Less than seven weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Baines Johnson faced both houses of Congress and gave his first State of the Union speech.
Some had expected it to be bland. After all, LBJ was filling another man’s seat. He had just become President, and the nation was still unsettled. But Johnson’s speech was momentous, at least in one regard: He announced he was committing to the nation to a War on Poverty. “Our aim is not only to relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it, and above all, to prevent it,” he said. That November, Democrats won a stunning landslide that gave them two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate.
That meant LBJ could pretty much get anything passed that he wanted, and he moved with lightning speed. Programs like Head Start, Vista, and the Job Corps were created. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security were all drastically expanded.
SNAP — Supplemental Nutrition Assistance — converted food stamps into a permanent program. LBJ spent billions. Yet today, poverty is clearly still with us. It has long been fashionable to argue that LBJ’s war on poverty was a failure. But it wasn’t.
Poverty fell dramatically, especially among seniors, from 22 percent in 1959 to 11 percent by 1973, the year LBJ died. Some of those 1960s programs weren’t very successful; others, like Head Start, have been expanded and are still with us.
Policy makers failed to foresee how difficult it would be to get people to see the dignity of work and holding a regular job, especially if they had been on welfare for generations.
What really prevented the War on Poverty from being more of a success was time, and Vietnam. The president’s attention gradually wavered as he became consumed with Indochina. Republicans made major gains in Congress in 1966, which effectively prevented more mammoth social programs from being launched.
When Richard Nixon became President, the Office of Economic Opportunity was disbanded, and the War on Poverty gradually forgotten, or demonized as an example of classic liberal overreach. But that’s far too simplistic. Lyndon Johnson was right about something:
We owe it to our relatively affluent selves to do something about poverty. Current estimates show that more than 43 million Americans are still poor, 12.7 percent of all of us. There’s no political will these days to launch huge anti-poverty efforts.
Luke Shaefer knows that. That’s why he and the University of Michigan have quietly launched their more modest Poverty Solutions program, to help people, and to learn. Poverty Solutions is partnering with the City of Detroit, and Shaefer sees Detroit as a great laboratory.
Last winter he told me, “We are going to try some things that won’t work, and some things that will work, and that will help build knowledge that will spread across the city and nation.”
The key, he told me, is for anti-poverty researchers to keep open minds. “We’re interested in anybody who wants to test innovative ways of doing things. Our primary focus is on economic mobility,” he said. He believes the biggest cure for poverty is good-paying jobs.
The poor people he’s interviewed overwhelmingly said jobs were what they wanted. Our leaders need to brainstorm as to how to best make that come about.
