After waging War on Poverty for 50 years, let's not surrender

  • Thread starter Thread starter Robert_Sock
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
R

Robert_Sock

Guest
latimes.com/business/la-f…#axzz2qCLB57TP

Fifty years ago Wednesday, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered what may have been the last genuinely uplifting State of the Union speech we’ve had.

“This administration, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” he said. “We shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”

Since LBJ’s launch of the War on Poverty, the effort has become a whipping boy on the right and even the left. President Reagan’s judgment from 1986 seems to have won the battle for the most repeated crack: “In 1964 the famous War on Poverty was declared and a funny thing happened … I guess you could say, poverty won the war.”
 
If one if waging war for 50 years and little has changed, maybe the wrong tactics are being used?

OTOH, I agree with what Christ said: The poor you will always have with you. It seems very clear to me that there will always be people in need. Sometimes we measure the poor by quintiles and that just makes me laugh because of *course * there will always be a lowest quintile!

But in reality, there will always be handicapped, ill, and elderly, as well as people who are temporarily down on their luck, people unable to get ahead, and those who make foolish decisions.

There will always be people to help, and that is how it should be. Those in need awaken our compassion and help draw us all into community with our fellows, which is what God wants.
 
How can we wage “war” on poverty? Who do we start shooting at first? Those with the most money?😛
 
The war against poverty is like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, or any war the USA has entered into since WW2, expensive and futile.
The only way to improve the lowest quartile is to increase the size of the pie overall.This is not achieved by socialist intervention; just look at Europe.
Big government taking over the role of charities is a dangerous extension of governmental control.
I read an interesting analysis suggesting that bankrupt cities in the US should learn from the history of Hong Kong in its treatment of taxation and government controls.

When you win your next war, you can take another look at poverty, but the country’s economic malaise may cripple any future excursion as the world’s policeman and encourage an outbreak of peace.
 
St_Francis said:
If one if waging war for 50 years and little has changed, maybe the wrong tactics are being used?

OTOH, I agree with what Christ said: The poor you will always have with you. It seems very clear to me that there will always be people in need. Sometimes we measure the poor by quintiles and that just makes me laugh because of *course * there will always be a lowest quintile!

But in reality, there will always be handicapped, ill, and elderly, as well as people who are temporarily down on their luck, people unable to get ahead, and those who make foolish decisions.

There will always be people to help, and that is how it should be. Those in need awaken our compassion and help draw us all into community with our fellows, which is what God wants.
Click to expand...
👍👍

Being ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ canbe relative terms. In one area, being poor maybe one thing and in another area that person maybe rich. 🙂
 
Poverty is a really complex issue which has many causes. Some believe if people would just give money to people, it would solve it. I don’t think even that would.

Well, let’s take homeless people, as just one example. A lot of people are homeless due to mental illness. With the advent of deinstitutionalization, thanks to some movies which portrayed mental health institutions very negatively, didn’t help matters at all. Instead of people being in an institution, they end up on the street.

Also, people who don’t have the mental faculties to make a choice are expected to.

Another major area of people living in poverty are people with varying kinds of addictions from drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc., who spend all their money on those, have nothing left over.

Once, I took a class on poverty, and it talked about all kinds of things. It even talked about how machines, computers, etc., took probably thousands of jobs away, that were previously done by people.

Now, sometimes, people are poor, because they don’t have enough of an education. There are many causes for that, as well. It can be because they don’t want an education, that they don’t have as much of a mental capacity, whatever.

Sometimes, I’ve tried to work with the poor and others, and it hasn’t been at all like what I thought. I have been surprised how hard it’s been. Some, even given opportunities at free learning, free materials, still won’t even try to get out of their poverty due to lack of motivation, sometimes. I’ve seen this both in the US and Mexico.

Sometimes, it’s cultural. For instance, I’ve seen at least here where the man of the house will forbid his wife or children (girls especially), from going to school when education would be one main means at a better life, at least economically.

In Mexico, I’ve seen a lot of child labor. I’ve lost students, children, who decided to go out and cut sugar cane rather than be in class. I can’t blame them. They made that decision to help their poor families.

There are all kinds of scenarios, reasons for poverty.

Of course, there is also the wide discrepancy of incomes, another reason.

Sometimes, people want to work, but there just aren’t enough jobs. Or, if there are, they aren’t enough to take a person out of poverty.
Sometimes, people have some kind of disadvantage, a physical/mental disability, and that can move them towards poverty.

A country they are in could be in war or have suffered a natural disaster.

So, we have all these reasons and more which aren’t even listed here. The problem is really complex and will need a wide variety of solutions.

