Recently gjohnsit wrote a brilliant diary entitled Slouching toward Neofeudalism that shot to the top of the rec list because it said what so many of us here are feeling: The wealthy are crippling America. If you haven't read it, I urge you to.
I'd like to follow up that diary with a more in-depth look at one of the biggest lies that Neofeudalism is based upon. This lie is so huge that it is accepted as conventional wisdom by much of the country and as gospel by those on the right. What is this big lie?
The Great Society was a failure and created a permanent underclass of people on welfare.
More below the crease.
This massive canard is the basis for much of the meme that poor people and "gov'mint" are the reason that the lot of the middle class in America has deteriorated.
I intend to show that the Great Society was a success overall and that it not only did not create a permanent underclass but that it reduced the permanent underclass dramatically.
Was the Great Society flawed? Of course it was. We certainly have learned that building huge high-rise "projects" to solve inner city housing woes is a bad idea. We now have a model that works and works successfully: Habitat for Humanity.
We know that top-down federal programs that offer poor oversight and massive red tape are not often the right solution to problems. Today, we know that allowing states and local governments to adapt and experiment with programs so they fit the unique needs of a community is a far better way to go.
But to deny the massive positive impact of the Great Society push is simply a lie. And comments like, "Well, it didn't eliminate poverty did it?" are disingenuous at best. The fact is that while the War on Poverty did not eliminate poverty, it certainly made some significant inroads, particularly among the elderly. And it has been our stubborn determination as a nation to do nothing further to address poverty that allows it to remain at the level where the Great Society programs left it.
I'm not going to do a lot of background on the development of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. For an awesome in-depth look at that, see Nicholas Lemann's massive article "The Unfinished War," published in Atlantic Magazine in 12/88 and 1/89. It contains a very interesting description of how and why the "community service" model and the Office of Economic Opportunity lost out to the top-down government model.
For those much younger than me, let me explain that The Great Society was President Lyndon Johnson's vision of a more fair and just America. In his words, speaking in Michigan in 1964, LBJ said:
The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
Your imagination and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
The Great Society rests upon abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time.
(snip)
But most of all the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
So let us look at some reality.
In 1959, the overall poverty rate for individuals was 22.4%, for families it was 20.8%, and for female-headed households it was 49.4% (See Census Bureau Table 2 here.)
By 1969, the year LBJ left office, those three key numbers had fallen to 12.1% for individuals, 10.4% for families, and 38.2% for female-headed households.
Among African Americans, the figures are even more startling, dropping from 55.1% to 32.2% for individuals, 54.9% to 30.9% for families, and 70.6% to 58.2% for female-headed households.
Let's put some real numbers behind that. Overall, about 18 million individuals were lifted out of poverty in that decade. Among African Americans alone over 3 million people left poverty at a time when the AA population increased by 4 million people.
But the discouraging part is that those numbers have remained virtually unchanged since:
According to the same table, overall poverty in 2008 was 13.2% for individuals, 11.5% for families, and 31.4% for female-headed households. Among blacks, the numbers are somewhat better as the longer term effects of two key Great Society initiatives have borne fruit. Because of reforms in civil rights (through the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and through education reform (more on that later), African American poverty was 24.7% for individuals, 23.7% for families, and 40.5% for females heads of households in 2008.
As for senior citizens, the benefit of the enactment of Medicare was dramatic, according to PBS:
In 1964, 44 percent of seniors had no health care coverage, and with the medical bills that come with older age, this propelled many seniors into poverty. In fact, more than one in three Americans over 65 were living below the poverty line -- more than double the rate of those under 65. Medicare was an important and big change in American health care . . . and the results have been extraordinary: virtually all seniors now have health care, and the poverty rate for the elderly has fallen to approximately one in ten -- a rate lower than that of the general population.
