Friday, January 10, 2014

"Victory" in the War on Poverty nowhere in sight

Matthew Vadum reports that
The country has spent $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years on welfare programs, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every war it has fought.

Already the federal government administers 80 different means-tested welfare programs. Government blew $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and about 100 million Americans accepted aid from at least one of the programs, costing $9,000 per recipient on average, a figure, Heritage’s Rector notes, that doesn’t include Social Security or Medicare benefits.

Yet “victory” in the War on Poverty is nowhere in sight. In 2012, 15 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line, roughly the same percentage as in the mid-1960s. Currently, around 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the government defines as a four-member family earning $23,550 a year. And 47 million Americans receive food stamp benefits, 13 million more than when President Obama was first sworn in.

“The welfare state has done to black Americans what slavery couldn’t do, what Jim Crow couldn’t do, what the harshest racism couldn’t do, and that is to destroy the black family,” says economics professor Walter E. Williams of George Mason University, a black man who rose from poverty.

By 1976, the illegitimacy rate for whites jumped to 10 percent from 3 percent in 1965. Blacks fared far worse, as their illegitimacy rate skyrocketed to 50.3 percent, more than double the percentage in 1965. “In 1987, for the first time in the history of any American racial or ethnic group, the birthrate for unmarried black women surpassed that for married black women,” they wrote.

Currently, whites have an illegitimacy rate of 29 percent, compared to a shocking 73 percent for blacks. Overall, the poverty rate for single parents with children was 35.6 percent in 2008, but for married couples with children it was a much lower 6.4 percent.

“The data is [sic] going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category,” Tavis Smiley, a black, left-wing radio talk show host said in the fall. “On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”

Left-wingers have successfully been changing the subject, moving the discussion away from their policy failures for 50 years now.

Why should they change a winning formula now? They know they can continue to count on taxpayer funding for their adventures in leftist activism.

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