Joe Biden just launched the second war on poverty

[DonViejo]

The first war on poverty cut it in half. Joe Biden could do it again.

By Dylan Matthews [e-mail] Mar 10, 2021, 2:20pm EST

Fifty-seven years ago, a Democratic president who had a reputation as a moderate — and who had been a senator and vice president before reaching the highest office in the land — announced his administration would be waging “unconditional war on poverty in America.”

The legislation that grew out of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration had no marquee program. Instead, the war on poverty was a collection of new initiatives that have stood the test of time: Medicare; Medicaid; food stamps (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program); aid for women, infants, and children (WIC); school breakfasts; Pell Grants; Head Start; and Section 8 housing vouchers, to name a few. It was a landmark passel of legislation that reshaped American life in the decades that followed.

With Congress’s passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, another Democratic president with a reputation as a moderate (and who came through the Senate and the vice presidency) is putting his stamp on American policy. The Covid-19 relief bill, which passed the US House on Wednesday afternoon and is set to be signed into law by President Joe Biden on Friday, is the most far-reaching anti-poverty legislation in more than 50 years.

Johnson’s war on poverty has gotten a raw deal in historical memory. Ronald Reagan’s quip that “poverty won the war” remains the dominant assessment of Johnson’s efforts. (It certainly didn’t help matters that Johnson escalated US involvement in a real, catastrophic war around the same time.)

But poverty didn’t win the war. When two economists tried to construct a more accurate measure of American poverty between 1960 and 2010, they found that Johnson presided over a massive decline in poverty. In 1960, the rate of consumption poverty in the US was 30.8 percent. By 1972, it had declined to 16.4 percent. Johnson’s efforts appeared to be the main lever cutting the poverty rate nearly in half.

more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22319572/joe-biden-american-rescue-plan-war-on-poverty

[Budi]

1. Typical LBJ reply:

Link to tweet

[Demsrule86]

2. You know I hadn't considered that Biden and Johnson have similiar experience. I believe Johnson

is underrated by Democrats in general...he got so much great legislation passed. And I have never believed Kennedy could have done as well. Civil rights in particularly would have been viewed through the prism of electability.

[jorgevlorgan]

3. That thought crossed my mind too after seeing this

I won't be surprised if he is just as -or even more, transformative of a president as Johnson.