Chapter 4 - Policy Analysis and Findings

Summary

This chapter focuses on the results of the policy analysis of Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty anti-poverty policies. Lyndon B. Johnson oversold and underfinanced the War on Poverty. Worse, the war was conceptually flawed. Johnson and anti-poverty planners censored alternative approaches. Although notable in their thinking about poverty, was the absence of any mention of the economic system within which it operated. The anti-poverty programs targeted the poorest of the poor and segregated them from the larger population that also faced economic risk on a daily basis. The successes of the War on Poverty remain controversial. Ronald Reagan asserted a decade later that the government had declared a war on poverty and poverty had won. Conservatives claimed that the real victories against poverty stemmed from individual willpower and economic growth, not government programs. Michael Harrington suggests that because of the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty programs were underfunded and never given a chance. Others, like political scientist John Schwarz, concluded that cash programs such as Social Security and welfare, not economic growth and training programs, produced most of the 1960s success against poverty. Historian, Irwin Unger, claims that anything other than what the Johnson administration did was impossibly utopian. However, there was nothing as utopian as programs that led to nowhere; the poor learned that once the training was over, there was no job. Survey data showed that Americans would have supported other approaches; and the War on Poverty could have emphasized government job creation or better income policies. Johnson and his economic advisors were at fault; their political caution and constricted ideology did not want the social programs to threaten the middle-class pocketbooks or business power. A great deal was done, but the War on Poverty itself failed to solve poverty; it focused on the very poor and did not deal with the income and employment problems of average working-class families. So, these families felt that their problems were being ignored, especially when it appeared that the poor were black and the working class was white. The anti-poverty crusade did not conquer poverty, but it provided weapons to the enemies of liberalism.