[Vision2020] Fifty years ago today (January 8, 1964)

Thu Jan 9 09:24:03 PST 2014

Thanks Donovan for your thoughts.

Just in from the NY Times:

Here is the answer to my question in my first post.

A Columbia University study suggests that without government benefits, the
poverty rate would have soared to 31 percent in 2012. Indeed, an average of
27 million people were lifted annually out of poverty by social programs
between 1968 and 2012, according to the White House Council of Economic
Advisers<http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50th_anniversary_cea_report_-_final_post_embargo.pdf>
.

*Progress in the War on Poverty*

JAN. 8, 2014 Nicholas Kristoff, *The New York Times*

America’s war on poverty turned 50 years old this
week<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/50-years-later-war-on-poverty-is-a-mixed-bag.html>,
and plenty of people have concluded that, as President Reagan put it: “We
fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.”

That perception shapes the right’s suspicion of food stamps, minimum-wage
raises and extensions of unemployment benefits. A reader named Frank posted
on my Facebook page<https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10151974136467891&id=9351577890&p=10>:
“All the government aid/handouts in the world will not make people better
parents. This is why the ideas from the left, although always made with the
best of intentions, never work. ... All of this aid is wasted.”

Yet a careful look at the evidence suggests that such a view is flat wrong.
In fact, the first lesson of the war on poverty is that we can make
progress against poverty, but that it’s an uphill slog.

The most accurate measures, using Census Bureau figures that take account
of benefits, suggest that poverty rates have fallen by more than one-third
since 1968. There’s a consensus that without the war on poverty, other
forces (such as mass incarceration, a rise in single mothers and the
decline in trade unions) would have lifted poverty much higher.

A Columbia University study suggests that without government benefits, the
poverty rate would have soared to 31 percent in 2012. Indeed, an average of
27 million people were lifted annually out of poverty by social programs
between 1968 and 2012, according to the White House Council of Economic
Advisers<http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/50th_anniversary_cea_report_-_final_post_embargo.pdf>
.

The best example of how government antipoverty programs can succeed
involves the elderly. In 1960, about 35 percent of older Americans
were poor<http://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p60-245.pdf>.
In 2012, 9 percent were. That’s because senior citizens vote, so
politicians listened to them and buttressed programs like Social Security
and Medicare.

In contrast, children are voiceless, so they are the age group most likely
to be poor today. That’s a practical and moral failure.

I don’t want anybody to be poor, but, if I have to choose, I’d say it’s
more of a priority to help kids than seniors. In part, that’s because when
kids are deprived of opportunities, the consequences can include a lifetime
of educational failure, crime and underemployment.

Research from neuroscience underscores why early interventions are so
important. Early brain development turns out to have lifelong consequences,
and research from human and animal studies alike suggests that a
high-stress early childhood in poverty changes the physical brain in subtle
ways that impair educational performance and life outcomes.

A careful review of antipoverty programs in a new book, “Legacies of the
War on Poverty<https://www.russellsage.org/publications/legacies-war-poverty>,”
shows that many of them have a clear impact — albeit sometimes not as great
an impact as advocates hoped.

For starters, one of the most basic social programs that works — indeed
pays for itself many times over — is family-planning assistance for at-risk
teenage girls. This has actually been one of America’s most successful
social programs in recent years. The teenage birthrate has
fallen<http://www.nbcnews.com/health/teen-birth-rate-hits-historic-low-officials-say-8C11086339>by
half over roughly the last 20 years.

Another hugely successful array of programs involved parent coaching to get
pregnant women to drink and smoke less and to encourage at-risk moms to
talk to their children more. Programs like Nurse-Family Partnership,
Healthy Families America, Child First, Save the Children and Thirty Million
Words Project all have had great success in helping parents do a better job
with their kids.

*Vald*

36 minutes ago

"As that example suggests, we increasingly have first-rate research —
randomized controlled trials, testing antipoverty programs as...

