The popularity of the Welfare State caused the issue of poverty to be off the political…
Since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, much has been done to address poverty in the United States. Over time, there have been both changes and continuities. One continuity is that politicians have kept Medicare, Medicaid, and the Education subsidies from LBJ’s plan largely intact. One change is that LBJ’s plan focused on directly providing money to those in poverty, while later plans focused on getting people jobs.…
America was once a great country. People looked at this nation as the “land of opportunity,” because of the unlimited potential that could be reached by even the poorest. Now, America has a disreputable notoriety due to its constant mistakes. A continuous list of numerous incidents, hypocrisies, involvements, and self destructive factors have not only negatively shaped the minds of its own people, but also the rest of the world. This nation has created chaos in the Middle East, piled a massive amount of debt, violated its very own constitution and lost its integrity.…
The term “American” is viewed differently by many distinct people. In this essay, one can find out what it truly means to be an American. An American is someone who can be themself and is classified as an American.…
War on Poverty was part of LBJ’s ‘Great Society’ that Johnson envisioned for the United States. The term was the unofficial name that LBJ gave during his State of the Union address in January of 1964. At the time, the poverty rate was at nineteen percent. Following the speech Congress established the Office of Economic Opportunity with the passing of the Economic Opportunity Act. LBJ’s polices were seen as continuing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Many acts were passed under LBJ’s policy of War on Poverty. The Food Stamp Act of 1964, Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the Social Security Act of 1965. The Social Security Act of 1965 created Medicare and Medicaid. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act funded primary and secondary education and emphasized equality to access for education.…
He and other liberals believed that, in a time of great economic affluence, the nation had the resources for programs that could end “poverty, ignorance, and hunger as intractable, permanent features of American Society.” Beginning in 1964 the Johnson administration passed more than a score of major legislative acts meant to do so. The significance of the War on Poverty was how successful and unsuccessful it was. It did alleviate some of the effects of poverty, directly addressing the debilitating housing, health, and nutritional deficiencies from which the poor had long suffered. However, many War on Poverty programs less successfully addressed the root causes of poverty and many of the poor people remained in the same socio-economic…
In 1996 President Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it.” Clinton’s 1996 Welfare Reform Act replaced the federal program of Aid to Dependent Children, later known as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). After 1970, liberals, moderates, and even welfare recipients began to join conservatives in denouncing welfare in general, and AFDC in particular. The discussions tended to accuse AFDC of breaking up the family, fostering a rise in illegitimacy, and stimulating dependency, although the evidence of this was sometimes ambiguous (Grabner). By the 1990s programs like AFDC has proved to be vulnerable, and during the 1994 elections President Clinton was forced to give up the program to get re-elected. The program only shows another flaw in the system, and Clinton tried to mend it. As a result, Congress passed the Welfare Reform Act in 1996. The law ended AFDC which in turn limited single mothers their independence that the program had given them before, and it required work for temporary relief. During the course of the Clinton presidency the national poverty rate dropped tremendously by a quarter, and welfare caseloads plummeted by 60 percent. Welfare was now controlled by the states rather the federal…
In the 1960’s, the United States plumed in an economic way! About twenty percent of the United States’ population lived under the poverty line. The 1960’s focused on structural poverty and culture of poverty. Structural poverty represented various failures of the economic system, and cultural of poverty focused on the idea of there being deeply entrenched social and financial habits. When many of the people thought about War on Poverty, it tied into Lyndon B. Johnson and the sixties. With Johnson’s Office of Economic Opportunity also known as the OEO, he thought that it would be a way to help. At the beginning of the War on Poverty it seemed to very popular and many supported it but it also had it drawdowns. The criticism came along with some…
While the idea of war on poverty began with the Kennedy Administration in 1963, Johnson learned about the poverty program the day after Kennedy was killed and wanted to work on it as fast as possible. In Johnson’s state of Union address, as part of a even bigger idea of his, the Great Society, he needed to end poverty, so he declared an unconditional war against poverty in order to completely remove it from the U.S within 50 years. Johnson wanted to break the cycle of poverty in the U.S by attacking the source of it in urban ghettos and…
The year was 1976. The presidential race was starting to pick up, with all of the nomination hopefuls attempting to make their mark. At one of the campaign stops, one of the two candidates from the Republican party, former governor of California Ronald Reagan stepped up onto the stage to speak. He knew the speech he was about to give, as he performed it at almost every stop, according to the press accounts following him. "There's a woman in Chicago," Reagan says. "She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income alone is over $150,000." With a single speech, Reagan was able to establish the single story of the “Welfare Queen”, building the stereotype that will define the working poor for the next 40 years. This narrative is always about someone, usually of the working poor or underclass, who abuses the benefits given to them.…
Flash forward to today, America has over forty-three million people that struggle with food security and over one-third of these people are children (Hauptmann, Cole). In terms of poverty, America is slightly worse as over forty-four million people are beneath America’s poverty line. While America has it way better than most other countries that have huge problems with hunger and poverty, America is definitely not perfect. The systems set in place in the 1970’s to alleviate hunger and poverty in America are now overtaxed and misused. Over 25% of federal disability claims were found as unnecessary and seemed to take advantage of only minor…
Poverty is a major problem facing our society, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in the United States, he did so when he signed “the omnibus ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY ACT OF 1964. The law created the Office of Economic Opportunity aimed at attacking the roots of American poverty” (ushistory.org, n.d.). The poverty simulation gave me a different perspective on the obstacles that faced lower income families in our society, as you will come to learn in the following paragraphs.…
What is the definition of a puzzling and mysterious system that attempts to provide for the indigent? It is called the welfare system, and it works in a very complicated manner (Weiss 5). The dictionary defines welfare as an “organized community of corporate efforts for social betterment of a class or group” (Weiss 7). The welfare system was developed as a program to help American citizens during the Great Depression. Originally the welfare system was simple, understandable, and provided uniform benefits to the nations poor—mostly women, children, and unemployed men. Many of the programs were based on the idea “that government can and should try to eradicate poverty with handouts of cash and other benefits” (Weiss 53). What made the early welfare programs simple was its ability to recognize “poor” as being the same from state to state and “relief was offered on a short-term basis, giving the neediest a boost and affording them the chance to get back on their feet” (Weiss 103). Through the years as the welfare programs expanded they became less need-based, more long-term, and less strictly monitored. The biggest argument against today 's welfare system is that it is more widely considered to be an entitlement program that contributes to an eroding social climate and with its lack of infrastructure promotes more problems such as cheating. A solution to this problem would be changing the requirements of the system and having more strict check-ins on recipients.…
A crucial controversy of America today is the growing gap between the wealthy and the poor, and the discrepancy is caused by capitalism run wild and only the helping hand of the government can only fix the problem. A question that turns the tables is what if the growing wealth disparity in America is actually caused by the government? For years, the idea that inequality is economically neutral has been the prevailing view not just among traditionalists but also between most Americans outside the further reaches of a political audience. There could be ideological or moral reasons to object to a growing gap between the wealthy and the rest but for economic reasons, there are no such. Furthermore, there are many ways inequality places itself in America. In our society, a good amount of the population is forced to stand up and work for our country while hardly being redeemed for their time and effort, thus the problem of income inequality. An estimate of these people live from paycheck to another, barely coping with life itself, not because they cannot manage their money well, but the reason is that…
Cited: Halsall, Paul. "Modern History Sourcebook." President Lyndon B. Johnson war on poverty. July 1998. 13 Oct. 2008 <http://http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1964johnson-warpoverty.html>.…