The War on Poverty

Paul Krugman’s NY Times article, “The War on Poverty”, dissects the complex issue of the nation’s view of Lyndon B. Johnson’s initiative to combat poverty that began in the early 1960s. Krugman asserts that since the WOP’s inception, the positions of progressives and conservatives have not changed as drastically as some might expect. Rather, the positions of these two political ideologies have been emboldened. Krugman claims that progressives have taken a firmer stand against the harsh criticism of the poor and have used the WOP as one of their winning issues. Conservatives, however, have chosen to use the risk of harming the economy to support their argument against public programs designed to help the poor, instead of referring to them as ‘lazy’ or ‘dependent’. Krugman cites the source of these subtle shifts as the change of the public view of the poor. The WOP, in its beginning, was largely thought of as a failure due to the fact that most Americans, at that time, believed that poverty was a social-individual problem, one that could be fixed with an attitude change or a brighter outlook on life. However, Krugman asserts, many critics of the WOP soon discovered that this was indeed not the case. With increasing instability of the labor market, critics of the WOP began to cite job insecurity and income inequality as the source of poverty. Krugman asserts that, overall, income inequality and the unequal availability of jobs in comparison to the richest individuals in America are the main causes of poverty. Moreover, Krugman maintains that as income inequality become more difficult to ignore, critics of the WOP, namely conservatives, inadvertently paint themselves as pompous and out of touch with reality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/10/opinion/krugman-the-war-over-poverty.html?_r=0