Due to human nature’s being what it is, that there will always be some people who will not be willing to give up their addictions, etc., a certain amount of poverty probably always will continue, unfortunately.
 
OP’s corrected link is found here: latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20140112,0,1032268.column

The War on Poverty is in some ways as futile and Quixotic as the War on Drugs; even more so. Neither war can be won definitively. Both are political excuses for funding a “military industrial complex” of Big Government.

I will grant that federal programs begun in the 20th Century such as Social Security and Medicare help a lot of people, and are beneficial to the nation. We cannot defund these projects or allow them to languish because that would be a disservice to many people who depend on them. I myself benefit from some government programs, and it is always a dilemma for me, as a relatively freshly-minted Republican, why my party wants to dismantle all kinds of things in the name of “smaller governement” while the Catholic Church and other worthwhile charities, that could normally pick up the slack, are being squeezed out of the public square by the other guys.

I don’t know much about the history of public government welfare programs in the US. I understand that before Social Security a lot more people had to rely on charity. I wonder if charitable giving was comparatively more generous before Uncle Sam began taking out mandatory charity from our paychecks. To most citizens it seems like giving voluntarily would be preferable to mandatory taxes being taken out, of course this results in fewer people participating in the redistribution of wealth.

The current trend toward socialism in America does trouble me. I appreciate Francis in his campaign against the greed of unfettered capitalism (although it’s a straw man, no such system has ever existed in the world) and I appreciate his concern for the poor. But what Francis doesn’t realize is that giving people jobs and other opportunity is, to me, the preferred way to redistribute wealth. If our parish sold our building and gave the money to the poor, they would be temporarily less poor, and the sale would throw our entire parish into abject poverty. Without a place to hold Mass, we would not be able to provide the sacraments to all the faithful, and of course we would not be able to take a collection to pay for their ongoing needs as well. In a nutshell, selling your assets is a bad idea unless you’re totally bankrupt. However, the socialism trend isn’t the only disturbing one - the flirtations with fascism being practiced such as PATRIOT Act and other attrition of civil liberty is weird, considering which side we fought in for WW II.

As an example, my pastor since his assignment here has been on a somewhat unpopular mission to beautify our worship space. I personally do not understand why it’s so controversial, because the furnishings and additions have been tasteful and quite fitting to the sacred action that takes place in our 1980-vintage ugly-barn-style church edifice. The church was in really sorry shape when he arrived. Since then he has added an incredible crucifix, several other statues and images, put the tabernacle front-and-center, and faced many surfaces with an attractive stone finish. Some of these funds were raised through special programs and not taken from the plate. All of these projects stimulated the economy of our parish community. The artist who created the stunning altar pieces including the crucifix is himself a very poor man with a large family in Mexico. Without our patronage, he would be struggling and destitute. Now he is making a good living and I am sure his creditors appreciate our assistance. That is how you lift the poor out of their poverty, by finding them something to do. The Church has always, 2000+ years, been a patron of the arts and sciences, and I think that the recent foundation of various institutions to foster appreciation for these finer things will hopefully stimulate the trading among artists and other workers who assist the Church in her mission to spread the Gospel message to the world.

It is far better to create jobs and stimulate the economy creatively than just handing out money to poor people. The Obama administration isn’t doing so great on this point. It’s actively destroying jobs with things like the HHS mandate and the abolition of incandescent light bulbs. The whole ObamaCare thing seems to be lining the pockets of doctors and insurance companies while rank-and-file Americans pay the price - how is that “Affordable”?
 
Robert_Sock said:
latimes.com/business/la-f…#axzz2qCLB57TP

Fifty years ago Wednesday, President Lyndon B. Johnson delivered what may have been the last genuinely uplifting State of the Union speech we’ve had.

“This administration, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” he said. “We shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on Earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”

Since LBJ’s launch of the War on Poverty, the effort has become a whipping boy on the right and even the left. President Reagan’s judgment from 1986 seems to have won the battle for the most repeated crack: “In 1964 the famous War on Poverty was declared and a funny thing happened … I guess you could say, poverty won the war.”
Click to expand...
The War on Poverty represents the hubris at the heart of liberalism - the idea that if we just get the right people in charge in government, we can solve any problem - including poverty.

Here is a quote from a good article on the subject: (warning to liberals: you will have to open your minds here - as this article is from the National Review and represents the conservative bias towards the issue. That said, I challenge anyone to refute the basic points of the article).