Early education likewise has strong evidence of impact. Critics note that
in Head Start, for example, gains in I.Q. seem to fade within a few years.
That’s true and disappointing. But in the last five years, robust studies
from scholars like David
Deming<http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7Edeming/papers/Deming_HeadStart.pdf>have
shown that graduates of Head Start also have improved life outcomes:
higher high school graduation and college attendance rates, and less likely
to be out of school and out of a job.

Advertising

Another area of success: Programs that encourage jobs, especially for the
most at-risk groups. The earned-income tax credit is a huge benefit to the
working poor and to society.

Likewise, a program called Career Academies has had excellent results
training at-risk teenagers in specialized careers and giving them practical
work experience. Even eight years later, those young people randomly
assigned to Career Academies are earning significantly more than those in
control groups.

As that example suggests, we increasingly have first-rate research —
randomized controlled trials, testing antipoverty programs as rigorously as
if they were pharmaceuticals — that give us solid evidence of what works or
doesn’t.

So let’s drop the bombast and look at the evidence.

Critics are right that antipoverty work is difficult and that dependency
can be a problem. But the premise of so much of today’s opposition to food
stamps and other benefits — that government assistance inevitably fails —
is just wrong. And child poverty is as unconscionable in a rich nation
today as it was half a century ago.

On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Donovan Arnold <donovanjarnold2005 at yahoo.com
> wrote:

