During the Zenith of the Civil Rights Movement, Lyndon B Johnson became president and made a decided mark on American Politics, Economics, Race Relations, and Christianity, and none of it for the better. In his inaugural address, LBJ proclaimed: “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” Let's break down that War on Poverty, its implementation, and effects today and see how beneficial or rather detrimental these policies have been on Race, Religion, and Family in America.
Let's look at the results of this War on Poverty from an Economic standpoint. The goal of the War on Poverty was to reduce the percentage of Americans who were living in poverty.
Did it work? Apparently not, but it may have done something more harmful…. According to the US Census Bureau's own statistics, poverty was on the decline before the so-called war on Poverty. Despite 22 trillion dollars (as of 2012) having been spent on this war, we still see roughly the same percentage of people below the poverty line. So what happened to the money being spent on the less fortunate? How is it remotely possible for so much money to be missing? Well, as with many such government programs, there are lies, darn lies, and then there are statistics. The way that these statistics are calculated always omits the amount spent on welfare. This may seem trivial, but with $9,000 spent on each recipient, on average, that is more than enough to raise many recipients above the poverty line, if it was reported as income. These people are no longer living in the mirey conditions that we connote with the War on Poverty. Roughly $1.00 out of $2.40 is actually reported by the US Department of Labor. In these families we see the following conditions as noted by Robert Rector Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation:
“Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, at the beginning of the War on Poverty, only about 12 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.
Nearly three-quarters have a car or truck; 31 percent have two or more cars or trucks.[9]
Nearly two-thirds have cable or satellite television.
Two-thirds have at least one DVD player, and a quarter have two or more.
Half have a personal computer; one in seven has two or more computers.
More than half of poor families with children have a video game system such as an Xbox or PlayStation.
Forty-three percent have Internet access.
Forty percent have a wide-screen plasma or LCD TV.
A quarter have a digital video recorder system such as a TIVO.
Ninety-two percent of poor households have a microwave.”
So, why the bait and switch? One would imagine that government would desire to take credit for raising people out of poverty. But that is never how government works.
From a political standpoint, let me ask you… would you be better off solving people's problems… or running on the same issues with a built in voter base, imprisoned by class and racial divisions?
LBJ said himself that: “These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again.”
Johnson was no friend of the Civil Rights movement, but rather a brilliant tactician. He is also quoted as saying: "I'll have them n-words voting Democratic for two hundred years." This is not the man of the Civil Rights movement, he was a Democrat politician whose party was losing power to the engine that was driving the Civil Rights movement, the Republican Party.
So how would Johnson change the face of the Democrat Party? These were the same people that had held slaves and had enforced Jim Crow, by dirty cop, gun confiscations, and lynch mobs…. This would be quite the magic trick. However, if there is one thing that can make people forget the past, it is prosperity, or the promise of it. During the Great Society Era, LBJ exchanged the ruthless Democrat policies that reoriented the Democratic Party as the rich uncle who would buy the favor of the population that it had spent centuries oppressing. All of this was at the expense of the taxpayer, but also of the supposed beneficiaries.
If you look at what really happened during the War on Poverty, you'll see that, although the amount of people in poverty had been trending downward for 15 years, 3~5 years after the War on Poverty programs were implemented, that downward trend stopped. In fact, according to the Census Bureau's own numbers, the decline of poverty appears to effectively be arrested since the War on Poverty has started.
We know that the counting is dishonest, when you consider the fact that the average welfare recipient receives $9,000 a year from the government, but there is something else that is wrong here. We see a culture of dependence that has grown from the government's intervention.
Why this has occurred is perhaps the most interesting result of this miss-happed societal experiment. We see here that the anti-marriage policies of the War on Poverty have created a new societal trend, the unwed mother. Indeed, this should not come as a surprise when we not only recognize the 60s as the time of the Boomer Generation's rejection of Traditional Marriage, but we also see that many women were incentivized to have children for the welfare benefits, and enjoyed a no-fault divorce settlement to boot with child support.
According to Robert Recto at Heritage: “Today, unwed childbearing and the resulting growth of single-parent homes is the most important cause of official child poverty.[25] If poor women who give birth outside of marriage were married to the fathers of their children, two-thirds would immediately be lifted out of official poverty and into self-sufficiency.[26]
The welfare state has also reduced self-sufficiency by providing economic rewards to able-bodied adults who do not work or who work comparatively little. The low level of parental work is a major cause of official child poverty and the lack of self-sufficiency. Even in good economic times, the median poor family with children has only 1000 hours of parental work per year. This is the equivalent of one adult working 20 hours per week. If the amount of work performed in poor families with children was increased to the equivalent of one adult working full-time through the year, the poverty rate among these families would drop by two-thirds.[27]”
There are stories of agents and social workers coaxing people to not marry for the benefits of this new welfare state. This has generated not only a reliance upon the government for mothers, but a fatherless generation who now live as their parents do, single mothers and divorced or single men, with no intergenerational wealth.
