Johnson’s simultaneous endorsement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act gave the impression that Great Society programs would also help lift African-Americans out of poverty. But, as historian Ben Shapiro writes, “The Great Society significantly slowed economic progress for black Americans.”
“Government involvement is far more to blame” for “the stagnant rates of increase in black prosperity.” In the past, the government had imposed racism when it legislated “Jim Crow Laws.” But starting in the mid-1960s, it was anti-poverty programs which did the most harm to the Black community.
The Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson, touted as a sort of reparations-lite by Johnson allies, actually harmed the black community in significant ways that continue to play out today. According to former Air Force One steward Ronald MacMillan, LBJ pushed the Great Society programs and civil rights bill out of desire to win black votes.
Johnson frequently used inappropriate and hateful epithets to refer to African-Americans, usually the “n-word” but also others. His racist vocabulary has been well documented.
But Johnson hoped to persuade Black voters to support him and his political party. He presented his programs as their salvation. Yet the biggest cause of poverty turned out to be LBJ’s anti-poverty programs.
In essence, the Great Society drove impoverished black people into dependency. In 1960, 22 percent of black children were born out of wedlock; today, that number is over 70 percent. The single greatest indicator of intergenerational poverty is single motherhood. As Thomas Sowell writes, “What about ghetto riots, crimes in general and murder in particular? What about low levels of labor force participation and high levels of welfare dependency? None of those things was as bad in the first 100 years after slavery as they became in the wake of the policies and notions of the 1960s.”
An analysis by the Brookings Institute shows that, prior to Great Society programs, African-Americans were making progress: “From 1940 to 1970, black men cut the income gap [with white men] by about a third.” Black wage-earners were experiencing rising wages and were headed for equal pay.
This optimistic trend, however, faded, as Ben Shapiro notes: “Such growth slowed after the implementation of the Great Society. According to economists John J. Donahue III and James Heckman, black men saw ‘virtually no improvement’ in wages” after LBJ’s initiatives were implemented.
Thomas Sowell notes that African-Americans made the largest and fastest economic progress before Great Society programs were launched. Johnson’s war on poverty actually slowed the gains being made by Blacks, as Sowell writes:
Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began. Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance.
It’s worth noting that the Great Society programs did not help white people either, or Latinos, or Native American Indians. Johnson’s programs have been in place for fifty years, but poverty rates remain unchanged, as Ben Shapiro notes:
As for the Great Society itself, poverty rates in the United States have remained largely unchanged: the government spends $9,000 per welfare recipient per year in the United States, and yet Americans had the same poverty rate in 2013 as they did in 1963. Living standards have improved, but dependency has not decreased.
The number of Americans and the percentage of the American population living in poverty declined throughout the 1940s and 1950s. But those numbers have been frozen since the mid-1960s. Johnson’s programs are expensive but ineffective.
The Great Society programs started by costing billions; now they cost trillions. These programs have inflicted suffering by means of taxation and by means of expanding the national debt. But these programs have not reduced poverty — for African-Americans, for whites, for Latinos, or for anyone else.
