A fine kettle of fish....

 History: 

  The Great Society was a set of domestic political programs in the United States launched by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. The main goal of the Great Society social reforms was the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. President Johnson first used the term "Great Society" during a speech at Ohio University, then unveiled the program in greater detail at an appearance at University of Michigan. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The program and its initiatives were subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s and years following. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy's New Frontier. Johnson's success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democratic landslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938.

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 But all is so nice and neat as the politicians would have you believe! 

Posted on 9/12/2005 8:51:41 PM by StoneGiant

LBJ's Great Society: 40 Years Later


1964 was a very busy year for Lyndon Johnson. 

First he rammed through Congress the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving him war powers in Vietnam. 

Next he signed into Law the now famous or infamous, depending on ones political slant, Civil Rights Act. He called this ambitious undertaking his "Guns and Butter" program. 

The first part of this equation to go sour was the war effort. Johnson treated the war like a political problem that he could solve by twisting the arms of Ho and Giap the same way he had got things done in the Senate for so many years. When this strategy failed to produce results he next tried to micromanage the war from the Oval Office as if it were a giant chess game with our troops as the pawns. He went so far as to select bombing targets and to turn missions on and off like a switch with a carrot-on-a-stick approach to entice Ho to the peace table.

 Meanwhile on the home front, with his Great Society and War on Poverty programs, he was socially engineering our country into a welfare state while funding a military adventure overseas. When asked by a reporter if it was fiscally prudent to fund a war effort and his social programs at the same time he replied,    "Heck yeah man, we're rich".  *

{* this is just the thought pattern of the Liberal way of things.  Spend big because we have plenty!}

When Cronkite abandoned him on National TV, as he strolled through the ancient city of Hue with his battle helmet and somber intonations that we were mired in a quagmire and that it was time to seek peace, (code word for surrender), with honor, Johnson folded up like a wet tissue, tucked his tail between his legs, and slinked off back to his ranch in Texas.

As bad as his failure in Vietnam proved to be, the results of his Great Society Programs were far more insidious, deadly and injurious to our Nation's psyche. 

The mammoth social welfare entitlement programs that streamed out of Washington did more damage to the fabric of our society than any number of Vietnams could have done.

 The irony is, that the segment of our society that it meant to help, was the one that was most grievously harmed.

**  Of all those who fell victim to the welfare mentality, none suffered more than the black communities.

In the fifties, although blacks were still struggling for equal opportunities and were on the low end of the economic ladder, the black family was for the most part strong and stable. Two parent families were the rule, not the exception. They attended church together, had strong moral values, and did not comprise a majority of the prison population. 

Compare that to the present state of the black community after 40 years of Liberal Socialism. Our prisons are disproportionately black, unwed mothers and single parent families are the rule, black youths without a strong male role model other than rap stars and basketball players, roam the streets and are drawn into a culture of drugs and crime. {with the government programs doing nothing to improve the situation}

The following statistics are provided by Star Parker's Coalition of Urban Renewal, (CURE).

**  as of  Sept 2005 *60 percent of black children grow up in fatherless homes. *800,000 black men are in jail or prison. *70 percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. *Over 300,000 black babies are aborted annually. *50 percent of new AIDS cases are in the black community. *Almost half of young black men in America's cities are neither working nor in school. What we have here is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.

What was the message of the social programs that came out of LBJ's Great Society? 

One of the most devastating to the family was that if an unwed woman became pregnant, moved out of the home of her parents, did not name or know who the father was, then Big Daddy in Washington would provide for all her essential needs. Ergo she no longer needed a husband or the support of her family. 

In fact, the more children she had out of wedlock, the more money she would receive from the government. This program was the death knell for many families, especially in the black community. Unfortunately many black men saw this as the best of all possible worlds. They could father as many children as they wanted, from multiple women, without ever having to accept the responsibility of fatherhood. 

Many women rejected marriage in favor of a boyfriend who could slip in the back door and not jeopardize her government check. In this dysfunctional culture why would education be important? 

Why seek an education only to have to compete for a good job in the marketplace when they could just hang around the neighborhood and have all of life's amenities? 

In fact studying and getting good grades, for many blacks, became a social stigma. They were called "Uncle Toms" and accused of trying to act "white". Many blacks who had the potential to succeed gave in to this pressure and opted for failure. 

After all they had the perfect excuse. Did not the NAACP and race hustlers like Jesse Jackson tell them that it was not their fault? That they were just innocent "victims" of white racism?

This is the legacy of LBJ's Great Society.....compassion as defined by Liberalism.

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The backlash against the Great Society has been as enduring as its successes.