THIS is the systemic discrimination of modern America. We have watched society crumble beneath the weight of this sick idea, that man is somehow basically good and needs the right environment. When you look at the world around you, it is clear to see that this simply isn't so.
So what causes poverty? LBJ said in his inaugural speech that he would strike at the “heart of the causes of poverty”. What are these causes really and how would we go about remedying poverty?
On one hand the economist and philosopher Amartya Sen proposed that poverty should be re-understood in terms of capability deprivation. Here again, we see man attempting to make poverty about exterior circumstances, instead of a condition within man himself. Ignoring human nature, however, has far-reaching consequences. In this framework, poverty will be very hard to measure, and such a change disconnects the concept of poverty from more than a century of detailed empirical and theoretical research. Amartya Sen (1983), however, insists that poverty is not just relative, but also absolute. In short, in Sen's framework, the poor are poor because that is who they always have been and ever will be. If this were true, then a communistic structure would be the only compassionate way forward.
A libertarian approach to poverty would seek to rekindle that spirit, rather than expand a government that sucks the oxygen out of families, private charities, and the very poor that it purports to help.
But as Christian that poverty is a result of a broken world. And we as humans follow the path of less resistance, it is easier to work at McDonald's and then get fired to get unemployment, than it is to excel and work hard. It is easier to fly below the poverty line radar and cash government aid checks than it is to work 40 hours a week.
First off, let's acknowledge God's heart for the poor. The Lord has commanded us to give to the poor in Proverbs 19:17 He says: “He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.” In Pro 28:27 we also have a blessing promised from God: “He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse.”
In Deuteronomy, we see that God put laws in place to protect the poor, the Israelite people had just come out of profound slavery and poverty and God wanted them to remember from where they had come: In Deu 15:8-11 we see God say “But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth. Beware that there be not a thought in thy wicked heart, saying, The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand; and thine eye be evil against thy poor brother, and thou givest him nought; and he cry unto the LORD against thee, and it be sin unto thee. Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto. For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.”
God never intended His people to be stingy. In fact, just as God has lavished His Grace upon us, we are to also lavish it upon our families, communities, and strangers. We see this in 1Jn 3:17 “But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” A lack of generosity is seen here as a sign of one who does not know God.
However, not only do we see a call to be generous to others in the Scripture, but a call to industriousness. There is a balance. In 1Ti 5:8 we see this about folks who do not provide for their families: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.”
In the Proverbs, we see that a lack of work ethic, is a sinful state in God's eyes. Pro 10:4-5 says “He becometh poor that dealeth with a slack hand: but the hand of the diligent maketh rich. He that gathereth in summer is a wise son: but he that sleepeth in harvest is a son that causeth shame.”
Similarly, we see in 2 Thessalonians 3:10: “For even when we were with you, this we commanded you, that if any would not work, neither should he eat.” It would seem that God prefers an individualized work ethic as well as an individualized charity. The government should not make you work or provide charity, but both are commanded by God.
In Pro 3:9 Our work is supposed to honor God: “Honour the LORD with thy substance, and with the firstfruits of all thine increase: So shall thy barns be filled with plenty, and thy presses shall burst out with new wine. “ This command to honor God with our wealth also comes with a promise of provision.
In Mal 3:10-11 we also see what Proverbs 3:9-10 looks like in practice: “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it. And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, and he shall not destroy the fruits of your ground; neither shall your vine cast her fruit before the time in the field, saith the LORD of hosts.”
What we have is not our own. It all belongs to our Heavenly Father. When we replace Church giving with Government spending, we replace God with Government. One provides supernaturally and changes men's souls, the other leaves men without hope and purpose, creating the intergenerational poverty that we see in the West today.
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https://www.heritage.org/poverty-and-inequality/report/the-war-poverty-after-50-years
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/17/1123508069/religion-christianity-muslim-atheist-agnostic-church-lds-pew
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/pf_2022-09-13_religious-projections_00-01/
https://aspe.hhs.gov/topics/poverty-economic-mobility/poverty-guidelines
http://blackyouthproject.com/50-years-later-an-look-at-the-war-on-poverty/
https://talkpoverty.org/2014/06/19/beezat/
https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/eras/war-poverty-1964/
https://www.masslive.com/politics/2014/12/war_on_poverty.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_People%27s_Campaign
https://www.dailysignal.com/2014/11/18/war-poverty-hurt-american-marriage-rates/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8X0b7yeQFU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYvZZdOI2YQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkN3Gzob_Vk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n0e3_vD-xE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxZVfwudvC8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J6xO4gtCJM
