Contributors to a National Review Online symposium on the LBJ's "War on Povery" include (among others) Charles Murray, Marvin Olasky, John Stonestreet, and W. Bradford Wilcox. [my bolding]
Charles Murray
The pair of statistics about the War on Poverty that should get the most publicity are these: In 1949, 41 percent of Americans were below the poverty line (scholars have retrospectively applied the official definition of “poverty” to the 1950 census); when LBJ announced the War on Poverty in 1964, that proportion had dropped to 19 percent. Contemplate that pair of numbers for a moment. In just the 15 years between 1949 and 1964, the American poverty rate had dropped by 22 percentage points. What had the government done to help? By the definition of the 1960s and thereafter, nothing. The federal government sponsored no education programs for the disadvantaged. No training programs. No jobs programs. No community action. No affirmative action. No Head Start. No welfare whatsoever for men, and only a stingy cash payment for unmarried mothers, hedged with restrictions. The federal government was missing in action in the real war against poverty — and yet somehow America cut poverty by more than half.
Poverty continued to drop during LBJ’s years, which featured a red-hot economy (unemployment rates averaged 4.2 percent from 1964 to 1969). But when the economy slowed, the poverty rate flattened, hitting its low point of 11 percent in 1973. That doesn’t mean nothing has changed since then. In recent decades, the official poverty statistic has become less and less interpretable. But whatever measure is used, we have seen nothing remotely like the progress against poverty that the American economy and American civil society — not government programs — achieved from the end of World War II to 1964.— Charles Murray is the W. H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
John Stonestreet
The War on Poverty had good intentions but a bad strategy. The first question to answer before going to war is: Who am I fighting? In the same way, to “defeat” poverty, we must know what poverty we are fighting.
The government has only one type of anti-poverty weapon: a check. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a government check, all poverty looks like a lack of money. So, for the elderly with no means of income, the War on Poverty provided a desperately needed safety net.
But most poverty in America isn’t, and wasn’t, of the financial kind. Most poor children, for example, are victims of relational poverty, familial poverty, moral poverty, or all three. As the government was fighting poverty with checks, divorce rates were skyrocketing, along with out-of-wedlock births and cohabitation. To mix metaphors, it was like trying to win a football game by defending the other team’s cheerleaders.
The social and financial costs of family disintegration are incredible, and there were never enough checks to keep up. But the course has now been set. As Brad Wilcox and others have pointed out, marriage is now distinctive of middle- and upper-class America, while the underclass chooses not to participate in the institution that would deliver greatly needed stability.
Overall, the government was just the wrong army for most of the battles in this so-called war. Its clunky, one-size-fits-all approach cannot be truly effective in understanding and remedying the diverse life situations in which people find themselves. But mediating institutions — charities, churches, civic organizations, volunteer groups — are much nimbler and more effective. A better battle plan would be for the state to let them do most of the fighting.
— John Stonestreet is a speaker and fellow for the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview and co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview (2nd ed.).
Marvin Olasky
If a particular product, activity, or orientation dramatically cut drug use, recidivism, teenage pregnancy, the rate of school dropouts, job-quitting, and many other patterns that consign millions to poverty, you’d think federal and state governments, foundations and educators, politicians and pundits, would be singing its praises and furthering its dissemination.
It hasn’t happened that way: I’ve seen for 30 years that Bible-based programs are far more likely to work than their secular alternatives, but they are generally ignored. One reason: The War on Poverty began 50 years ago just as media, academic, and judicial leaders started to undercut the influence of Biblical understanding in American public life.
Before then, most Americans had learned that we’re all sinners who need God’s mercy to curtail our natural tendencies toward anger, promiscuity, lying, and stealing when we can get away with it and irritated coveting when we can’t. Trusting our own natures doesn’t work: When we “just do it,” we do wrong.
Those who understood the Bible also knew that each of us was created in the image of a creative God who works and sacrifices Himself for his children. Many government programs for years have enticed men to abandon wives and children, and women to declare themselves independent. We can’t beat poverty as long as government subsidies and the enticements of immediate gratification encourage single-parenthood.
Biblical understanding over the years also gave way to the faith that excluding God from our thinking creates institutional neutrality. It doesn’t: It results in practical atheism. The War on Poverty went wrong because many of its backers, despite the success of Bible-based programs, preferred a war against God to an effective war on poverty
— Marvin Olasky is the editor in chief of the World News Group.
W. Bradford Wilcox -
... So, if our policymakers are serious about renewing the American dream for our poorest citizens, they must also continue to experiment with federal and state measures that would renew the fortunes of marriage in America. After all, this new Harvard-Berkeley study suggests that it takes a married village to make the Horatio Alger story true for today’s America.
— W. Bradford Wilcox is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. You can follow him @WilcoxNMP.