Real War on Poverty
by Joseph Morris

More than 43 years ago -- on January 8, 1964 -- President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "War on Poverty". Perhaps it's time to declare victory and go home.

The era of “Great Society” programs, with the stated aim of eliminating poverty, was launched by President Johnson at the outset of his 1964 Presidential election campaign. Gary Bauer makes the point that "decades and billions of dollars later, politicians today still make headlines campaigning on the theme that massive poverty in America demands more big government solutions."

One might think that, nearly half a century on, either we would have licked the problem of poverty or we'd have the intellectual honesty to concede that big government, Great Society-style, is a failure. Maybe there is some truth to both propositions.

Robert Rector, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has been examining the latest census data on "America's "poor", and this week he published his report.* Here’s what he found:

“Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car (31% of ‘poor’ households own two cars), air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR, or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry, and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family’s essential needs. …A third of ‘poor’ households have both cell and land-line telephones. A third also [have] telephone answering machines.”

A major reason, according to Rector, for children living in poverty is the breakdown of families. Rector notes, “If work in each family were raised to 2,000 hours per year -- the equivalent of one adult working 40 hours per week … -- nearly 75 percent of poor children would be lifted out of official poverty. … If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three quarters of the nation’s impoverished youth would immediately be lifted out of poverty.”

Powerful as it is, government can never substitute for the family.

Rector does offer one explanation why, more than four decades after the Great Society was launched, it seems that the poor are with us yet: Illegal immigration.

“A quarter of legal immigrants and fifty to sixty percent of illegals are high-school dropouts. By contrast, only nine percent of non-immigrant Americans lack a high school degree. As long as the present steady flow of poverty-prone persons … continues, efforts to reduce the total number of poor in the U.S. will be far more difficult. A sound anti-poverty strategy must not only seek to increase work and marriage among native born Americans, it must also end illegal immigration, and dramatically increase the skill level of … legal immigrants.”

President Johnson sold his program as a "War on Poverty" in America. The collapse of American borders means that Great Society programs will receive an endless stream of new beneficiaries to the point where they must implode of their own weight.

Ending poverty everywhere in the world is a wonderful idea. But neither importing the world's poor to America to process them through the Great Society system here, nor exporting the Great Society system to the world to process the poor in their native lands, seems like a workable plan.

A real assault on poverty throughout the globe would begins with these prescriptions: (1) Establishment of the rule of law and of transparency in government, and eradication of systemic governmental corruption. (2) Legal protection of private property and of contract rights. (3) Removal of impediments to free markets. (4) Elimination of high taxes, including high tariffs, and of artificial barriers to entry to markets, industries, and professions, so as to foster entrepreneurship and competition.

Many who hold governmental power -- and not just in banana republics -- would find the implementation of those precepts decidedly unpalatable. But adopt them and, in no time at all, you'll have a great society.

Joseph A. Morris is president of the Lincoln Legal Foundation in Chicago.

*Robert Rector, "How Poor Are America's Poor? Examining the 'Plague' of Poverty in America," Heritage Backgrounder No. 2064 ( Washington, D.C.: Heritage Foundation, Aug. 27, 2007). See: http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg2064.cfm