It's axiomatic among conservatives that Lyndon Johnson's tenure was a historic failure, while Ronald Reagan's was a remarkable success. But for whom? For all the talk of the Great Society's failures, it's striking how much poverty actually did decrease, and how many of the period's programs remain in vibrant operation today. This graph, from a recent TAP article by William Spriggs, is particularly illuminative:
At the start of Johnson's tenure, two-thirds of America's African-American children were impoverished. By the end of his term, that number had plummeted by 25%, to 39%. This is what Reagan was talking about when he said, "The federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won." What he didn't mention was that it was grievously wounded.
By contrast, in 1980, 42.1 percent of black children lived below the poverty line. By 1988, Reagan had reduced that share to...42.8 percent. Some record.
Or there's this: "In 1962, on the eve of the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice in 1963, the median income of black men was below the poverty threshold for a family of three, but by 1967 it was above that level (not until 1995 did it get above the poverty level for a family of four)." But we've become fairly uninterested in helping the poor. It's disheartening, for instance, that Social Security has grown along with the economy over the past few decades, while welfare benefits have contracted.
Those are our priorities. Not to mention war, tax cuts, corporate breaks, and all the rest. It's irrelevant to wonder whether poverty won; the real issue is that we've ceased fighting it.
