Is without a doubt the war on poverty. And like every war the left has been involved with since WW2, it has been a miserable loss for America and the American tax payer. From the article:
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty. This report is noteworthy because this year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty. Liberals claim that the War on Poverty has failed because we didn’t spend enough money. Their answer is just to spend more. But the facts show otherwise.
>>> Full Report: The War on Poverty After 50 Years
Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.
The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs. These programs provide cash, food, housing and medical care to low-income Americans. Federal and state spending on these programs last year was $943 billion. (These figures do not include Social Security, Medicare, or Unemployment Insurance.)
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Over 100 million people, about one third of the U.S. population, received aid from at least one welfare program at an average cost of $9,000 per recipient in 2013. If converted into cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all poverty in the U.S.
But today the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14 percent of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually shows that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years.
The war on poverty has been a bust. $22 trillion (in 2012 adjusted dollars) has been spent – an amount that, if you go to the bullshit the left really likes to go to whenever they want to make anti-war talk, is over three times the total cost of every major war effort the US engaged in since the civil war – and we have more poor than we had before. If you choose to look at the effectiveness of this project, the best case scenario is that it is a wash, and realistically, it is a miserable failure that has pissed away a huge amount of money. Poverty, according to the collectivists, still is rampant.
The country’s private sector – the productive part of it – is being bled dry. The middle class is in a death spiral. Our economy is in the shitter. Trillions in debt we have no means to pay off, and over regulation that never address the fundamental underlying problem that government has abrogated itself the ability to pick winners & losers, are coupled with an agenda to allow government to control the flow of money and people – through things like the takeover of healthcare and insane environmental activism – to the benefit of those in power. Trillion dollar annual deficits, that do nothing but funnel money to the ultra-rich & well-connected and to those they buy votes from, are needed to even keep a semblance of stagnation (the reality is that we are stuck in a depression), have become the norm. More people than ever are unemployed, and the agenda of the last 6 years, including the support for an invasion from the southern border, all but guarantees this number will go up even more. Dependency on government handouts are at their highest, with more and more people lining up to suck at the government’s teat while the productive sector is bled dry.
Nobody but those that profit from this failed boondoggle can argue that the war on poverty has been anything but an abject failure. We would have been better off giving the poor a blank check as a share of the wealth pissed away so far. Not most of them would not have just pissed it away in record time, and then would show up with their hand out asking for more in record time. Saying that the “War on poverty” has been a gigantic failure and can never be won, is an understatement. But damn, this wasteful program has worked beyond any democrat’s wildest dream to help them retain their hold on power. And in the end, that was and remains the real goal of this insanely costly program. By that measure, this program has been a huge success. The left wins, again, as America loses out.