Lyndon Johnson on Welfare & Poverty

After 50 years, War on Poverty has 40 controversial programs

Many of today's fiercest political debates can be traced to the aspirations of the Great Society, the domestic programs it spawned during the 1960s, and the doubts it raised about the role and reach of Washington. Johnson's years in office saw the greatest expansion of government since FDR's New Deal, and even exceeded the scope of those Depression-era programs. The two parties have been fighting about it ever since.

Great Society today: Head Start; food stamps; NEA; Job Corps

It would ultimately include a raft of initiatives: Medicare and Medicaid, the first direct federal aid to school districts, Head Start, food stamps, landmark environmental legislation, the Job Corps to provide vocational education, urban renewal programs, national endowments for the arts and humanities, civil rights legislation, funding for bilingual education.

The political environment was ripe: The nation was reeling from the assassination of a young, idealistic president; Johnson had a firm hold on his governing coalition; and the economy was booming.

War on Poverty results: poverty down; safety net up

• The official US poverty rate was 15% in 2012 (most recent available), compared with 19% of the population in 1964 when Pres. Johnson delivered his "war" remarks in a State of the Union message.
• The poverty rate would be lower still today, economists say, if not for the deep recession that ended in 2009 and from which the US economy is still recovering.
• Still, a rise in the overall population means that the number of Americans who were poor in 2012--at more than 46 million--was higher than the 36 million in poverty back when LBJ spoke.
• The rise of safety-net programs, including those championed by Johnson, has helped to reduce both overall poverty and the likelihood that a single-parent household will be in poverty. Another mitigating factor is rising job opportunities for women.
• Yet the number of Americans who live in single-parent households has soared since 1964--and those families are still more likely to be poor than two-parent households are.

Address poverty with programs for both urban and rural poor

Weapons in War on Poverty: better schools; health; and homes

"Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. Our chief weapons will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment," he said. And the speech announced also the crusade's goal, which was revolutionary: "not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it."

War on Poverty later widened to Great Society

The program to which he was committing was one whose purpose was to right, on a vast scale, past wrongs, to use to an extent rare in history a great nation's wealth to ameliorate the harshness of life for a portion of its citizens too often overlooked by government in the past. It was clear that it was a program whose aim was to launch America on a course toward social justice that, were it to be completed, would result in nothing less than a society's transformation. In fact, during the following years, Lyndon Johnson widened the War on Poverty by introducing legislation on a dozen fronts to transform not just low-income American but the nation as a whole into "the Great Society."

1964: Food Stamps, initially 350,000 people, now 42 million

To chart America's decline, the explosion in the food stamp program is a good place to begin. A harbinger of the Great Society, the Food Stamp Act was signed into law in 1964 by LBJ. Initially, $75 million was appropriated for 350,000 individuals in forty counties and three cities. However, no one was starving in the 1960s.

FactCheck: Poverty rate has fallen under Great Society

The Great Society agenda included such ongoing programs as Medicare, Medicaid, and Head Start--intended to improve the health care, Nutrition, & education; and focused on elderly poverty, which is down to 13%. That said, we'll take O'Reilly's statement on its own terms:

He uses the wrong numbers. The poverty rate was 17.3% in 1965, not 14%. So the poverty has fallen by 3 percentage points, or by about 1/6 its original level.

Counting different years shows even more decline. In 1962, the poverty rate ranged was 20%. In pre-recession 2007, it stood at 12.5%. Comparing 1962 and 2007, the poverty rate dropped by over 1/3.

Announced "War on Poverty" in 1965

OpEd: Legacy of Great Society is red tape & deficits

Great Society required business community's support

There came to the White House, in waves of meetings and dinners and luncheons, the premier captains of the American industrial empire. He sought them out, singly and together. He paid court to them, listened to them, persuaded them their advice was essential and their power necessary to the momentum of the economy, and of course, the Johnsonian legislative program.

Rent supplements cost less than public housing

1964: declares unconditional war on poverty

Most Johnsonian was the core of the message. Social legislation plus economy--the blend was heavily emphasized near the start of the speech, and the President touched on it at every opportunity.

Urban Development Bank; build 500,000 homes for needy

To achieve the goals of the Housing Act of 1968 that you have already passed, we should begin this year more than 500,000 homes for needy families in the coming fiscal year. Funds are provided in the new budget to do just this. This is almost 10 times--10 times--the average rate of the past 10 years.

Our cities and our towns are being pressed for funds to meet the needs of their growing populations. So I believe an urban development bank should be created by the Congress. This bank could obtain resources through the issuance of taxable bonds and it could then lend these resources at reduced rates to the communities throughout the land for schools, hospitals, parks, and other public facilities.

Three paths of Great Society: growth, justice and liberation

• First is growth--the national prosperity which supports the well-being of our people and which provides the tools of our progress. Workers are making more money than ever--with after-tax income in the past 5 years up 33%. More people are working than ever before in our history--an increase last year of 2 1/2 million jobs.
• The second road is justice. Justice means a man's hope should not be limited by the color of his skin. I propose legislation to establish unavoidable requirements for nondiscriminatory jury selection--and to give the Attorney General the power necessary to enforce those requirements.
• The third path is the path of liberation. It is to use our success for the fulfillment of our lives. A great nation is one which breeds a great people. A great people flower not from wealth and power, but from a society which spurs them to the fullness of their genius. That alone is a Great Society.

War on poverty will not be a short or easy struggle

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but 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. $1,000 invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.

Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized at the State & local level and must be supported and directed by State & local efforts.

The program will emphasize this cooperative approach to help that 1/5 of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs.

National Service Corps as a domestic Peace Corps

• We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia.
• We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.
• We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless, hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.
• We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp program.
• We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those abroad.
• We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level commission on automation.
• We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2 million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.