Daily Read: On Poverty, Another War We Lost

by Sam Rolley / Personal Liberty Digest

The Daily Signal’s Robert Rector in a Tuesday commentary tells us what the federal government has been able to accomplish after 50 years and $22 trillion taxpayer dollars spent waging President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Not much.

From the piece:

Over 100 million people, about one third of the U.S. population, received aid from at least one welfare program at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient in 2013. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.

But today the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14 percent of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually shows that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years.

How is this possible? How can the taxpayers spend $22 trillion on welfare while poverty gets worse?

The answer is it isn’t possible. Census counts a family as poor if its income falls below specified thresholds. But in counting family “income,” Census ignores nearly the entire $943 billion welfare state.

For most Americans, the word “poverty” means significant material deprivation, an inability to provide a family with adequate nutritious food, reasonable shelter and clothing. But only a small portion of the more than 40 million people labelled as poor by Census fit that description.

Johnson’s goal was to give poor Americans the tools needed to pull themselves out of the poverty cycle, and he even sold his War on Poverty plan by discussing how it would shrink welfare doles.

Of course, the federal government has made great gains in power anytime it has declared “war” on anything (drugs, terror) and gladly spends about two-thirds of the nation’s overall budget on warfare and welfare (defense, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security). In any free-market system, more power would come with more responsibility to demonstrate results. But the smoke and mirrors of the nation’s modern economy absolve leaders of that responsibility with unnatural economic meddling.

Thus, what look like failures to reduce poverty are, in reality, part of a larger economic problem that has to be answered by the leaders of a warfare/welfare state. And the left isn’t the only group at fault. 

Neoconservatives, while spending much time speaking out against domestic programs that make people dependent on government, are often all too happy to create international disturbances that leave people in far-off lands dependent on U.S. military welfare. I think we call it “spreading freedom.”

Next time a Barack Obama talks about hope and change through big domestic programs or a John McCain discusses safety through military adventurism, Americans who can no longer afford to be aloof must demand clear results.

We’ve seen three wars failed in the past half-century (drugs, terror and poverty); how many more can we afford to lose?

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.” — George W. Bush from Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004