Tuesday, March 1, 2016

War on Poverty

Page, Marianne. "Despite the Statistics, We Haven't Lost the War on Poverty." Time. Time, 8
Jan. 2015.Web. 02 Mar. 2016.

In this article, the author Marianne Page describes how the war on poverty, declared by Lyndon B. Johnson, has seemed to have done nothing to help poverty, and that is has “accomplished nothing.” LBJ said that the United States had the power to eliminate poverty from an entire continental nation.” She says that there have been improvements but not in they way we measure poverty. Many programs that were established such as Medicaid provide non-cash help, which have grown in importance but again do not count in official statistics and do no count for the overall improvement of poverty rates. Official poverty measure is based on pre-tax, cash income. She explains that the growing inequality among worker, the structure of U.S. families, and the elderly are all to account for the unchanged poverty rates. She says that the next phase in this war is to should be to “Renew efforts that recognize demographic and labor market realities and the enormous challenges they place on anti-poverty efforts, and measures of that progress.”


Page believes that the war has not clearly been won, but it has not been lost. There is still more to do and it will eventually go in the right direction. In this article, many techniques were used such as statistics and authority. This article displayed authority because the author is a professor of Economics and Deputy Director of the Center of Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis. And to top it off she has a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. If that doesn’t make her credible and scream authority, then I don’t know what will. Also in the article, Page used many statistics and facts that help this article believable.

4 comments:

  1. Rector, Robert. "The War on Poverty: 50 Years of Failure." Washington Times. The Washington Times, 19 Sept. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2016.


    In this article, the author Roberts says how much of a fail the " War on Poverty" was. He notes how since the War on Poverty began in 1964 to now, over 22 Trillion $$$ has been spent trying to win the war.

    The funny thing is in 2013, about 14.5% of Americans were considered poor, which remarkably is nearly the same rate which it was in 1967. Roberts also states how self-reliant in the American government has increased significantly, and how the welfare system in itself DISCOURAGES work and penalizes marriage. When the War on Poverty began, 7% of American children were born outside marriage; but today it is 41%. The collapse of marriage and encouraging having baby-daddy's is a huge reason why the War on Poverty is horrible. By making people more reliant on the government, it self-perpetuates for even more reliance on the government. LBJ (creator of the War on Poverty) increased the poor’s reliance on the government, instead of trying to make the rich independent.

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  3. Matthews, Dylan. "Everything You Need to Know about the War on Poverty." Washington Post.The Washington Post, 8 Jan. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2016.

    Dylan Mathews wrote, “Everything you need to know about the war on poverty”, an editorial in The Washington Post. He talks about essentially what the title says, events that occurred and effects that have taken place because of the war on poverty. It goes back to President Lyndon Johnson who gave his State of the Union Address stating “unconditional war” on poverty, promoting acts and Amendments. There are four main points that Mathews states that Johnsons 4 Legislative steps to defeat war on poverty and stop it from happening. These 4 steps include Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security Amendment and a few other acts that were enacted.

    When reading the editorial one can tell that it was well researched. And it is useful because it shares and explains something that happened back in the 1960’s. It is noticed when Mathews divides his writing into seven portions and begins with, “What is the War on Poverty”. It starts in a broad context and narrows it down explaining in a more detailed fashion, making it understandable, and useful for various different research.

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  4. To start off with my research I wanted to define exactly what I was going to be researching. While using the google search engine I simply googled the words that create the phrase. The definition of war through the use of dictionary.com means the struggle to achieve a goal. On defined is a supportive and backing device deployed in order to support the word before itself. Poverty is the state or condition of having little to no money, goods, or means of support and deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients. I then googled the Phrase “War on Poverty” and checked out the suggested searches that included: who are the poor in America and war on poverty failed. Continuing with my search I looked at an article from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/50-years-later-war-on-poverty-is-a-mixed-bag.html?_r=0 which was titled 50 Years Later, War on Poverty Is a Mixed Bag by Annie Lowery. From this article I gathered information about the declaration of war on poverty directly stated by Lyndon B. Johnson during his state of the union address, which in 2012 had been 50 ago. The article proclaimed how this declaration had greatly failed. Now I am aware that I was looking at a biased source; therefore conducted more research. This brought me to my next source http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/09/the-war-on-poverty-after-50-years which had more statistics and information than any other source I had viewed. Stats such as, “Taxpayers spent over $22 Trillion on anti-poverty or welfare programs which is 3 times the cost of all military wars in all of US history. It also showed through graphs the rate at which poverty is growing which shockingly it wasn’t as drastic as I expected. However, with the amount of money being spent on poverty the rate should be doing the opposite and becoming lower each year, but that is not the case. Overall the war on poverty is believed to have failed, that is if it has even ever ended.

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