With the help of aides Bill Moyers and Kennedy
holdover Richard Goodwin, President Lyndon Baines [“Bane of Existence”] Johnson
settled on "The Great Society"—borrowed from the title of a 1914
socialist tract by British political scientist Graham Wallas—as the slogan
through which he would communicate his updated vision of liberal reform. Read
that Again: 1914 SOCIALIST TRACT. In May
1964, in a commencement address at the University of Michigan, he used the term
for the first time. Had you any doubt that since John F. Kennedy, the last real
Democrat, that the Democratic Party is guided by a Socialist Tract? It actually
began with Woodrow Wilson [17th Amendment], but LBJ put the icing on the cake.
In 1964 alone, LBJ won approval for Kennedy's tax
cut, the LBJ Civil Rights Act, and the LBJ Economic Opportunity Act that
codified his "war on poverty." LBJ's working relationship with
Everett Dirksen, leader of the Republican minority in the Senate, was essential
to the passage of this legislation. The civil rights bill, in particular, which
was opposed by Southerners in Johnson's own party, could not have won approval
in the Senate without overwhelming support among Republicans, the Party that
freed the slaves and is still trying today. Johnson also rode the wave of a
booming economy: From 1963 through 1966, real GDP grew at a rate of nearly 6
percent per year, the most rapid three-year expansion of the entire postwar
period.
With the political and economic winds at his back,
Johnson won the 1964 election with 61 percent of the popular vote, thus
outdoing FDR in his 1936 landslide reelection, while also bringing in safe
majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives. LBJ, now elected in his
own right, proceeded in 1965 to steer through the 89th Congress the lasting
pillars of the Great Society: the Elementary and Secondary Education Act
(providing federal aid to schools with concentrations of poor children); the
Higher Education Act (providing federal funds for scholarships and work-study
programs for low-income students); Medicare and Medicaid (new entitlements
providing federal support for health care for the elderly and the poor); the
Voting Rights Act; and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, eliminating
pro-European quotas in U.S. policy and opening the doors to immigrants from
Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
For those of us in Oklahoma, especially Seminole,
Oklahoma, who are struggling over local control of local schools, this was the
beginning of the end. In 1965, Property Taxes paid two-thirds of the SPs, State
funds took up the balance and FED Funds were non-existent. Now it is
flip-flopped. Local Property Taxes only pays 30 percent, State Funds 65 percent
and the FED GOV owns you with a 5 percent controlling interest. The reason
there is no local control of our schools is that we gave it away when we quit
paying the bills. Good luck Chuck and forget any local control.
The passage of these programs brought about large
changes in national policy that continue to shape our politics today. Medicare
and Medicaid established a permanent federal role in health care, one that
continues to grow in expense year by year. Medicare, an insurance program, paid
for by recipients, began with about 19 million participants in 1966 and has
expanded to about 57 million participants today and is projected to grow to 80
million by 2030. Medicaid, a total Welfare Program, paid for by those who
actually work for a living, has grown even more rapidly, from 4 million
beneficiaries in 1966 [2% of the population then] to nearly 70 million today
[22% of the population today]. Really?! Believe that and I have a nice ocean
front property for you in Arizona, very cheap too. It has nothing to do with “poverty”;
it has everything to do with slavery and votes. Period!
That is laugh track material. We did not eliminate
anything; we recreated the definition of poverty and compounded it
exponentially. If you have traveled in impoverished parts of the world, you
will KNOW that there is no such thing as poverty in the USA, then or now. We
continue to redefine it from President to President; it’s a moving target. Now,
if you don’t have an ObamaPhone, a Nissan SUV, Big Screen TV, a PC, Laptop,
Pad, you are in poverty. That’s a wee bit more than a car in every garage and a
chicken in every pot, as Harry wished. In fact, in other parts of the world,
our impoverished are rolling in wealth. The problem is that half of us didn’t
earn it. The other half bought it for them and Merry Christmas. We don’t even
have 4 million in poverty today, much less 70 Million. Dumbshits!
