Since there's an energetic argument on the Great Society whirling in the Will thread, it's probably time to note that my poverty feature is unlocked and ready to read. Here's the beginning, which is rather relevant to the conversation below:
"It was 1988, Ronald Reagan's final state of the Union. The previous eight years had been good to the Gipper. The word “liberal” had been rendered radioactive, much on the conservative wish list had been checked off, and Reagan himself had stomped two successive Democratic challengers. So you might think he would have been content to ride quietly into the sunset, a conservative legend retiring athwart a horse named History. But that night, Reagan stuck a final knife in the battered, bloodied carcass of liberalism. As was his wont, he did it with a grin: “My friends,” he said. “Some years ago, the federal government declared war on poverty, and poverty won. [Laughter.] Today, the federal government has 59 major welfare programs and spends more than $100 billion a year on them. What has all this money done?”
The jab was classic Reagan. Even now, the chuckles echo, preserved in the transcript as stage direction for future conservatives. But, in classically Reaganesque fashion, the line lacked a sort of historical, well, accuracy. The money had done much. The Great Society had not failed, its programs were not bureaucratic black holes whirling destructively through the inner city. While poverty had indeed weathered Lyndon Johnson’s assault, it stumbled forth a withered shell of its former self. Where in 1959 it could claim a robust membership of 22.4 percent of Americans, by 1973 it was at an emaciated 11.1 percent. In 2004, it rested at 12.7 percent.
And there's good reason for that success. Since Lyndon Johnson, only the two Presidents Bush failed to substantively address poverty. Richard Nixon created Supplemental Security Income and considered guaranteeing a minimum yearly wage, Gerald Ford resurrected the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), Jimmy Carter passed the Comprehensive Employment and Training Administration Act, and even Ronald Reagan vastly expanded the EITC. To paraphrase Bush's favorite philosopher, the poor we have always had with us, even during Republican administrations.
But for conservatives, halting attempts to eradicate poverty slowly gave way to more successful efforts to vilify it. Conservative leaders kept a dark (literally and figuratively) picture of the underclass visible to the nation's white middle class. The faces of poverty became more sinister: the Willie Hortons and the Linda Taylors (Linda Taylor was Reagan's ubiquitous welfare queen whose ill-gotten payouts totaled no more than $8,000). These visages transformed a discussion over alleviating economic despair into a subtly racist wedge issue that resonated with white males. And so it was easier, after that, to suggest that, irrespective of the facts, the Great Society was a disaster, poverty the intractable affliction of an unsocialized underclass. Egghead liberals with more good intentions than common sense had surrendered to instinct and offered cash prizes to every unwed black mother able to bear a child, creating a culture of government dependency that fostered criminality, broken families, and joblessness.
Conservatives, deciding government involvement had created the problem, concluded that government withdrawal would solve it. But Clinton's ascension and Democratic sympathy for the poor wrecked that plan, and the two sides eventually compromised on a sort of political detente they termed welfare reform. Welfare reform, while about poor people, was never about poverty, it was about politics. It made the impoverished a little less galling to the better off, ensuring that the government's incentive structure didn't reward the out-of-work and thus offend the gainfully employed. Meanwhile, crime was plummeting and the streets, thanks to Bill Clinton's 1994 Crime Bill, were flooded with new police officers. Come the late 1990s, the poor were neither dangerous nor ideologically maddening. A handful of urban politicians continued pleading for inner-city aid, but with electoral power shifting away from metropolitan centers, few listened. After 9-11, no one did. Poor blacks were no longer the threat; poor browns had taken their place. And so America's impoverished became something new: forgotten.
And then the waters came."
