War on Poverty, Part 4

                The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the war on poverty as explained by Glenn Beck. I explained in Part 1 that the United States of America has been fighting the war on poverty since 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson announced his war on poverty initiative. The initiative was to use the full force of the U.S. Government to intervene and provide all manner of welfare for those in need. Since that time, the initiative has grown to “70 welfare programs to aid the poor and has spent $22 trillion.” Yet, we have more poor among us now than we did in 1965. In Part 2 I cover how “Great Depression in the United States of America changed the world” because Franklin D. Roosevelt kept instituting programs that made the depression worse. In Part 3 I explained how Lyndon B. Johnson’s war on poverty brought worse poverty.

         

                In Part 4 Beck explains that the war on poverty “is an unmitigated failure. The United States has gone from 26 million people on food stamps in 2007 to more than 47 million today. The cost of the program has gone from $33 billion to $77 billion. It has become so flawed that the Wall Street Journal reported millions are now legally entitled to collect food stamps as long as they have little or no monthly income. Thirty-five states have abolished asset tests for most food stamp recipients. These and similar paperwork reduction reforms advocated by the USDA are turning the food stamp program into a magnet for abuses and absurdities. Furthermore, according to the Journal, the Obama administration is far more enthusiastic about boosting food stamp enrollment than about preventing fraud. And there is fraud – a lot of it….”

                Americans can never hope to win this “war on poverty” until we have a president and Congress that want to win it. As long as they pass laws that make it easier to receive government handouts than it is to work, lazy Americans will continue to take the handout. FDR, LBJ, and Obama were all part of the Democrat Party. Democrats want to keep Americans on the government plantation in order to stay in power. They care only about power, not people.