I remember when Lyndon Baines Johnson declared his “War on poverty” back in 1965. Here it is, 48 years and $15 trillion taxpayer dollars later and poverty is still with us. It looks like poverty won.
It doesn't help that our present president has done nothing about it except make it worse, with 16 times the number of people on food stamps today than in 1969, a lower percentage of people in the work force today than back in 1960, along with an actual unemployment rate of close to 15%. (The 'official' U3 unemployment rate only includes the number of people receiving unemployment benefits. Once you stop receiving them you are no longer counted in the U3 stats, but in the U6 totals which are rarely mentioned by the MSM or the Obama administration.)
Since 2007 Congress has worked tirelessly to make sure poverty gets worse by proposing measures that place a greater burden on businesses and individual taxpayers. Since January 2009 President Obama has doubled and tripled down on those efforts and has succeeded in choking off economic recovery, though he'll keep telling you the economy has recovered. (It's like that old aphorism - Don't piss on my back and tell me it's raining.)
It doesn't help matters that there are also companies out there making a ton of money on poverty, administrating EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) cards, kind of like an ATM card used for benefits. The more people receiving benefits, the more money they make. There's something perverse about that situation.
What makes all of this worse is that before LBJ made the War on Poverty the mainstay of his administration, poverty was already on a decline. Then when he instituted his Great Society platform, of which the War on Poverty was a part, poverty rates reversed and poverty started to grow again.
Talk about the Law of Unintended Consequences raising its ugly head!
