War on poverty
The War on Poverty was the name given to a President Lyndon Johnson initiative introduced during his 1964 State of the Union speech. Generally speaking, it was designed to ease the suffering of those in poverty and hopefully shift them off welfare. It was one part of his Great Society.
Speech Relevance[edit]
The "War on Poverty" is only mentioned once in 'A Time For Choosing' but the overall theme of welfare is throughout both speeches.
Welfare spending is 10 times greater than in the dark depths of the Depression. We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now do a little arithmetic, and you will find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those 9 million poor families, we would be able to give each family $4,600 a year, and this added to their present income should eliminate poverty! Direct aid to the poor, however, is running only about $600 per family. It would seem that someplace there must be some overhead.
So now we declare "war on poverty," or "you, too, can be a Bobby Baker!" Now, do they honestly expect us to believe that if we add $1 billion to the $45 million we are spending...one more program to the 30-odd we have — and remember, this new program doesn't replace any, it just duplicates existing programs — do they believe that poverty is suddenly going to disappear by magic?
Reagan's contention was that starting these social entitlement programs would begin to take the United States down the road to socialism and eventually communism. Welfare would not be eliminated and the programs would slowly consume more and more funding until the country could no longer sustain itself.
