The War on Poverty Worked

Fifty years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional war on poverty in America." In his January 1964 address to Congress, LBJ underscored his fervent desire to "build more homes, more schools, more libraries, more hospitals," to drastically reduce unemployment, and to provide strong safety nets for the elderly, the disabled, and the nation's poorest citizens. President Johnson's proposals were certainly ambitious given the fact that a vote on Medicare, for instance, had failed during the Kennedy presidency in 1962 by a narrow margin in the Senate. Indeed, much of the agenda Johnson ran on in the 1964 campaign was stymied by southern conservative Democratic senators during his predecessor's tenure. Then, Johnson won in an overwhelming landslide, crushing Barry Goldwater with the largest national popular vote percentage total in modern history: 61 percent of the vote. LBJ had a clear mandate to enact a sweeping agenda of progressive change that would fundamentally reshape American social policy. The domestic legal framework of our social welfare system would never look the same as LBJ sought to launch an aggressive war on poverty. Five decades later, despite the assaults on these efforts from President Nixon and President Reagan and the conservative movement, by almost any metric, the war on poverty has proven a success.

As The History Channel correctly noted in its The Presidents documentary special, LBJ's war on poverty "cut the percentage of those who lived in poverty by half" by the end of his tenure in 1969. It was not until the enactment of Richard Nixon's policies of block-granting, partly dismantling, and devolving federal anti-poverty programs did poverty begin to worsen again. After the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, who blasted the New Deal as having its origins in "fascism," a deemphasizing of the importance of social welfare in public policy led to an increase in income inequality, higher homelessness, and less aid to impoverished areas of the country. Therefore, it is particularly rich to see modern day Republicans like Senator Marco Rubio and Representative Paul Ryan declare that the war on poverty was a failure when it is the policies of their own party that led the war on poverty to become less successful. When politicians pull the rug out from under people struggling to make ends meet, the result is not that they suddenly bounce to joyous financial prosperity. Instead, what happens is that these families spiral into even more abject poverty, their children fall behind as opposed to their more financially stable peers, and the broader economy suffers as some of the minute wealth of these Americans disappears.

On the other hand, when elected officials choose to invest in robust anti-poverty programs that seek to lift people out of hard times, give them a chance to a fair and decent life, and help the economy by giving these individuals the chance to become part of a broader middle class, poverty is reduced, families are ultimately better off, and the country benefits from the success of these Americans. The evidence that this has been the case in the war on poverty is overwhelming. SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that is otherwise known as "food stamps," became what we know it as today during LBJ's tenure. Consequently, according to the most recent Census studies, as many as four million Americans were lifted out of poverty because of SNAP in 2012 . Further, the Recovery Act's 2009 increase in SNAP allocations resulted in a much-needed jolt to the then-suffering economy. Medicare and Medicaid, also creations of the war on poverty, have boosted the livelihoods of millions of senior citizens and low-income families, respectively, who rely on these crucial lifelines to provide for their health insurance which, if these programs did not exist, would be in limbo thanks to the egregiously, historically high costs of private health insurance in the United States. Thanks in part to Medicare, the elderly have gone from being among the most likely groups to fall into poverty, five decades ago, to now being the least likely group. This outcome was a core goal of LBJ and it appears to have been met. Finally, for all the criticisms Head Start has earned, the "bottom line" is, according to a thorough Washington Post analysis early last year, that the LBJ-launched program "produces modest benefits including some longer-term gains for children." Those gains are part of a crucial federal investment in early childhood education which has proven to be key in fostering the cultivation of successful, productive members of society who contribute proactively to economic growth.

Those who dispute these findings are the very same individuals who propose budget blueprints and policy proposals that aim to destroy these programs and, in turn, their ideas do not really reduce poverty as they claim but instead result in making rampant poverty a permanent fixture of American life. That's not the vision LBJ had and thankfully, because of the efforts he and the Democratic Congress of his time launched, even in the face of attacks on this anti-poverty framework, the success is evident in the statistics. "The federal government," The New York Times noted recently, "has succeeded in preventing the poverty rate from climbing far higher...[and] a broad range of researchers...[have] stressed the improvement in the lives of low-income Americans since Mr. Johnson started his crusade." We must recommit ourselves to Lyndon Johnson's cause if we want to take a serious stab at reducing the outrageous levels of income inequality we see today. Thankfully, it appears that President Obama is interested in undertaking that effort. His expansion of SNAP, unemployment insurance, and various tax credits as part of his 2009 federal stimulus law -- though many of these benefits are now expired thanks to recent congressional inaction -- showed he is willing to commit himself and seek out success in fighting poverty. Further, he has even overseen an expansion of Medicaid thanks to his Affordable Care Act and an expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program early in his presidency; both of these policies are helping reduce poverty as we speak. This year though, if the President wants to live up to the LBJ legacy of aggressively fighting an "unconditional war on poverty," he must be bold in his State of the Union address like Johnson was 50 years ago and he must follow those words with actions similar to those Johnson took. Indeed, that's the only thing that's ever worked.