The Great Society at Fifty
What LBJ wrought
• By NICHOLAS EBERSTADT
May 22, 2014, marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s “Great Society” address, delivered at the spring commencement for the University of Michigan. That speech remains the most ambitious call to date by any president (our current commander in chief included) to use the awesome powers of the American state to effect a far-reaching transformation of the society that state was established to serve. It also stands as the high-water mark for Washington’s confidence in the broad meliorative properties of government social policy, scientifically applied.
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No less important, the Great Society pledge, and the fruit this would ultimately bear, profoundly recast the common understanding of the ends of governance in our country. The address heralded fundamental changes—some then already underway, others still only being envisioned—that would decisively expand the scale and scope of government in American life and greatly alter the relationship between that same government and the governed in our country today.
In his oration, LBJ offered a grand vision of what an American welfare state—big, generous, and interventionist—might accomplish. Difficult as this may be for most citizens now alive to recall, the United States in the early 1960s was not yet a modern welfare state: Our only nationwide social program in those days was the Social Security system, which provided benefits for workers’ retirement and disability and for orphaned or abandoned children of workers. Johnson had gradually been unveiling this vision, starting with his declaration of a “War on Poverty” in his first State of the Union months earlier in 1964, just weeks after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. In LBJ’s words, “The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that,” he said, “is just the beginning.”
The Great Society proposed to reach even further: to bring about wholesale renewal of our cities, beautification of our natural surroundings, vitalization of our educational system. All this, and much more—and the solutions to the many obstacles encountered in this great endeavor, we were told, would assuredly be found, since this undertaking would “assemble the best thought and the broadest knowledge from all over the world to find those answers for America.”
Memorably, Johnson insisted that the constraints on achieving the goals he outlined were not availability of the national wealth necessary for the task or the uncertainties inherent in such complex human enterprises, but instead simply our country’s resolve—whether we as a polity possessed sufficient “wisdom” to embark on the venture.
For a lesser politician, the Great Society speech might have amounted to little more than lofty rhetoric. For LBJ, it was an actual blueprint. With Johnson’s consummate legislative skills, honed over six years as Senate majority leader, and with the coming 1964 electoral landslide for his party, the Great Society vision would be swiftly implemented: through civil rights laws, a panoply of new social programs (Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and so forth), new federal agencies (the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Transportation), and a vast array of other federal social projects.
What began under Johnson continued—or, more often, expanded—under all successive presidents. Not even Ronald Reagan managed to reverse the growth of government set in motion by that call for the Great Society. Thus, the American welfare state as we know it today is very largely the outcome of forces Johnson unleashed in the first half-year of his presidency. (The most appreciable addition to this apparatus over the past half-century is arguably Obamacare, the health care guarantees forged into law under the Affordable Care Act of 2010.)
Half a century later, how should we assess the Great Society? Any attempt at a comprehensive assessment would demand vastly more space than this essay, given the audacity and expanse of territory it laid claims to conquer—or, more precisely, to improve. Everywhere Johnson cast his eye, he seemed to find an America in need of improvement: Environmental protection, community development, the arts—all of these and more he flagged in this one short speech as legitimate new areas for federal government involvement under the banner of the Great Society. We will confine our assessment here to that enormous first pillar of the Great Society: “abundance” for all and the “end to poverty” to which Johnson committed us.
I
The War on Poverty was grounded in a set of presumptions about our economy and society that were widely shared at the time by the country’s opinion leaders and decision-making elites. American prosperity was, in this postwar era, finally here to stay—and continuing economic advancement could be all but taken for granted. Indeed, the helmsmen of our national economy—groups like the President’s Council of Economic Advisers—knew so much about how to manage the workings of the magnificent U.S. macroeconomy that they could seriously talk about fine-tuning its performance.
The problem of poverty amid general affluence, for its part, was mainly a technocratic question—to be answered boldly through straightforward, official redirection of national resources to fill the country’s “income gap.” Some special programs, however, were also required for addressing conditions in pockets of lingering social disadvantage (urban slums, Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, and other blighted locales). Guided by experts from the academy and elsewhere, these social programs could, with time, systematically convert virtually all of the underprivileged into full participants in the American Dream.
The conceit that possessed the initial troop of Great Society poverty warriors, in short, was that the challenge inherent in the project of eliminating poverty in America was not in essence very different from that of the project for sending a man to the moon. Both tasks could be successfully engineered by a confident government with sufficient resources, know-how, and commitment behind it. This outlook exemplifies what Friedrich Hayek termed “scientism,” pure and simple: misapplication of techniques and theories from the natural sciences to other, patently unsuitable realms.
The scientistic fallacies that animated the original War on Poverty did not long survive their encounters with real, live human beings, as the fates of the Office of Economic Opportunity and other experiments would attest. Nevertheless, official antipoverty programs and policies went on to flourish—at least by the administrative metric of resource expenditures. In 2012, nearly $700 billion in means-tested transfers of money, goods, and services were obtained by recipients of antipoverty benefits. And this does not include the bureaucratic overhead and personnel costs for such programs. At this writing, annual government outlays for U.S. antipoverty programs may have reached, or even exceeded, the trillion-dollar mark.
And programs expressly devised for combating poverty were only one component within the overall schema of social policies intended to redress material want and economic insecurity. For the Great Society also added Medicare to the structure of the American welfare state and arguably prepared the way for more generous, and inventive, outlays from the existing Social Security program. All in all, inflation-adjusted government transfers for social welfare programs soared more than tenfold between 1964 and 2013, and real per capita welfare state transfers were six-plus times higher in 2013 than 50 years earlier. Numerous critics at home and abroad fault the contemporary U.S. social welfare system for what they take to be its punitive austerity. Nevertheless, the share of overall personal income from social welfare transfers jumped from 5.8 percent in 1964 to 17.0 percent in 2013; more than one dollar in six within the overall American household budget thus comes from government entitlement programs, redistributed through social welfare guarantees.
Since 1964, the welfare state has devoted considerable resources to assuring or improving the public’s living standards—something like $20 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars through antipoverty programs alone, by one calculation. What sort of effect have these programs had on deprivation and its attendant miseries?
If we were to judge the performance of our welfare state solely by the statistical measure invented to gauge national performance in the War on Poverty—the “poverty rate”—we would have to conclude the whole effort has been a miserable and unmitigated failure. The true picture, however, is rather more complex than that same poverty rate is capable of depicting, though not necessarily much more heartening.
II
Acccording to the official poverty rate, the proportion of our population below the poverty line was dropping rapidly in the years immediately before the War on Poverty was fully underway. In the seven years between 1959 and 1966, according to the Census Bureau, the proportion of our country living in poverty dropped by about a third, from 22.4 to 14.7 percent. Since then, however, the official poverty rate has been essentially stuck. It reached an all-time low of 11.1 percent in 1973, in the Nixon era, then drifted uncertainly back upward. For the year 2012, the most recent such data available, the national poverty rate was 15.0 percent—slightly higher, in other words, than back in 1966.
The official poverty picture looks even worse the more closely one focuses on it. According to those same official numbers, the poverty rate for all families was no lower in 2012 than in 1966. The poverty rate for American children under 18 is higher now than it was then. The poverty rate for the working-age population (18-64) is also higher now than back then. The poverty rate for whites is higher now than it was then. Poverty rates for Hispanic Americans have been tracked only since 1972—but these likewise are higher today than back then. Shocking as this may sound, only a few groups within our society—most importantly, Americans 65 and older and African Americans of all ages—registered any appreciable improvement in poverty rates between 1966 and 2012.
(read the rest of this essay at link) http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/great-society-fifty_791175.html?nopager=1
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