How about the basic premise, which is the war on poverty failed?
Well, you cited black poverty before the 1960s and after. How is that doing? Are blacks poorer now or beofre?
Ah, so your examples that poverty has been a failure rely on independent examples of one guy and... the heritage foundation? Okay, well let's see a few claims by the heritage foundation which are simply laughable:
Not even government, though, can spend $9,000 per recipient a year and have no impact on living standards. And it shows: Current poverty has little resemblance to poverty 50 years ago. According to a variety of government sources, including census data and surveys by federal agencies, the typical American living below the poverty level in 2013 lives in a house or apartment that is in good repair, equipped with air conditioning and cable TV. His home is larger than the home of the average nonpoor French, German or English man. He has a car, multiple color TVs and a DVD player. More than half the poor have computers and a third have wide, flat-screen TVs. The overwhelming majority of poor Americans are not undernourished and did not suffer from hunger for even one day of the previous year.
Alright, so... the average America doesn't fit
any global indicator of poverty, however the war on poverty has
failed.. let's move on...
Do higher living standards for the poor mean that the war on poverty has succeeded? No. To judge the effort, consider LBJ's original aim. He sought to give poor Americans "opportunity not doles," planning to shrink welfare dependence not expand it. In his vision, the war on poverty would strengthen poor Americans' capacity to support themselves, transforming "taxeaters" into "taxpayers." It would attack not just the symptoms of poverty but, more important, remove the causes.
Ah okay... well now we're getting somewhere, so opportunity has declined. Oh alright... well what metric do they use to determine whether opportunity has declined? Let's see:
According to the Heritage Foundation's analysis, children raised in the growing number of single-parent homes are four times more likely to be living in poverty than children reared by married parents of the same education level. Children who grow up without a father in the home are also more likely to suffer from a broad array of social and behavioral problems. The consequences continue into adulthood: Children raised by single parents are three times more likely to end up in jail and 50% more likely to be poor as adults.
So... in short... the war on poverty has failed because more people are getting divorced and
some people are poor. Oh... okay well... that's an odd way to define why it has failed. I mean, it's almost as if the article makes an obvious attempt to ignore that....
- American kids don't have to work in order to eat,
- American kids don't have to pitch in to pay the family's rent
- Hunger and housing have been completely disassociated with poverty
- Minorities have substantially higher education rates
- Access to education
for all is an application away
- Access to healthcare is not based on ability to pay
- Real poverty levels for blacks have dropped from 87% to 20-25%
.... well you get it. Is that honestly what
you based your argument that less people getting married/more people get divorced has led to
move poverty? That people getting divorced and single parents have created more poverty and less opportunity? Because that's a pretty easy statement to debunk. Hell, your article's complete avoidance of
any reference to general poverty makes it pretty obvious that it's a ridiculous argument to begin with. People
aren't poorer and even the poor aren't really poor by any standard of the word. Hell, even opportunity hasn't declined because people have access to things whose lack of would have killed them in the past. So with that said, what other non-arguments do you have for why the liberal programs of the past 50 years have failed?