http://townhall.com/columnists/johncgoodman/2014/02/08/why-we-lost-the-war-on-poverty-n1791483/page/full
In the article above, “Why We Lost The War On Poverty” by John C. Goodman explains why he believes America has lost the War on Poverty. In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson gave his State of the Union address and introduced a legislation unofficially named the War on Poverty. Goodman shows a graph of Poverty in the United States from 1951-2013. In the graph we see that while poverty has declined from1951, since starting the War on Poverty, not much has changed. Goodman explains how welfare has expanded and how it changes people’s behavior. He gives examples of how welfare has changed America by presenting statistics like, “The length of unemployment increased 27% among husbands and 42% for wives, relative to the control group. For single female heads of households it increased 60% more.” And “Divorce increased 36% more among whites and 42% more among blacks.” These numbers were gathered by social scientists that randomly selected people for control groups. In the end, Goodman says that despite spending $1 trillion dollars a year on the effort to fix poverty in the United States, there has been no progress. Thus, we lost the War on Poverty.
In the article “Why We Lost the War on Poverty” John Goodman brings out statics saying that at the start of the “War on Poverty” 18% of the population lived in poverty, and after 15 Trillion dollars, and a trillion a year more of spending, it only brought the percentage down to 15%. This is astonishing because from World War II, to 1965 the poverty level dropped from roughly 32% to 18%. This shows that the growth of an economy is more important than government support. The article then goes into detail showing that it is quite hard to be poor in the United States as long as you do 4 simple tasks: Get a high school Diploma, get a job, get married, and don’t have kids till your married. This shows that government support really isn’t the answer, economic growth and personal responsibility are quite more effective.
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