War on PovertyEssay Preview: War on PovertyReport this essayWar on PovertyStemming from a decision made in November 1963 to pursue a legislative agenda that economic advisers to President John F. Kennedy had planned, the War on Poverty consisted of a series of programs in the areas of health, education, and welfare that Congress passed in 1964 and 1965. When President Lyndon Johnson declared an “unconditional war on poverty” in his 1964 State of the Union address, he referred to federal aid to education and medical care for the elderly as important parts of that war. Although these measures passed in 1965, an omnibus act, prepared by a special task force of President Johnsons Council of Economic Advisers, became the legislative vehicle most closely associated with the War on Poverty. The House Education and Labor Committee began to consider this legislation, known as the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), in April 1964, and the measure passed Congress that August.
Run as part of the Executive Office of the president and directed by Sergeant Shriver, a brother-in-law of President Kennedy, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) served as the bureaucratic center for the war. Shrivers Office of Economic Opportunity contained assistant directors for each of the three most important components of the Economic Opportunity Act. The Job Corps, the first of these components, based on New Deal models such as the Civilian Conservation Corps, recruited 10,000 people by 30 June 1965 to receive vocational training in urban training centers, frequently located on abandoned military bases, or in smaller conservation camps managed by the Agriculture and Interior departments. The conservation camps stressed the value of discipline and physical labor in rural settings such as forests and recreational areas.
By the end of 1966, the Job Corps encountered serious opposition in Congress. Training inner-city youths for meaningful jobs turned out to be an expensive and difficult task. The fact that some Job Corps trainees committed crimes and that a riot erupted at one Job Corps training center added to the negative publicity. Nonetheless, the program survived as a public-private partnership run by the Department of Labor. Between 1966 and 2000, the program served more than 1.9 million disadvantaged young people.
The Community Action Program, the second of the important components of the Office of Economic Opportunity, functioned as a grant program from the federal government to local Community Action Agencies. These local agencies, either private or governmental organizations, had the assignment of mobilizing the resources of a given area and using them to plan and coordinate an attack on the causes of poverty. Part of their mission was to involve local residents in the decision making process. After urban riots in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts in the summer of 1965, Congress began to question the efficacy of the Community Action Program. President Johnson also began to distance himself from the program, particularly after receiving complaints from local politicians that local Community Action Agencies were operating as centers to organize political movements in opposition to the incumbent mayors and city council members. In 1967, Representative Edith Green (D-Oregon) helped to save the Community Action Program by offering a successful amendment that placed all of the more than 1,000 community action agencies under the control of local or state governments.
The creators of the War on Poverty had hoped to create a flexible approach that would allow local communities to experiment with what worked best. Although such an approach failed to materialize, the Office of Economic Opportunity sponsored important research into the causes of poverty and the best means of alleviating it. The economists in the Division of Research, Planning and Evaluation viewed the poverty legislation as an avenue for policy evaluation and research. Hence, it seemed natural to them to test the notion of a guaranteed income that would be paid both to the working and the nonworking poor, to families headed by women, and to “intact” families that contained both a father and a mother living at home. In a remarkable development, the economists secured approval to conduct one of the largest social experiments in the nations history, undertaken in the late 1960s and 1970s and known as the Negative Income Tax Experiments.
The Positive Income Tax Experiment
In the early years of the program, there were only six states permitted to enact such a program. However, in 1970, two states (Arizona and Washington) adopted policies that, although not technically impossible, would require public discussion and public support. During 1970, the programs were fully operational; the program went on to become the country’s largest tax policy during the decade at large. This policy was a major victory for the nation’s economy, with tax revenues averaging an astounding $5 billion a year. In 1977, the nation enacted more than half a trillion dollars in federal grants to the program, and it will continue to do so with significant success until its replacement in 2000. With this economic success comes great responsibility.
In a nutshell, the goal is to produce a program of social change intended to solve real and projected social problems, from public policy reforms to the distribution and quality of basic services, a system that would help every nation overcome the poverty and hunger problems. The goals are, by any standard, unrealistic. There are a number of potential solutions to these problems. There are several important ways in which this will occur in the future, and, despite some of the possible problems, it has worked much more effectively for the country than anticipated as of today. (For example, many of the measures that created the Great Depression (which had been pursued with a small population and a high cost of living after the Great Depression) were successfully combined into programs that are still utilized today.)
The Economic Recovery
The Economic Recovery program began in the United States in the ’70s, after the initial Great Depression, and was intended to provide for millions of poor families without social security, other forms of assistance, or welfare benefits. The program began to fail. Despite this, President Ronald Reagan announced a tax cut that would begin to restore low-cost programs in many ways, including public funding to address welfare inequities, the tax deduction for family members that were so burdensome that Congress had to rework the tax breaks in order to get them back. However, in 1981, Congress restored the Earned Income Tax Credit (EARC), and in 1994 the Tax Exemptions for Income Tax Purposes for Business Income and Interest, both of which now help make up a larger portion of the program’s overall funding.
By 1980, the program had stabilized, and many economic experts expected that the economic recovery would turn out to be a positive change in the way that a poor family had to spend their money in the early years of its existence. The Recovery Act of 1979, signed by President Ronald Reagan, extended the EARC grant program to families that suffered through major economic downturns of 1981 and 1983. By 1980, it offered a total payment of $10 billion to those families whose incomes declined in 1981 or 1984 before continuing to experience some of the most severe downturns of the post-industrial era. Under the Economic Recovery Act of 1980, an additional $1 billion would be added to the program to help families like the elderly take advantage of these gains.
While it makes sense for poor families to have a basic income based on their purchasing preferences (as opposed to their wealth or other basic needs) and to be able to control their expenditures, it might not be realistic for any of them to pay for some of these basic necessities of the welfare state in the absence of income support unless the government could provide an alternative source of money to buy food and water for them. This is where the Recovery Act of 1980 comes in. In 1981, with the economy back to growth and the economy more able to keep pace with developments and the growing needs of the population, government spending on basic expenses for households peaked at nearly 5 percent of national income; by 1985, government outlays on basic needs had surpassed $