The education acts similarly established a large
and ever-growing role for the federal government at all levels of the
educational system. The immigration act has brought waves of new immigrants
into the United States from Asia and Latin America. The Voting Rights Act,
thought to be a temporary measure required to ensure black voting rights in the
South, won renewal and expansion by Congress periodically through the decades,
most recently in 2006 (though an important section of the bill was struck down
by the Supreme Court in 2013). Professor Woods takes the reader through these
various programs, noting how they have evolved or have been reformed over the
decades but stressing that, a half-century later, they continue to win support
from voters and key interest groups. Read that again: VOTERS AND INTEREST GROUPS, the whole crux of
the matter.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then working in the Labor
Department, prepared an explosive statistical report showing that the black
family, under stress from poverty and urbanization, was showing signs of
breaking apart due to rising numbers of out-of-wedlock births. After reviewing
the report, Johnson delivered a commencement address at Howard University in
June 1965 in which he described the growing problem and pledged new policies in
his war on poverty designed to expand opportunities for the poor and keep urban
families intact. Johnson's remarks seemed to point toward some kind of
guaranteed family income, as opposed to a strategy that delivered services to
the poor while sending the money to middle-class providers.
When Moynihan's report appeared in a national
magazine several weeks later, liberals and leftists denounced it for
exaggerating the problem and for "blaming the victim" for responding
in understandable ways to the conditions of poverty. On August 6, LBJ signed
the Voting Rights Act. Five days later, rioting broke out in the Watts section
of Los Angeles that lasted for six days and led to the deaths of 34 people and
injuries to more than a thousand others. In response to this event, black
activists began to question the value of integration and the goals of the war
on poverty. Big-city mayors, including Richard Daley of Chicago, began lodging
complaints with the White House that activists were using federal
"community action" funds to finance demonstrations and sit-ins in
their cities [Sound familiar, Baracky?]. Johnson soon scrapped his ideas for
expanding the war on poverty and distanced himself from Moynihan's report.
From this point forward, Johnson played defense
against escalating attacks on his domestic and foreign policies. The riots in
Watts were only a prelude to scores of urban uprisings during subsequent
summers. Rates of violent crime spiked year by year through the 1960s. Students
disrupted college campuses in protest against the war in Vietnam. By 1968, the
United States had descended into something resembling a "dystopia,"
to use the author's term. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were
assassinated within weeks of one another during the spring of that year; in
August, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was disrupted by more riots
in full view of a national television audience [I was there, in person]. Johnson,
who ascended to power in a tragic moment of national unity, left the presidency
with the nation in revolt against his policies and at war with itself.
THE FALLACY:
The author argues that, despite Johnson's downfall, the Great Society
improved American society over the long haul by reducing poverty, expanding
educational opportunities for the poor, extending affordable health care to the
poor and elderly, introducing environmental concerns into national politics,
and breaking up the racial caste system across the South. Woods, in Prisoners
of Hope, rejects any link between the Great Society and the disorder of
the 1960s. If Johnson erred, he writes, it was in other areas: in his Vietnam
policy, for example, and in ordering the FBI to spy on domestic opponents
[Sound familiar? A hobby of Democratic Presidents], including civil rights
leaders, antiwar groups, "black power" advocates, and (even) Robert
Kennedy. Now, it’s presidential candidates, Supreme Court Justices,
Congressmen, Cabinet Nominees, you name it. Obama got ‘em all, the Devil
Incarnate.
THE CAUSE AND EFFECT
In the first place, critics had a point when they
drew a link between the war on poverty and urban crime and disorder. Between
1964 and 1969, for example, a period of expanding economic opportunity, the
welfare rolls in New York City tripled from around three hundred thousand to
more than a million people because the mayor and community activists saw an
opportunity to take advantage of the new availability of federal funds [VOTES!
They are bought and sold]. Those numbers on public assistance stabilized at a
million or more until the 1990s, when reform efforts succeeded in paring back
the rolls. What happened in New York City occurred throughout the country:
Welfare rolls multiplied, and so did crime, disorder, broken families,
dysfunctional schools, and out-of-wedlock births. The unraveling of America's
cities largely took place within a few years in the late 1960s, corresponding
to LBJ's time in office. Ronald Reagan once remarked that "In the '60s, we
waged a war on poverty, and poverty won." That statement may have been an
exaggeration, but it also contained an element of truth: The scores of
burned-out, crime-ridden, and bankrupt cities in America today must be counted
as part of the legacy of the Great Society. It was NO EXAGGERATION, it was a
statement de minimi.
