This week marks the 50th anniversary of when President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a “war on poverty.” His administration created many of the federal and state initiatives low-income Americans rely on today. They include Medicaid, Medicare, subsidized housing, Head Start, legal services, nutrition assistance, raising the minimum wage, and, later, food stamps and Pell grants.
Today an increasing number of Americans say they experience direct economic hardship, according to a new study by the Center for American Progress. It found 61 percent of Americans say their family’s income falls below the cost of living. As many as a third of Americans reported serious problems falling behind in rent, mortgage or utilities payments, or being unable to buy enough food, afford necessary medical care, or keep up with minimum credit card payments.
Peter Edelman talking:
there were really two layers to what President Johnson did. One was the war on poverty. The other was the larger Great Society. And so, when we think about that period of time, we need to understand that the big things were Medicare and Medicaid and the historic civil rights laws and the first-ever federal aid to elementary and secondary education. The war on poverty was very specific. And it was good things. It was Head Start. It was legal services for low-income people, community health centers—all things that we still have, all things that have made a difference. But in and of themselves, that narrower group of things was not going to end poverty. It has made a contribution to help in a variety of ways, and it continues, but it was a narrower idea. We do need to understand that.
It was in the context of the optimism and the positive feeling about America that we had after World War II and the tremendous economic boom that we’d had, although there had been a recession at the end of the Eisenhower period. So, we really were in an optimistic position where we thought we could do anything—you know, later on, go to the moon, all of that.
Secondly, and very important, the civil rights movement made a major difference in terms of exposing injustice, racial injustice, but it immediately became clearer, as we achieved legal equality, and as President Johnson said, that that didn’t mean that somebody would be able to afford to buy a meal at a lunch counter. And so, there was a kind of an upheaval of—from the bottom, through the civil rights movement, as well as Johnson himself, who gets—has to get—for all the things that we think negatively in terms of the war in Vietnam, Johnson is our great president after Abraham Lincoln on civil rights, and he really cared about poverty, from his own upbringing.
It’s a very different time politically. It is also true that as of the election that gave us the 89th Congress beginning in 1965, we had enormous majorities of Democrats in the House and the Senate, and also a much more bipartisan approach to so many issues. The civil rights laws wouldn’t have been passed without Republican support. Food stamps, then, and really until very recently, was bipartisan in its support. Richard Nixon was the first president to send a message to Congress asking for a national food stamp program. Bob Dole defended the food stamp program in the early ’80s. George W. Bush, very recently, was a strong supporter of the food stamp program. So, we had a different politics than we do right at the moment, anyway.
President Obama has done a lot about poverty, and I think we should be very clear about that. The Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act is of historic dimension. What was in the Affordable—in the Recovery Act was terrific for low-income people in our country. So, we have leadership. But Lyndon Johnson, those words do ring very strong for us.
I am glad that Senator Rubio and some of the other Republicans have discovered poverty this week. These ideas are not going to get us anywhere. And there are a lot of workers out there who are struggling very hard, who would find it very constructive if Congress would act, if the Republicans would support President Obama’s proposal to get the minimum wage up to $10 an hour. I’m the first to say, long before Senator Rubio, that we need to have wages that are higher than that. We need to have returns from work that help people get out of poverty.
He is not proposing one thing. These are—turning it over to the states is a shopworn idea. It goes back decades. What it does is it leaves it to states like Mississippi and Texas and others that could care less. And [inaudible] of national standards like food stamps—are people hungrier in New York than they are in Mississippi? I don’t think so. And to say, “Well, the state will decide how hungry you are and how much we’ll pay,” makes no sense.
Peter Edelman, in 1996, resigned in protest after President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act.
One of the unfortunate things that we’ve done over the last 40 years, along with doing smart things like expanding the earned income tax credit and enacting the Child Health Insurance Act under President Clinton and the Affordable Care Act now, was to just slash a huge hole in our safety net, which was ending the AFDC, the old welfare program, which was not a satisfactory program and needed to be reformed in a progressive way, and instead, essentially, to throw people off the rolls, so that we now have less than four million people who are receiving cash assistance—and that’s about women and children in our country—so that we end up with six million people in our country whose only income is from food stamps. Six million people. That’s 2 percent of the American people. That’s an income of $6,000. In other words, about 30 percent of the poverty line. That was a bad thing that we did. In Wyoming now, for example, because it’s completely up to the states and there’s no legal right, there are only 600 people, 4 percent of poor children in Wyoming. And that’s actually typical of about half of our states. So, we made a huge mistake there, and that was self-inflicted in terms of our safety net and our anti-poverty strategies.
I am deeply opposed to the current welfare law and very troubled by what happened last year in the Congress. It ends a very fundamental entitlement of assistance to children in need. The way the law used to work—and this has completely ended—is that if a family with children satisfied the eligibility requirements—and those were national, federal requirements—they could get aid. What’s happened now is it’s entirely up to the state, each state, to decide whether it will help people at all, whether it will give them cash or help them with a voucher, whether it will have its system run by a public agency or by a corporation or some private agency.
what’s been happening is that we’ve been swimming upstream in an economy that’s changed just radically since 1968, when President Johnson left office, so that we’re now a low-wage nation. That’s the heart of what’s happened here. And so that even with the really important policies that have been led largely by Democrats, but far more bipartisan than we have right now, even with all of that, we still have 46 million people in poverty, which is terrible. And that is so significantly because of our economy, because of the structural changes due to globalization and technology.
And we really need to wake up and say, “OK, what do we do to get good jobs? What do we do to get better wages? And, of course, along with that, how do we educate our children for the jobs of the 21st century?” And then, with that, we do need a safety net that reaches all the people. We have 20 million people now who are in deep poverty, whose incomes are below half the poverty line, below $9,500 for a family of three. These are things that, across the board, both parties need to pay attention to in constructive ways. That quote from me that you just played about what happened to welfare and what they’ve done at the state level ought to tell us what would happen if Senator Rubio had his way and turned everything else over to the states.
– source democracynow.org
Peter Edelman, faculty director at the Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Public Policy at Georgetown University. He was top adviser to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and also a member of President Bill Clinton’s administration until he resigned in protest after Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform legislation. His latest book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America.