
Washington's 'War on Poverty' Never Helped the Poor, Huckabee Claims
America's 50-year-old "War on Poverty" was never intended to eliminate poverty, GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said Tuesday night. Instead, it was a purely political ploy.
The purpose, the former Arkansas governor claimed during the first of two debates for the party's presidential hopefuls was to prop up an "industry of poverty" and provide jobs for the supposed benefactors of the poor. The event was organized by Fox Business Network and the Wall Street Journal.
"The people who are poor have not benefited," said Huckabee, who took advantage of the occasion to lambast a variety of federal social welfare programs, especially Medicare, which provides health care to senior citizens, and Social Security, which provides post-retirement stipends.
"There's a big difference between welfare programs and what some people would call entitlements," he said. "I just want to remind everybody out there who's ever had a paycheck that the government didn't ask you if you wanted to take money out of your check for Social Security and Medicare -- they did that involuntarily."
Such a policy does not constitute welfare but "earned benefits," he said. "And, by gosh, you paid for it. And if the government screwed it up, you shouldn't have to pay the penalty because of an incompetent government."
Huckabee estimated that the U.S. has spent roughly $2 trillion on various entitlement programs, excluding Medicare and Social Security, since President Lyndon Johnson launched the so-called War on Poverty in 1964 amid a push to build the U.S. into a "Great Society."
Historical data doesn't altogether bear out Huckabee's assessment.
The "War on Poverty" carried forward the agenda of President John F. Kennedy, who had been shot to death the previous year, and targeted a poverty rate that reached 19% in 1959. The initiative was designed to help "one-fifth of all American families with incomes too small to even meet their basic needs," Johnson said in his 1964 State of the Union address.
Its primary weapons would be "better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them," Johnson promised.
Four years after his speech, the effort appeared to be getting results. Census data show the poverty rate at 10% in 1968, a reduction of almost half.
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