And the numbers in education are just as startling. The PBS link shows where we were:
In 1964, 8 million American adults had not finished 5 years in school [5.6%]; more than 20 million had not finished eight years [14%]; and almost a quarter of the nation's population, around 54 million people, hadn't finished high school. In 1965, Congress passed the groundbreaking Elementary and Secondary Education Act which for the first time provided federal funding for education below the college level passed the Higher Education Act, which created a National Teachers Corps and provided financial assistance to students wishing to attend college.
By 2009, the numbers looked like this:
Only 2.9% of adults had finished less than 7 years of school, and 85% of adults had a high school diploma or higher.
Here are some more stats:
Infant mortality among the poor, which had barely declined between 1950 and 1965, fell by one-third in the decade after 1965 as a result of the expansion of federal medical and nutritional programs. Before the implementation of Medicaid and Medicare, 20 percent of the poor had never been examined by a physician; when Johnson retired as president the figure had been cut to 8 percent. The proportion of families living in substandard housing--that is, housing lacking indoor plumbing - also declined steeply, from 20 percent in 1960 to 11 percent a decade later.
In the interests of length, I will stop here with the numbers. But let me add that the Great Society also added the following to our country:
Wilderness Preservation Act
Water Quality Act
Clean Air Act
Air Quality Act
Job Corps
Head Start
National Foundation for Arts and Humanities
Public Broadcasting
24th Amendment (Eliminated the Poll Tax)
Appalachian Regional Development Act
Truth in Packaging Act
Highway Safety Act
Dept. of Transportation
Motor Vehicle Safety Act
So how did such a dramatically successful program come to be viewed negatively? Well, that's another diary. But lies by the likes of Ronald Reagan and others helped. Here's the meme,
President Ronald Reagan voiced a common conservative viewpoint when he declared, "There is no question that many well-intentioned Great Society-type programs contributed to family breakups, welfare dependency, and a large increase in births out of wedlock." [Read about his "Welfare Queen" lie here.]
To support their arguments, conservatives cite a close chronological connection between increased government welfare expenditures and dramatic increases in female-headed households and illegitimacy among the poor.
But the facts aren't quite so convenient:
Did the expansion of state services contribute to rising rates of illegitimacy and single parenthood? The answer to this question remains in dispute. On the one hand, there is no empirical evidence that there is a correlation between the level of welfare payments the number of children in single parent families. Other studies have shown that increases in the wages of the poor produce a sharp drop in female-headed households - suggesting that it is low wages and unstable jobs, and not the level of welfare payments, that are the major contributors to family instability.
Some of the apparent deterioration in poor families is illusory. If female-headed families made up a growing proportion of the poor, this partly reflected a sharp reduction in poverty among other groups. One of the consequences of the Great Society was to dramatically alter the profile of the poor. Increases in Social Security payments sharply reduced the incidence of poverty among the elderly. The Supplemental Social Security program introduced in 1973 greatly reduced poverty among the disabled. As a result of reductions in poverty among the elderly and disabled and increases in the number of single parent, female headed households, poverty has been increasingly feminized.
And yet, if the war on poverty accomplished more than its critics charged, there can be little doubt that the Johnson administration failed to persuade Americans that it had been successful. Beginning with the Presidential election of 1988, the Republican party won five of six elections and controlled the White House for sixteen of twenty years. Why?
A 1969 book entitled The Emerging Republican Majority by political commentator Kevin Phillips offered an answer. He claimed that the Great Society provoked an angry reaction among large segments of the white working class and middle class. Issues of race - such as affirmative action, school busing, residential integration, and racial preferences in job selection and government contracting - along with a reaction against the antiwar movement, cultural permissiveness, crime, cutbacks in local control of schools and neighborhoods, and liberal Supreme Court decisions on subjects ranging from pornography to the rights of criminal defendants, Phillips argued, had fractured the political coalition that had arisen during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
It's time to change the meme. The next time you hear someone bashing the Great Society, fight back. Call out the Big Lie.