How about a war we can all support?

[NNN0LHI]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Poverty

War on Poverty

The War on Poverty is the unofficial name for legislation first introduced by United States President Lyndon B. Johnson during his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty.

As a part of the Great Society, Johnson's belief in expanding the government's role in social welfare programs from education to health care was a continuation of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, which ran from 1933 to 1935, and the Four Freedoms of 1941.

The popularity of a war on poverty waned after the 1960s. Deregulation, growing criticism of the welfare state, and an ideological shift to reducing federal aid to impoverished people in the 1980s and 1990s culminated in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which, as claimed President Bill Clinton, "end{ed} welfare as we know it." Prof. Tony Judt, the late historian, said in reference to the earlier proposed title of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act that "a more Orwellian title would be hard to conceive" and attributed the decline in the popularity of the Great Society as a policy to its success, as fewer people feared hunger, sickness, and ignorance. Additionally, fewer people were concerned with ensuring a minimum standard for all citizens and social liberalism. Nonetheless, the aftermath of the War on Poverty remains in the continued existence of such federal programs as Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America, and Job Corps.

Criticisms

President Johnson's "War on Poverty" speech was delivered at a time of recovery (the poverty level had fallen from 22.4% in 1959 to 19% in 1964 when the War on Poverty was announced) and it was viewed by critics as an effort to get the United States Congress to authorize social welfare programs. Some economists, including Milton Friedman, have argued that Johnson's policies actually had a negative impact on the economy because of their interventionist nature. Adherents of this school of thought recommend that the best way to fight poverty is not through government spending but through economic growth.

Results and aftermath

In the decade following the 1964 introduction of the war on poverty, poverty rates in the U.S. dropped to their lowest level since comprehensive records began in 1958: from 17.3% in the year the Economic Opportunity Act was implemented to 11.1% in 1973. They have remained between 11 and 15.2% ever since.

[Pterodactyl]

1. Endless war...

[NYC_SKP]

2. If we fought a war against Ignorance, the war on Poverty might go more quickly.

K/R

[sad sally]

3. Let's not call it a war. All these kinds of "wars" (on poverty, on drugs,

on terror, on the middle class, you name it), may accomplish some things but somehow never end which make the results hard to measure.

Clinton's "welfare to work" program was seen as okay by many because there were jobs and even some training for those on welfare. It's a different story today, and while lots of Democrats will say that government subsidies to employ people living in or on the verge of poverty would the right thing to do, neither the President nor the Republicans will push this kind of much-needed government assistance.

The $4,000 tax credit in the President's American Jobs Act for people unemployed for more than six months may spur some hiring to help some from slipping into poverty, but the outlook for that happening for millions isn't very positive.

[jwirr]

5. Yes, in the end all the "wars" of the 1970-80s eventually turned into

wars against the users of the programs because the problems turned out to be harder to solve than thought and someone had to take the blame. Almost all of LBJ's War on Poverty programs have been destroyed in the raygun revolution.

[bemildred]

4. I am sick of fake wars on nouns.

But we definitely need to do something about the hogging of the country's wealth by the few at the expense of the many.