Virtually every political battle that rages today has roots in the federal expansion and experimentation that began in the 1960s. It set terms of engagement for ideological warfare over how to grapple with income inequality, whether to encourage a common curriculum in schools, affirmative action, immigration, even whether to strip federal funding for National Public Radio. (Yes, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is another Great Society program.)

SEE THE SPEECH: Video excerpts from Johnson's 'Great Society' speech to the University of Michigan’s Class of 1964.

Many Great Society programs are now so popular it is hard to imagine the country as we know it without them. Others — including some of its more grandiose urban renewal efforts — are generally regarded as failures. Poverty remains with us, with the two parties in deep disagreement over whether government has alleviated it or made it harder to escape.

When Johnson spoke that day in Michigan, before a crowd of 70,000, the country was enjoying unprecedented affluence.

So he beckoned Americans to consider what they could do with their riches, to imagine ahead — to today — a time that many who heard his words have lived to see.

“The challenge of the next half-century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life and to advance the quality of our American civilization,” the president said. “Your imagination and your initiative and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time, we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the Great Society.”

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© Jack Kurtz/ZUMA Press/Corbis

Fixing the problem isn't rocket science, and it would reassure millions of future recipients that their retirement planning is secure. So why don't we just bite the bullet, fix Social Security now and get it over with?

Over the last five years, the Institute for Women's Policy Research has been looking at issues surrounding Social Security and talking to politicians and policy experts about fixing its problems. Recently, it released a report on the findings. Heidi Hartmann, president of the institute, says most people in positions to do something about Social Security agree on what needs to be fixed, but disagree on how to pay for it.

"Republicans say we should pay for it by reducing the benefits for those with higher incomes. Democrats have introduced several bills that say we're going to pay for Social Security by raising the tax on people with higher incomes," Hartmann says.

Institute researchers say policy makers and politicians are factoring the following issues into any potential plan to fix Social Security.

Mixing Social Security with the debt problem. Democrats told interviewers that the driving issue now is the national debt. Introducing Social Security reform into this discussion would muddle both issues. Delaying the discussion five years might distance it from the debt crisis, plus more boomers will be collecting at that point, making the need for fixing the shortfall more immediate.

Higher benefits for lower earners. Many people think that there ought to be longevity payments -- a bump in benefits for those who live beyond a certain age. Others would revise the cost of living formula to reflect the cost of health care and other things on which older people spend the most. Still others suggest eliminating the part of the calculation that gives credit for 35 years of work, basing benefits on fewer years of work. That change would mostly aid women who take time out from the workforce to care for families. "This is something the women's movement used to talk about a lot in the '70s and '80s," Hartmann says. "But since then there have been fewer homemakers and we haven't talked about this as much."

Improved benefits for single people. A bipartisan majority of those interviewed supported the idea of adding caregiving "work" credits to the Social Security records of men or women taking care of children or elders instead of holding full-time jobs. Other people would eliminate spousal benefits altogether and compensate lower earners with a higher minimum benefit. A few would modify spousal benefits by adding an earnings-sharing plan that combines and averages total earnings for dual-earner couples across the duration of their marriage. This would potentially make it easier to share retirement benefits after divorce.

Restore or add benefits for students. Before 1983, college students were eligible for Social Security benefits if they had a working parent who died or became disabled. Some support restoring that benefit because it would be good for the economy overall.

Put more money into the system. Raising the earnings cap for the payroll tax was viewed by several experts as the simplest way to fix the funding gap. Other ideas included expanding the payroll tax to cover non-wage benefits like tax-free spending accounts and generous health insurance plans sometimes received by higher earners. Many resisted the idea of tapping other types of taxation such as estate taxes because it would make the system seem less self-sufficient.

Cutting benefits. Ways to cut benefits include adopting the chained consumer price index, which reduces cost-of-living increases; indexing the retirement age to future longevity increases, and requiring later retirement. Both Democratic and Republican respondents doubted the wisdom of further increasing the retirement age past 67 because there are "simply not enough employers willing and able to provide jobs to older workers."

In the meantime, Social Security is very complicated, and it is difficult for workers to know what they are entitled to. Social Security is closing offices and pushing recipients to go online to find information just at a time when increasing numbers of people are entering the system. "Social Security does very little to make it clear how your benefits would increase over time based on your choices," Hartmann says. "This was identified as a problem by a substantial minority of those interviewed. They thought people should be helped to understand the system better."

Amen to that.

Related posts:

1. Social Security: Cap or no cap?
2. More on fixing Social Security
3. Don’t settle for Social Security
4. Uncapping Social Security taxes
5. 6 ways to improve Social Security

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