Six decades after LBJ declared ‘war,’ objectives remain unfulfilled.
Six decades after LBJ declared ‘war,’ objectives remain unfulfilled.
O n this day in 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an unconditional war on poverty in America during his State of the Union address. Six decades later, the nation has made tremendous strides, including a sizable reduction in the poverty rate as Americans enjoy an improved standard of living. Yet we have not won the war. Success has come almost entirely from government transfer payments to poor households, not from improvements in the foundational aspects of a flourishing life.
The foundation of a thriving life reflects our collective values, such as getting an education, working hard, and raising a family. However, many of our safety-net policies do not align with these objectives. Our safety-net programs disincentivize work and marriage, and many low-income children still cannot access quality education due to our government’s policies. This is almost certainly not what President Johnson had in mind when he declared a “War on Poverty.”
The president’s message that day was for Congress to help low-income people develop the tools necessary for success, not simply send them a government check. He encouraged Congress, saying: “Our chief weapons in a more pinpointed attack will be better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.” He argued for states and localities to lead the fight because “the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington.”
Yet, a Washington-centric approach is precisely what emerged. One year after declaring a war on poverty, President Johnson introduced his Great Society agenda, setting the stage for the vast federal anti-poverty bureaucracy that we have today. Passage of programs such as Medicaid, Head Start, and a nationalized Food Stamp Program followed, and today, the federal government funds more than 80 means-tested programs or services, with states contributing only a fraction of the total costs.
Unsurprisingly, this approach set the federal government on a disastrous fiscal path. Federal expenditures on means-tested programs have increased eightfold since the War on Poverty started, equating to an additional $800 billion per year in today’s dollars. That amounts to spending $2,500 per person in the United States.
Admittedly, this has substantially reduced the poverty rate. As my AEI colleagues Kevin Corinth and Richard Burkhauser recently showed, when fully accounting for all government benefits in the poverty calculation (unlike the government’s official poverty rate) and adjusting the 1964 poverty threshold only for inflation, fewer than 2 percent of people are poor today compared to 20 percent in 1964. However, expanding transfer payments to reduce the poverty rate was simply a mathematical achievement. Fundamentally improving the lives of poor families has proved an entirely different task.
More than a decade ago, long-time Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins argued that the key to the problem of poverty in this country was a failure among young people to achieve key life milestones. Terming the milestones the “success sequence,” Sawhill and Haskins showed that when young people graduated high school, worked full-time, and married before having children, their odds of living in poverty dramatically reduced. Indeed, the success sequence embodies the War on Poverty’s core principles and remains an effective strategy for reducing poverty.
In a study published today, I find the success sequence effective even among the country’s most vulnerable families. Analyzing 15 years of longitudinal data consisting primarily of poor unmarried mothers from the Future of Families study (formerly the Fragile Families study), I find that many disadvantaged unmarried mothers were able to rise out of poverty when they later achieved success sequence milestones, even though they started on a different path. For example, 15 years after giving birth to a child outside of marriage, only 9 percent of mothers who earned a high school education, worked full-time, and later married were in poverty. Among mothers who failed to complete any of those three steps, the poverty rate was 79 percent. When unmarried mothers turned toward the success sequence, their odds of living in poverty dropped substantially.
The vision outlined by President Johnson in his War on Poverty declaration 60 years ago today remains unfulfilled. Winning that war requires safety-net policies that align with the foundational principles essential for a flourishing life — education, employment, and marriage. Perhaps with more adherence to the success sequence, we can finally triumph over poverty.