic Opportunity.
Yet, the war on poverty was founded on the most conservative principle: Put the power in the local community, not in Washington; give people at the grassroots the ability to stand tall on their own two feet.
[28][29] Historian Tony Judt said in reference to the earlier proposed title of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that "a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive" and attributed the decline in the popularity of the Great Society as a policy to its success, as fewer people feared hunger, sickness, and ignorance.
[30] Economist Thomas Sowell also criticized the war on poverty's programs, writing "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.
Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube.
"[34] The next year, King started the Poor People's Campaign to address the shortcomings of the "war on poverty" and to "demand a check" for suffering African-Americans which was carried on briefly after his death with the construction and maintenance of an encampment, Resurrection City, for over six weeks.
Large-scale homelessness, an explosion of teen-age pregnancies and single-parent households, rampant illiteracy, drugs and crime – these have been both the results of and causes of persistent poverty.
While it is thus inappropriate to celebrate an anniversary of the war on poverty, it is important to point up some of the big gains ... Did every program of the 60's work?
"[37]On March 3, 2014, as Chairman of the Budget Committee of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan released his "The War on Poverty: 50 Years Later" report, asserting that some of 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans have not provided the relief intended and that there is little evidence that these efforts have been successful.
[38][39] At the core of the report were recommendations to enact cuts to welfare, child care, college Pell grants and several other federal assistance programs.