“Fifty years in, the War on Poverty has fortified the welfare state–industrial complex while weakening society’s little platoons and disarming the vulnerable. Far from giving the poor “a fair chance to develop their own capacities,” as President Johnson sought, public assistance too often has created long-term dependence while undermining work and eroding marriage — the primary lines of defense against poverty.”

At present the government spends nearly $1 trillion annually on 80 federal means-tested programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care, and targeted social services for poor and low-income Americans. Despite nearly $20 trillion of taxpayers’ money spent since the War on Poverty began, the poverty rate remains nearly as high as it was in the mid-1960s.

nationalreview.com/article/367820/incentives-matter-fighting-poverty-jennifer-marshall

In other words, there is something other than lack of money that causes poverty, and a solution that merely gives handouts will not solve or even help the poverty problem.

Ishii
 
These “wars” on nebulously defined (or even non-defined) elements of society can be excuses for illicit abuses.

Beware of “wars” declared on ill-defined “opponents”.

“Wars” on “drugs”, wars on “poverty”, wars on “terror” all mean what?

Nobody really knows.

They are defined however you want them to be defined.

Now with elements of society intruding into the heath care realm more and more, I would not be at all surprised to see a “war” on “sickness” sometime in the future.

Beware.
 
“I am for doing good to the poor, but…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed…that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”— Ben Franklin
 
The War on Poverty begins and ends with “families” and “education”. Creating a safety net that relieves a person of his/her sense of personal responsibility has created a permanent political servant class, built on the backs of the poor, whose vote they can count on from generation to generation, as long as the heroine of welfare keeps getting pumped into broken families and neighborhoods. They push “welfare” programs that stroke the conscience of voters who are rightly sorrowed by the poverty of our neighbors, but curiously never give the voters any statistics on how much good these programs have supposedly done. Instead,
  • There’s absolutely no urgency whatsoever to promote families and family life – instead there’s tremendous urgency to promote contraception and abortion.
  • There’s absolutely no urgency to make education a fast-pass to true freedom of the human person – the freedom to make good decisions, the freedom to reject the state-as-god. Those who have found this path have done so through the virtue of heroic educators and heroic parents or grandparents – not the government.
This is no “War on Poverty”, it’s a smoke-and-mirrors political goldmine for race and poverty hustlers who’ve spent decades preaching from the back of the limousine, corrupt to the core. We need to help our neighbors discover their inalienable dignity, who have a natural right to form nuclear families and provide safe, competent education for their children. The permanent handout society has done nothing but compound the misery instead of operating as a means to stability and human prosperity.

Pax vobiscum
 
One of the difficulties in knowing whether the “war on poverty” is being won or lost is that the relative positions change. You can’t define “poverty” by being on the low rung of the income ladder. If you do, it can never be eliminated, because if you raise the bottom, it’s just a new bottom.

Back before it, nobody would have ever called getting $60,000 in government benefits “poverty”, for a family of four. But we think of it that way now.
 
ClearWater said:
Poverty is a really complex issue which has many causes. Some believe if people would just give money to people, it would solve it. I don’t think even that would.

Well, let’s take homeless people, as just one example. A lot of people are homeless due to mental illness. With the advent of deinstitutionalization, thanks to some movies which portrayed mental health institutions very negatively, didn’t help matters at all. Instead of people being in an institution, they end up on the street.

Also, people who don’t have the mental faculties to make a choice are expected to.

Another major area of people living in poverty are people with varying kinds of addictions from drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc., who spend all their money on those, have nothing left over.

Once, I took a class on poverty, and it talked about all kinds of things. It even talked about how machines, computers, etc., took probably thousands of jobs away, that were previously done by people.

Now, sometimes, people are poor, because they don’t have enough of an education. There are many causes for that, as well. It can be because they don’t want an education, that they don’t have as much of a mental capacity, whatever.

Sometimes, I’ve tried to work with the poor and others, and it hasn’t been at all like what I thought. I have been surprised how hard it’s been. Some, even given opportunities at free learning, free materials, still won’t even try to get out of their poverty due to lack of motivation, sometimes. I’ve seen this both in the US and Mexico.

Sometimes, it’s cultural. For instance, I’ve seen at least here where the man of the house will forbid his wife or children (girls especially), from going to school when education would be one main means at a better life, at least economically.

In Mexico, I’ve seen a lot of child labor. I’ve lost students, children, who decided to go out and cut sugar cane rather than be in class. I can’t blame them. They made that decision to help their poor families.

There are all kinds of scenarios, reasons for poverty.

Of course, there is also the wide discrepancy of incomes, another reason.

