Tackling Child Poverty: Having That Vision Thing
Posted: 01/15/2014 11:24 am
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared "all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States" as something that "can and must be done." Despite a group of defeatists declaring failure, the fact is that major progress has been made in this battle.
As Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, recently noted, "President Lyndon Johnson deserves great credit for declaring the war and for skillfully pushing legislation through Congress that established a major set of programs designed to serve the poor. Two cheers for President Johnson."
Rather than accepting rampant poverty amidst plenty, President Johnson provided the vision and leadership to tackle the problem and he established a goal and policy agenda that, in part, achieved some important successes. In fact, according to Haskins, poverty in our nation "declined by 30 percent within five years of Johnson's declaration of war in 1964" -- a rather astounding accomplishment.
For our nation's senior citizens, he points out, "By increasing Social Security benefits, Johnson reduced elderly poverty to 25 percent in 1968 from 35.2 percent in 1959, a reduction of nearly 30 percent. Poverty among the elderly has continued to fall." In fact, the
