Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson's declaration of the War on Poverty as part of his Great Society program, in his first State of the Union speech, so it's time for retrospectives.
The latest is an op-ed piece in The New York Times from Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist for Vice President Biden. "Much of what we've done to reduce poverty has been highly successful," but that started with Social Security, which started in the 1930s and was expended in the 1960s, he writes. "Yet I suspect that if I could sit President Johnson down and explain to him all we’ve done to maintain and expand the policy arsenal he helped to introduce half a century ago, he’d be surprised that there’s still so much economic hardship." Bernstein explores the reasons for that: "globalization, deunionization, lower minimum wages, slack labor markets and decreasing returns to lower-end jobs," as well as "not getting enough schooling, single parenthood, or having children out of wedlock." The answer, he says, is strengthening the underlying economy.
Unfortunately, the Times has tripped on some rural nuances of the beginning of the poverty war. Annie Lowrey had a good, relatively short story on Sunday, but it was marred by the line that "parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing." No parts did, but many homes did. The next day, the newspaper published a written debate about the need for another poverty war, illustrated with a photo of Johnson visiting "the Inez family of Kentucky." That was the family of Tom Fletcher, who lived near Inez.
Poverty is disproportionately rural. "While showing the limits of government intervention to create economic opportunity, the War on Poverty also changed rural America for the better," the Daily Yonder says in an introduction to a retrospective by Timothy Collins, assistant director for research, policy, outreach, and sustainability at the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University in Macomb.
Collins includes excerpts from Johnson's speech and notes that his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, was planning a major effort to fight poverty. Hours before he was assassinated, the White House confirmed for Kentucky officials that he would visit the state in early December. Johnson made the trip, including a visit with the Fletchers, in April 1964. Here's a video of it and other stops on his "poverty tours" from the LBJ Presidential Library:
The latest is an op-ed piece in The New York Times from Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and former chief economist for Vice President Biden. "Much of what we've done to reduce poverty has been highly successful," but that started with Social Security, which started in the 1930s and was expended in the 1960s, he writes. "Yet I suspect that if I could sit President Johnson down and explain to him all we’ve done to maintain and expand the policy arsenal he helped to introduce half a century ago, he’d be surprised that there’s still so much economic hardship." Bernstein explores the reasons for that: "globalization, deunionization, lower minimum wages, slack labor markets and decreasing returns to lower-end jobs," as well as "not getting enough schooling, single parenthood, or having children out of wedlock." The answer, he says, is strengthening the underlying economy.
Unfortunately, the Times has tripped on some rural nuances of the beginning of the poverty war. Annie Lowrey had a good, relatively short story on Sunday, but it was marred by the line that "parts of Appalachia lacked electricity and indoor plumbing." No parts did, but many homes did. The next day, the newspaper published a written debate about the need for another poverty war, illustrated with a photo of Johnson visiting "the Inez family of Kentucky." That was the family of Tom Fletcher, who lived near Inez.
Poverty is disproportionately rural. "While showing the limits of government intervention to create economic opportunity, the War on Poverty also changed rural America for the better," the Daily Yonder says in an introduction to a retrospective by Timothy Collins, assistant director for research, policy, outreach, and sustainability at the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs at Western Illinois University in Macomb.
Collins includes excerpts from Johnson's speech and notes that his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, was planning a major effort to fight poverty. Hours before he was assassinated, the White House confirmed for Kentucky officials that he would visit the state in early December. Johnson made the trip, including a visit with the Fletchers, in April 1964. Here's a video of it and other stops on his "poverty tours" from the LBJ Presidential Library:
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