Sometimes, people want to work, but there just aren’t enough jobs. Or, if there are, they aren’t enough to take a person out of poverty.
Sometimes, people have some kind of disadvantage, a physical/mental disability, and that can move them towards poverty.

A country they are in could be in war or have suffered a natural disaster.

So, we have all these reasons and more which aren’t even listed here. The problem is really complex and will need a wide variety of solutions.

Due to human nature’s being what it is, that there will always be some people who will not be willing to give up their addictions, etc., a certain amount of poverty probably always will continue, unfortunately.
Click to expand...
Post of the Year; required reading.
 
ClearWater said:
Poverty is a really complex issue which has many causes. Some believe if people would just give money to people, it would solve it. I don’t think even that would.

Well, let’s take homeless people, as just one example. A lot of people are homeless due to mental illness. With the advent of deinstitutionalization, thanks to some movies which portrayed mental health institutions very negatively, didn’t help matters at all. Instead of people being in an institution, they end up on the street.

Also, people who don’t have the mental faculties to make a choice are expected to.

Another major area of people living in poverty are people with varying kinds of addictions from drugs, alcohol, gambling, etc., who spend all their money on those, have nothing left over.

Once, I took a class on poverty, and it talked about all kinds of things. It even talked about how machines, computers, etc., took probably thousands of jobs away, that were previously done by people.

Now, sometimes, people are poor, because they don’t have enough of an education. There are many causes for that, as well. It can be because they don’t want an education, that they don’t have as much of a mental capacity, whatever.

Sometimes, I’ve tried to work with the poor and others, and it hasn’t been at all like what I thought. I have been surprised how hard it’s been. Some, even given opportunities at free learning, free materials, still won’t even try to get out of their poverty due to lack of motivation, sometimes. I’ve seen this both in the US and Mexico.

Sometimes, it’s cultural. For instance, I’ve seen at least here where the man of the house will forbid his wife or children (girls especially), from going to school when education would be one main means at a better life, at least economically.

In Mexico, I’ve seen a lot of child labor. I’ve lost students, children, who decided to go out and cut sugar cane rather than be in class. I can’t blame them. They made that decision to help their poor families.

There are all kinds of scenarios, reasons for poverty.

Of course, there is also the wide discrepancy of incomes, another reason.

Sometimes, people want to work, but there just aren’t enough jobs. Or, if there are, they aren’t enough to take a person out of poverty.
Sometimes, people have some kind of disadvantage, a physical/mental disability, and that can move them towards poverty.

A country they are in could be in war or have suffered a natural disaster.

So, we have all these reasons and more which aren’t even listed here. The problem is really complex and will need a wide variety of solutions.

Due to human nature’s being what it is, that there will always be some people who will not be willing to give up their addictions, etc., a certain amount of poverty probably always will continue, unfortunately.
Click to expand...
👍

There is only one thing I desagree in part, machines and computers put some people out of work, but these things also provide jobs for other people. 🙂
 
Very informative study:
ncpa.org/pdfs/st312.pdf

There is a big difference between families in the top 20 percent and bottom 20 percent of income distribution: Families at the top tend to be married and both partners work. Families at the bottom often have only one adult in the household and that person either works part-time or not at all:
Code: 
In 2006, a whopping 81.4% of families in the top income quintile had two or more people working.
Click to expand...
Code: 
By contrast, only 12.6 %  of families in the bottom quintile had two or more people working; 39.2 % had no one working.
Click to expand...
The average number of earners per family for the top group was 2.16, almost three times the 0.76 average for the bottom.
Click to expand...
Having children without a husband tends to make you poor. Not working makes you even poorer. And there is nothing new about that. These are age old truths. They were true 50 years ago, a hundred years ago and even 1,000 year ago. **Lifestyle choices have always mattered. **
 
Elizium23 -

For an accurate historical perspective, I would suggest reading “The Tragedy of American Compassion”. It is a mind-numbing detailing which will answer your questions.
 
JB_Dugan said:
Having children without a husband tends to make you poor. Not working makes you even poorer. And there is nothing new about that. These are age old truths. They were true 50 years ago, a hundred years ago and even 1,000 year ago. **Lifestyle choices have always mattered. **
Click to expand...
The circumstances you refer to are not always choices. They are often thrust upon people despite their best efforts.
 
LeafByNiggle said:
The circumstances you refer to are not always choices. They are often thrust upon people despite their best efforts.
Click to expand...
The vast majority of babies *are *due to a choice: the choice to have sex with someone. Babies are not “thrust upon” those who *chose *to have sex, they’re a natural and well-known consequence of that descision.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top