America's Unwinnable War

More than 53 years ago President Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in America.  He promised a full-scale government assault to give the poor a hand up, not a hand out. The president asserted his campaign would deflate welfare rolls and turn "tax eaters" into taxpayers.

Mr. Johnson's war has been a tragic, costly flop.  Since LBJ's proclamation, the federal government has shelled out nearly $25 trillion of American taxpayer dollars to end poverty.  By any reasonable yardstick, the gusher of spending has been a wasteful big government social experiment.

When Mr. Johnson announced his campaign, there were 36 million Americans living at or below the government poverty level. According to the latest U.S. Census, there are 46.5 million people mired in poverty. For 2017, the federal poverty guideline is an annual income of $24,600 for a family of four.

Democrats have attempted to redefine this failure as a success.  They point out the poverty rate in 1964 was 19 percent of the population. The most recent census pegged the current number at 15 percent. Democrats claim the four-percentage-point reduction justifies spending trillions of dollars.

However, the poverty rate has not budged since the late 1960's.  The initial spending spree lowered the poverty rate and entrenched the idea that government largess could alleviate the problem. But the reality is that percentage of people living in poverty has remained stagnant over recent decades.

Some simple math will illustrate the folly of the massive spending. The percentage of Americans living in poverty has dipped by four-percentage points since 1964. That means the government spent $7.7 trillion for each percentage point of reduction.  Yet there are 10.5 million more in poverty.

Part of the problem is that federal bureaucrats keep running up the taxpayer tab.  At last count, taxpayers were funding 126 different schemes aimed at helping the poor. Government aid is available for everything from cell phones to housing to utilities and food.

The price tag for all this government assistance has reached $1 trillion annually for poor and low-income Americans.  That figure does not include Social Security or Medicare.  In addition, state and local governments allotted $284 billion to needy Americans last year.

Clearly, the welfare system needs overhauling.  The current strategy discourages work and undermines self-sufficiency. Increasing poverty expenditures will not solve the problem. Mandating work requirements for government aid is one sensible way to trim the poverty rolls.

The Kaiser Family Foundation ran the numbers and found that work-for-welfare would likely put 3.3 million people back in the labor market. Adding work rules for Food Stamp recipients could land 1.9 million people in paying jobs.

The foundation's findings are supported by real-world experience.  In 1996, Democrat President Bill Clinton signed into law the so-called Welfare Reform Act, which required those who received temporary government aid to obtain a job.  The welfare rolls plummeted by one-half.

However, President Obama's administration effectively gutted the reform.  Bureaucrats issued guidelines without congressional approval that gave states waivers to revise or eliminate work requirements for certain kinds of aid. Many states took advantage of the loophole.

That action has fueled an uptick in the welfare rolls.  More than 100 million people, about one third of America's population, now receive some form of aid from at least one of the myriad of welfare programs administered by Washington bureaucrats.

Food Stamps, now officially called SNAP, is the poster child for the out-of-control welfare growth. Under President Obama, the government added 10.7 million new Food Stamp recipients to the rolls. The tax bill was $66.6 billion last year for this single program.

President Johnson's original vision of freeing the poor from the yolk of government aid was laudatory.  But as often happens with in the Washington swamp, unaccountable bureaucrats and big spending lawmakers throw money and programs at every problem regardless of results.

Using the same failed strategy to tackle poverty will not win the war. New solutions are needed. The taxpayers footing the bill and the nation's poor deserve better. Spending another $25 trillion dollars will only guarantee the same disastrous results.