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Johnson's Great Society During The Vietnam War

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Johnson's Great Society During The Vietnam War
Not every American citizen or politician was satisfied with the results of Johnson's Great Society agenda and some even felt like the government shouldn't be involved in American lives. Although Johnson's Great Society had a lasting impact on almost all future political agendas, his success was concealed by the Vietnam War. He was forced to use funds from the War on Poverty on the Vietnam War. Even more damaging to the goals of the Great Society, ever larger amounts of money were being used to fight the Vietnam War instead (Longley). Despite the work he'd done, Johnson is known as the commander-in-chief who forced American into an unwinnable war that resulted in over 58,000 American deaths (History.com Staff, “Great Society”). Many people blame …show more content…
There were many improvements to America and one of those is the proportion of families living in houses that lacked plumbing declined from 20 percent in 1960 to 11 percent. Also, during the 1960s, black family income rose 53 percent (Mintz). According to the official poverty rate, the proportion of our population below the poverty line was dropping quickly. In the years of 1959 and 1966 the proportion of our country living in poverty dropped from 22.4 to 14.7 percent. Since then, it had reached an all-time low of 11.1 percent in 1973 then it went back up shortly after (Eberstadt). Some of Johnson's projects ran into their own problems later on after they started. The anti-poverty campaign, for instance, developed a poor bureaucracy that created fraud and Medicare suffered due to spiraling costs and the lack of ability to keep up with the population. On the other hand, one of Johnson's plans that succeeded after years of hardship was the Job Corps, a nationwide program that has trained more than 1.6 million poor, unskilled youth, basic education, and social skills (Wilson). The Great Society has resulted in many improvements in society, but it also resulted in the cause of many problems that exists

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