in this NY Times column in which he lays out the successes of the effort over the past 50 years, with links galore to support his argument that it has been a success.
As he notes:
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.
Without the programs, the poverty rate would now be approaching 1/3 of our population, at 31%.
Kristof goes through various programs, starting with the effectiveness of Social Security (and by the same reasoning Medicare) in seriously reducing the rate of poverty among the elderly.
He argues for a greater emphasis on programs that help the younger part of our population, and cites one program in particular:
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 by half over roughly the last 20 years.
Please keep reading.
He cites programs that assist parents, whether getting pregnant women to smoke and drink less, parents to talk to children, or the array of programs like Nurse-Family Partnership, Healthy Families America, Child First, Save the Children and Thirty Million Words Project that help parents be better parents.
It is worth remembering how many programs there are. For those too young to remember what serious parts of this nation were like before LBJ's presidency, even with the increases seen recently in poverty,especially childhood poverty, as the social safety net has been slashed, we are still far better off as a society than we were in the 1950s. That some are so dense as to be willing to cut programs further is to me a sign either of dementedness or a willingness to be deliberately cruel.
Kristof concludes his column with these words:
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.
I agree.
And I remember words from the man who in his long public service was the Vice President during the administration that initiated the War on Poverty, albeit not assuming that office until the year after its commencement.
Hubert H. Humphrey offered these words:
It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.
Before the War on Poverty we were failing that moral test.
Sadly, we have been increasingly moving again in the direction of that failure.
Read Kristof's column to see the specifics of why that does not have to be.
We have as a society a moral test before us. Kristof's final words are especially relevant.
But the premise of so much of today’s opposition to food stamps and other benefits — that government assistance inevitably fails — is just wrong.
Do not let those on the political "right" distort the history. The data supports government interventions like those cited by Kristof.
I teach. I deal with children. So the final sentence speaks directly to my experience:And child poverty is as unconscionable in a rich nation today as it was half a century ago.
If we as a society are unwilling to grasp our moral responsibility, if those who claim to be Christians are willing to ignore the words of the one whom they view as Incarnate God in Matthew 25 about the "least of these" then we do not deserve to persist as a society or a nation, we are reverting to the war of every man against every other as offered by Hobbes in his view of man in a state of nature, and the life of too many will be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.