Taken together, Johnson's various initiatives
smashed what James Q. Wilson once called "the legitimacy barrier,"
the older idea that the federal role was limited to a few clearly defined and
agreed-upon fields [Art 1 Sect 8]. By the time he left office, there was no
important area of American life in which the federal government did not take an
active part. Was this a good thing? The effect of this process was to
politicize vast new areas of American life and to bring all major institutions
under the financial and regulatory control of the federal government, including
especially local schools, colleges and universities, social service
organizations, and even museums and symphony orchestras. To a great degree,
state and local governments are now heavily dependent upon federal aid and
thereby burdened by the cumbersome regulations that accompany federal
assistance. You are owned, lock, stock and barrel.
More profoundly, the Great Society gradually
turned the Democratic Party into a "government party," organized
around public employee unions, lobbyists and interest groups, and would-be
recipients of federal funds. Many of the once-vital institutions of America's
civil society have been turned into appendages of the national government.
Then there were the economic and financial
consequences of Johnson's spending binge. Johnson's "guns and butter"
policy soon placed pressure on the federal budget and led, in turn, to rising
inflation. This was a key factor that led to the breakdown of the international
monetary regime forged after World War II. Under that system, foreign
currencies were pegged to the dollar and the dollar, in turn, was pegged at a
fixed rate to gold. Rising inflation in the late 1960s led to an outflow of
gold reserves from the United States, which, by 1971, forced the United States
to abandon the gold standard altogether.
The breakup of the Bretton Woods regime led to a
decade of economic disorder, here and abroad, as the United States and our
trading partners battled a combination of slow economic growth and rising
inflation. In addition to that, Great Society programs placed the federal
budget on auto-pilot so that it expanded relentlessly year-by-year, regardless
of expense or other priorities—a condition we still wrestle with today, and the
main reason why we now have a $4 trillion federal budget and over $19 trillion
in national debt. Now, we are all slaves, are we not? Unfortunately,
Snowflakes, this is not mommy’s fairy tale, it is a fact of life in the USA.
END OF STORY
Post Script:
Poverty Indicators: 49.5% of the US Population is on Welfare: Medicaid,
SNAP, Food Stamps, SSI, etc. These people are on “Poverty”: 49.5% receiving
money from the Social Security Fund less 18% who actually paid into the Fund
equals 31.5% in Poverty, having contributing absolutely nothing. In other
words, you are paying for almost double the number of people who actually paid
for the Social Security and Medicare Insurance, for those who did absolutely nothing
to earn anything. Feel better now? You should, you should be considered
philanthropists.
Philanthropist defined: a person who seeks to promote the welfare of
others, especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.
Does anyone in their right mind actually believe
that one-third of the population lives in poverty? Look around you and then
tell me that. If you believe that, you have a far different definition of
poverty than I do. If Social Security recipients, those who actually paid into
the system, live in poverty, it is because their money was stolen.
Only 18% of the population is actually receiving
that which they paid for, e.g. Retired workers, Disabled workers and Survivors.
Guess where the Welfare money comes from. The
Social Security “Fund”—BTW, there is no Fund. If you wonder why your Social
Security payout is such a paltry monthly payment, it is because your money was
stolen to pay for Welfare. That’s why they lump Social Security payments into
the “Entitlements” Category. Multiply your Social Security payment times 3 and
that’s about what you would be getting if you weren’t picking up the Welfare tab.
Why did they steal your money and kick it into
transfer payments? That’s where the money is, YOUR MONEY. There is no possible
way to appropriate money for Welfare out of the General Fund. You would march
on Washington and hang every one of them, summarily. So, they stole your money
instead. They took the insurance payments you paid in for Social Security and
Medicare and gave it away for VOTES. There is simply nowhere else they could
have gotten the money except to steal it, so that is what they did. How do you
like being lumped into the “Entitlements” Category, when you paid your own way?
I know how it makes me feel, I’m in favor of summary executions. There, I feel
better now.
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