LBJ created america's poor? While the GS did not live up to its rhetoric and may not have delivered services in an efficient manner (there were a lot of problems with the GS), it definitely did not "destroy millions of lives." We can critique the GS but let's be real.
The poverty you see didn't begin with LBJ and the WOP. I think we would all like to think that the sort of gut-wrenching poverty we see in many parts of our nation had a simple identifiable cause--but it doesen't. Blaming the GS for black poverty in the South makes little sense. Black poverty in the South was worse before the 1960s (in just raw numbers) so why does the GS get the blame for a phenomenon that was less of a problem than before its inception?
Before the GS there was the New Deal, the FEPC, the GI Bill, and post-war economic expansion--all of these factors help to explain the expansion of the black middle class. To say all poor people are lazy (or fail to take responsibility for their lives) is just plain incorrect.
If you want to really understand poverty, I suggest that you read a tad more widely than Townhall.com. I worked at housing project back in the mid-1990s and taught in inner-city urban core schools and the reality is so much more complicated than what conservative (or liberal) ideologues want to admit.
From 1960 to 1970 the poverty rate was cut in half. The idea that blacks were moving into the middle classes at a faster rate before the GS than after it is a simple reflection of mathematics -- rising from virtually zero is going to mean that of course in the early years of advancement, brought largely by the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, of course the rate of advancement into the middle class would be higher than it is now. Of course the rates have slowed. Furthermore, why isolate blacks in these assertions -- what segment of the population did not see increases in standards of living from 1940 to 1960? What group in American society did not see increases in education? And what does any of this have to do with the Great Society? This slapdash assertion of data has the taint of ideological preening and not intellectual seriousness.
The idea that the Great Society led to "destruction of millions of lives" is absurd.
these broad and useless generalizations about "the poor" do not get us very far. All data indicates that the vast majority of people on welfare stay for relatively short periods -- that the intractable cases are not the norm, even if rhetorically they are an easy whipping boy and thus become normative.
But the assertion that poverty is the fault of the poor is inane. Poor children do not choose to be poor. meanwhile, I still see neither causality nore correlation between the poor and the Great Society given the amount of poverty reduction that occurred as the result of LBJ's policies.
6 comments:
Classy.
Texans!
LBJ created america's poor? While the GS did not live up to its rhetoric and may not have delivered services in an efficient manner (there were a lot of problems with the GS), it definitely did not "destroy millions of lives." We can critique the GS but let's be real.
Mr. Jones,
The poverty you see didn't begin with LBJ and the WOP. I think we would all like to think that the sort of gut-wrenching poverty we see in many parts of our nation had a simple identifiable cause--but it doesen't. Blaming the GS for black poverty in the South makes little sense. Black poverty in the South was worse before the 1960s (in just raw numbers) so why does the GS get the blame for a phenomenon that was less of a problem than before its inception?
Before the GS there was the New Deal, the FEPC, the GI Bill, and post-war economic expansion--all of these factors help to explain the expansion of the black middle class. To say all poor people are lazy (or fail to take responsibility for their lives) is just plain incorrect.
If you want to really understand poverty, I suggest that you read a tad more widely than Townhall.com. I worked at housing project back in the mid-1990s and taught in inner-city urban core schools and the reality is so much more complicated than what conservative (or liberal) ideologues want to admit.
From 1960 to 1970 the poverty rate was cut in half. The idea that blacks were moving into the middle classes at a faster rate before the GS than after it is a simple reflection of mathematics -- rising from virtually zero is going to mean that of course in the early years of advancement, brought largely by the advances of the Civil Rights Movement, of course the rate of advancement into the middle class would be higher than it is now. Of course the rates have slowed. Furthermore, why isolate blacks in these assertions -- what segment of the population did not see increases in standards of living from 1940 to 1960? What group in American society did not see increases in education? And what does any of this have to do with the Great Society? This slapdash assertion of data has the taint of ideological preening and not intellectual seriousness.
The idea that the Great Society led to "destruction of millions of lives" is absurd.
these broad and useless generalizations about "the poor" do not get us very far. All data indicates that the vast majority of people on welfare stay for relatively short periods -- that the intractable cases are not the norm, even if rhetorically they are an easy whipping boy and thus become normative.
But the assertion that poverty is the fault of the poor is inane. Poor children do not choose to be poor. meanwhile, I still see neither causality nore correlation between the poor and the Great Society given the amount of poverty reduction that occurred as the result of LBJ's policies.
dcat
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