> The welfare state is bloated. It is bloated because wages are so low that
> a family of two working adults cannot pay their basic living expenses. If
> we raised wages less people would be on goverment assistance and more would
> be paying taxes instead. The idea that raising wages only causes inflation
> is an outdated one. This was when labor was 50 to 90 percent of a
> business's expenses. Today, because of automation and moving of jobs
> overseas, labor is only 10 to 25 percent of a business's expense. Further,
> the bottom 90 percent of wage earners make up an even smaller percentage of
> a business's expenses. Therefore, raising wages even as much as 50 percent
> would only cause a 5 percent increase in prices cover loses by employers. A
> 50 percent pay raise for 5 percent inflation would be a good increase in
> quality of life.
>
> Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android
>
>  ------------------------------
> * From: * Nicholas Gier <ngier006 at gmail.com>;
> * To: * Kai Eiselein <fotopro63 at hotmail.com>;
> * Cc: * vision2020 at moscow.com <vision2020 at moscow.com>;
> * Subject: * Re: [Vision2020] Fifty years ago today (January 8, 1964)
> * Sent: * Thu, Jan 9, 2014 7:44:59 AM
>
>   The question to ask about American poverty is where would we be today
> without Medicare, Medicaid, and Food Stamps?  We are now at the bottom of
> most industrialized nations in general health (worst in preventable
> deaths), poverty, child health, STDs, infant mortality, adult life spans,
> etc., etc. Without these programs we would have dropped to into Third World
> conditions.
>
> Kai: if it is the bloated welfare state's fault, why is it that the Nordic
> countries (see attached) with the most generous benefits and highest taxes
> are at the top of of all these quality of life indicators?  As I have been
> saying for years, economic facts defeat the GOP on every issue.
>
> Brazil has raised its minimum wage twice in huge increments, and its
> poverty rate has dropped dramatically and its economy keeps humming along.
>  If the U.S. federal minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, we would
> have won the war on poverty with that effort alone. Adjusted for inflation
> wages have been flat since Ronnie Reagan, while the fruits of our labor has
> gone to the rich and the corporations.
>
> The minimum wage in Australia is $16/hour and it was one of the only
> countries that flew through the Great Recession with flying colors.  They
> were government by the lefty Labor Party the whole time.
>
> The facts support the Middle Way between Communism and Libertarianism,
>
> Nick
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 7:05 PM, Kai Eiselein <fotopro63 at hotmail.com>wrote:
>
>> That's pretty much what the graph in USA Today showed this morning. They
>> had an article about it in yesterday and today's edition. Saw it while
>> eating breakfast at a La Quinta the past two mornings.
>> If I had to venture a guess for why it has failed, it would be that too
>> much money goes to bloated bureaucracies and not enough gets to the actual
>> programs.
>> Our government can be counted on for a few things:
>> Lies
>> Spying on citizens
>> F---king up just about everything it tries to manage.
>>
>> ________________________________
>> > From: scooterd408 at hotmail.com
>> > To: thansen at moscow.com; vision2020 at moscow.com
>> > Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 13:51:55 -0700
>> > Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Fifty years ago today (January 8, 1964)
>> >
>> > War on Poverty at 50 -- despite trillions spent, poverty won
>> > 'Over, the last 50 years, the government spent more than $16 trillion
>> > to fight poverty.
>> > Yet today, 15 percent of Americans still live in poverty. That’s
>> > scarcely better than the 19 percent living in poverty at the time of
>> > Johnson’s speech. Nearly 22 percent of children live in poverty
>> > today. In 1964, it was 23 percent.'
>> >
>> >
>> http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/01/08/war-on-poverty-at-50-despite-trillions-spent-poverty-won/
>> >
>> > I don't have the time to fact check, but the story is from Fox News
>> > which is the only source of news trusted by conservatives.
>> >
>> >
>> > ________________________________
>> > From: thansen at moscow.com
>> > Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2014 04:48:26 -0800
>> > To: vision2020 at moscow.com
>> > Subject: [Vision2020] Fifty years ago today (January 8, 1964)
>> >
>> >
>> > "This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on
>> > poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with
>> > me in that effort.
>> >
>> > It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy
>> > will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest
>> > Nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it. One
>> > thousand dollars invested in salvaging an unemployable youth today can
>> > return $40,000 or more in his lifetime.
>> >
>> > Poverty is a national problem, requiring improved national organization
>> > and support. But this attack, to be effective, must also be organized
>> > at the State and the local level and must be supported and directed by
>> > State and local efforts.
>> >
>> > For the war against poverty will not be won here in Washington. It must
>> > be won in the field, in every private home, in every public office,
>> > from the courthouse to the White House.
>> >
>> > The program I shall propose will emphasize this cooperative approach to
>> > help that one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to
>> > even meet their basic needs.
>> >
>> > 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.
>> >
>> > Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but
>> > the symptom. The cause may lie deeper in our failure to give our fellow
>> > citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of
>> > education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a
>> > lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their
>> > children.
>> >
>> > But whatever the cause, our joint Federal-local effort must pursue
>> > poverty, pursue it wherever it exists--in city slums and small towns,
>> > in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian
>> > Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well
>> > as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.
>> >
>> > Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it
>> > and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however,
>> > is going to suffice.
>> >
>> > We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of
>> > Appalachia.
>> >
>> > We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.
>> >
>> > We must enact youth employment legislation to put jobless, aimless,
>> > hopeless youngsters to work on useful projects.
>> >
>> > We must distribute more food to the needy through a broader food stamp
>> > program.
>> >
>> > We must create a National Service Corps to help the economically
>> > handicapped of our own country as the Peace Corps now helps those
>> > abroad.
>> >
>> > We must modernize our unemployment insurance and establish a high-level
>> > commission on automation. If we have the brain power to invent these
>> > machines, we have the brain power to make certain that they are a boon
>> > and not a bane to humanity.
>> >
>> > We must extend the coverage of our minimum wage laws to more than 2
>> > million workers now lacking this basic protection of purchasing power.
>> >
>> > We must, by including special school aid funds as part of our education
>> > program, improve the quality of teaching, training, and counseling in
>> > our hardest hit areas."
>> >
>> > - President Lyndon Johnson in his State of the Union Address (January
>> > 8, 1964)
>> >
>> >
>> http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/640108.asp
>> >
>> > -----------------------------------
>> >
>> > Seeya 'round town, Moscow, because . . .
>> >
>> > "Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
>> > http://www.MoscowCares.com<http://www.moscowcares.com/>
>> >
>> > Tom Hansen
>> > Moscow, Idaho
>> >
>> > "There's room at the top they are telling you still.
>> > But first you must learn to smile as you kill,
>> > If you want to be like the folks on the hill."
>> >
>> > - John Lennon
>> >
>> > ======================================================= List services
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>> > =======================================================
>> >
>> > ======================================================= List services
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>
>
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