Posted by
Andrews on Monday, March 31, 2008 2:19:50 PM
We have been fighting a war for over 40 years. It has cost us trillions of dollars. It has destroyed millions of families, left children without fathers, turned cities into wastelands, and killed thousands. Those we claim to be helping do nothing to help themselves, and generally resent those who are giving the most aid. It has been going on for decades yet the situation just keeps getting worse, and still we have no exist strategy.
Obviously, I am talking about the failed quagmire we call the War on Poverty.
Unlike the War on Terror where we have deposed religious extremists in one nation and a terrorist supporting despot in another, we have nothing to show for all the trillions of dollars we invested in this war. In fact, for all those who cry out about us losing the Iraqi front of the War on Terror, I would point to our devastated cities, escalating crime, teen pregnancy rates, and argue that if we are losing any war, it is the War on Poverty. And, please, no one tell me that I am making an offensive analogy, as "people are dying in Iraq", because people are dying from our misguided War on Poverty as well, and those who die never volunteered to put themselves in harm's way, unlike our troops in Iraq.
Of course, the War on Poverty is fought in a strange way. We hear much about Bush's strategic faults in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no one ever mentions our positively insane approach to fighting poverty. One of the iron-clad rules of economics is "if you subsidize something you get more of it". So, what did LBJ do? He subsidized unemployment and single parent homes. And, surprise! We ended up seeing a lot more unemployment and single parent families. We also, via social security, subsidized disability, and the number of disabilities which preclude working began to rise as well.
Did no one ever plan a strategy before declaring war?
Thanks to bad ideas in the 1960's and 1970's we decided it would be cheapest to house the poor if we massed them together in one place, and so the high rises were born. It should come as no surprise that massing together impoverished people willing to accept government handouts resulted in escalating crime*. And, worse still, as the poor now formed a substantial voting block in most cities, they managed to ally with the liberal reformers to castrate the criminal justice system in most of our cities. The rising crime rate began to skyrocket. And as crime rose, those who could afford to do so fled the cities, leaving the poor and criminal with even more political influence, creating a vicious cycle of lawlessness.
So, after over 40 years and trillions upon trillions of dollars, rather than ending, or even reducing poverty, we have created multiple generations of children with no fathers, children born to children, incarcerated teenagers, out of control homicide rates, blighted cities, and a welfare class which stretches back three or more generations in many cases. Had this been a military operation, the press would be running headlines each day demanding the troops come home.
But in this one case, apparently, success is not a requirement. The worse our efforts to end poverty perform, the more the press cries for us to increase spending. Of course, as we are actually subsidizing the things we claim to oppose, we end up spending more to get even worse results. It is a never ending cycle of poverty, where every time we try to fix something we just make it worse.
So, I will ask again, in the case of the War on Poverty, isn't it time we admitted defeat and brought the boys home?
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* I am not saying the poor as a whole are more prone to crime because of their poverty, however there is a correlation in the other direction. Most poor are not criminals, but most criminals are poor. In addition, the poor who would either game the system to be able to remain on the government dole for as long as possible or simply are unable to leave the welfare rolls for decades tend to be less responsible and thus a bit more prone to crime, meaning that the combination of poor and on the dole does tend to equate to an increase in crimes. It is no accident that much of the drug dealing in most cities takes place in public housing.