One of the most important social changes unfolding in the United States over the past half century has been the decline of the institution of marriage – this decline has been especially steep among b****s. In 1960, roughly 74% of w****s were married, and the rate dropped to 56% in 2008.
That is a big drop, but not compared to the plummeting marriage rate for b****s. In 1960, 61% of b****s were married, but by 2008 it was only 32%. B****s also get divorced more often and remarry less frequently than w****s.
Marriage has historically provided many benefits. Individuals who are married enjoy better physical and mental health, have more social ties and higher household incomes, accumulate more wealth, and raise children who do better in terms of health and social outcomes than the children of unmarried parents.
In his 1965 research report "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action," Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a social scientist who later became a U.S. Senator, argued that high poverty rates among b****s were in significant part due to deformed cultural values. After difficult historical experiences, he argued, black women preferred matriarchal families and their values contributed to disproportionately high rates of childbearing outside of marriage. In turn, black families without fathers led to larger social ills such as crime, joblessness, poverty, and over-dependence on welfare. “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family,” Moynihan concluded.
This ignores the role Lyndon Johnson played as President:
LBJ's "War on Poverty" Hurt B***k A******ns - Project 21
https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2014/01/08/lbjs-war-on-poverty-hurt-black-americans/Project 21's Jerome Hudson said: "Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty produced a reality that is horrifyingly different than the one he probably hoped for. Instead of providing a mere safety net for families in need, it effectively replaced the virtues of work and self-reliance with an avalanche of welfare programs nurturing the poor."
“We waged a war on poverty and poverty won.”
President Ronald Reagan, 1988 State of the Union Address
The dust has settled and the evidence is in: The 1960s Great Society and War on Poverty programs of President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) have been a colossal and giant failure. One might make the argument that social welfare programs are the moral path for a modern government. They cannot, however, make the argument that these are in any way effective at alleviating poverty.
In fact, there is evidence that such aggressive programs might make generational poverty worse. While the notion of a “culture of dependence” is a bit of a cliché in conservative circles, there is evidence that this is indeed the case – that, consciously or not, the welfare state creates a culture where people receive benefits rather than seeking gainful employment or business ownership.
This is not a moral or even a value judgment against the people engaged in such a culture. Again, the claim is not that people “choose to be on welfare,” but simply that social welfare programs incentivize poverty, which has an impact on communities that has nothing to do with individual intent.
We are now over 50 years into the development of the Great Society and the War on Poverty. It is time to take stock in these programs from an objective and evidence-based perspective. When one does that, it is not only clear that the programs have been a failure, but also that they have disproportionately impacted the black community in the United States.
The current state of dysfunction in the black community (astronomically high crime rates, very low rates of home ownership and single motherhood as the norm) are not the natural state of the black community in the United States, but closely tied to the role that social welfare programs play.Or as Dr. Thomas Sowell stated:
“If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where b****s stood a hundred years after the end of s***ery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state. In other words, we could compare hard evidence on “the legacy of s***ery” with hard evidence on the legacy of liberals.”
Black America has been a victim of LBJ’s Great Society and War on Poverty.
Seeing an opportunity to recreate the same New Deal magic that had propelled President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the White House in four successive e******ns 30 years earlier, Johnson pushed his War on Poverty.
It’s worth noting that the FDR New Deal has some success to boast in terms of lifting some extremely poor communities, particularly those in the rural South, out of grinding forms of poverty. This was through, for example, mass electrification and other similar campaigns, which radically redefined the experience of the poor in the United States. One can argue about the ethics of redistributive wealth programs, but one cannot argue about whether or not, for example, the electrification of the Tennessee Valley elevated people out of crushing and abject poverty – it did.
The Food Stamp Act of 1964: At this time, food stamps were open-ended and could, in theory, be a means of feeding a family for life.
The Economic Opportunity Act, in particular, was insidious in that it gave broad leeway to create programs without Congressional approval or oversight. An example of this is the Head Start program, which is shown to have only extremely limited and short-term effects on the ability of children to succeed in public schools.
Whereas the New Deal has demonstrably impacted communities with crushing and severe forms of poverty, the Great Society has demonstrably not only not “worked” by any available metric, it has also created a negative impact, most severely felt in the black community in the United States."
Wonttakeitanymore wrote:
I have a friend that comes from a black family that has had no marriages in their family for generations, they don’t believe in it! The aunt became a Christian and got married 5 years ago! Why?