Quais foram os resultados depois de colossal gasto público da chamada Guerra à Pobreza nos Estados Unidos? Ontem, observou-se o 50º aniversário desta política que foi estabelecida pelo presidente Lyndon Johnson (foto acima). O assunto é extremamenmte importante hoje em dia em que muitos países seguiram o mesmo caminho, mas continua-se gastando mais e mais, um sinal de que milhões ainda continuam na pobreza e outros milhões se apegam às ajudas financeiras públicas para viverem.
No Brasil temos inúmeros ajudas sociais, o mais conhecido programa para combater a pobreza é o Bolsa Família.
Por que o Estado parece não conseguir a resolver a pobreza? Por que as doações em dinheiro não reduzem a pobreza?
O site do
National Review Online convidou vários especialista para discutirem estes resultados da Guerra à Pobreza americana depois de 50 anos.
Em resumo, eles dizem que a Guerra à Pobreza foi uma "falha gigantesca", não conseguiu tornar as pessoas mais auto-suficientese piorou a moral das pessoas. A ajuda financeira pública tornou-se narcótico.
Que coisa não é? Como é que dinheiro de graça tornaria as pessoas mais trabalhadoras?
O pior é que depois de 50 anos, os esquerdistas americanos e de todo mundo ainda apoiam esta polítca com todas as suas armas.
Aqui vão as opiniões de alguns analistas mostrados no
National Review Online. Marco
em vermelho os pontos relevantes. São muitos analistas eu só mostro aqui os primeiros da lista, vejam todos no site da
National Review Online.
The War on Povery at 50.
Experts reflect on what went right and what went wrong with LBJ’s initiative.
Today marks the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s
announcing his “war on poverty.” What went wrong? What, if anything,
went right? What would a real war on poverty look like in 2014? Some
experts reflect.
Josh Archambault
Our country is better when we have a meaningful safety net. The most
prosperous nation in the history of the world should provide basic
protections for the most vulnerable.
But that safety net was intended to
be effective, affordable, focused, and committed to moving people
toward self-sufficiency. As we mark the 50th anniversary of President
Johnson’s War on Poverty, we see how far off the mark we are from his
attempt to move beyond the “Kennedy legacy.”
No, and the dramatic expansions of social-welfare programs such as
Medicaid and food stamps these last few years swim in a deep pool of
uncertainty. Taxpayer costs are growing. And the people in honest need
of help must compete for scarce services with an expanded population our
welfare programs were never meant to cover. The War on Poverty is
breaking the other way.
Seventy percent of low-income kids grow up
to become low-income adults. We need policies that break the
generational cycle that traps people in poverty. We need the political
will and the moral imperative to shut down failing programs and redirect
resources toward anti-poverty measures proven to work.
Reforms
should transfer more management of these programs away from Washington
and to the states. Past welfare reforms worked this way, with local
officials able to decide how to get the right help to the right people
and support them on their road to financial independence.
Change is imperative. Without it, we will continue to fight daily battles against poverty, but we will lose the war.
— Josh Archambault is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability.
John H. Armstrong
The War on Poverty was the most ambitious attempt in American history to
eradicate poverty through government planning. I believe it was a
virtuous plan, driven by idealism and deeply humanitarian concerns.
But
it was a massive government failure. The problem was that government’s
good intentions were put into a hugely bureaucratic program with little
awareness of the consequences of the moral choices the program created.
Michael Novak rightly writes in
Writing from Left to Right,
“There is a right way and a wrong way for government to get involved in
humanitarian attempts to better the human condition.” Franklin Delano
Roosevelt recognized this when he warned Congress in 1935: “The lessons
of history, confirmed by evidence immediately before me, show
conclusively that c
ontinued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual
and moral disintegration to the national fiber. To dole out
relief . . . is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the
human spirit.”
It was this “narcotic” that was the real culprit in
the War on Poverty. LBJ’s program clearly improved the condition of the
elderly. It also brought attention to the great needs of many poor
African Americans. But it lost sight of the moral consequences of good
intentions gone awry by removing personal responsibility. In the end it
eroded the national character of millions of Americans who were subtly
taught that it really is
more blessed to receive than to give. The fabric of this program, as FDR warned, was flawed. In time it was a coalition of Democrats
and Republicans, along with President Clinton, who legislatively addressed the flaw!
— John H. Armstrong is president of the ACT3 Network in Carol Stream, Ill.
Arthur Brooks
On January 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty. How goes the battle?
The past half-century has had its ups and downs, but the past half-decade offers reason for pessimism. Since January 2009,
Food-stamp recipiency has increased fully 50 percent. Forty-eight
million Americans — one-sixth of our country — require food assistance
to get by;
Labor-force participation has fallen to 63 percent. The smallest
fraction of Americans since the 1970s are employed or seeking work;
Uptake of disability insurance — permanent unemployment for millions —
has surged by 20 percent. On average, a million new people have begun
collecting disability every year;
Unemployment among African-American teens has climbed to 38 percent.
The
administration is quick to blame the Great Recession (or George W.
Bush), and everyone knows the fierce headwind that the economic crisis
created. But ultimately, there will be no excuses: History will assign
responsibility to the president of the United States. Barring a miracle,
the Obama years will be remembered as the time America gave up ground
in our War on Poverty.
How could the administration right the
ship? It could put genuinely pro-poor policies ahead of the perpetual
political campaign. The president’s denunciation of income inequality
and call to increase the minimum wage may be handy political cudgels,
but neither is a policy that actually helps those most in need.
Equalizing incomes per se
does nothing to expand opportunity. And as my colleague Mike Strain points out, high minimum wages
destroy job opportunities for marginalized Americans.
A
better path forward would be to lower the minimum wage while expanding
the Earned Income Tax Credit. Add in disruptive education reform and a
radically pro-jobs agenda including everything from energy production to
corporate-tax reform, and the Obama administration could execute a
political turnaround for the ages.
Will President Obama be
remembered for a legendary comeback or a historic failure to help
vulnerable people? Listen carefully to his State of the Union address.
If the president focuses on tangential issues such as income inequality
and insists on counterproductive minimum-wage hikes, we will have our
answer.
— Arthur Brooks is president of the American Enterprise Institute and the Beth and Ravenel Curry Scholar in Free Enterprise.
Stanley Carlson-Thies
In
developed economies, even the most systematic private charity is
insufficient, so government must act. But persistent poverty is more
than a lack of money, and its ending takes more than money and services.
Alas, LBJ’s War on Poverty, like the first big welfare expansion in the
1930s, did not rightly address the non-economic dimensions. Civil
society — especially families, neighborhoods, and religious charities —
was bypassed. Worse, some government programs harmed rather than
rejuvenated essential institutions — think of AFDC’s damage to married
families, urban renewal’s uprooting of functioning neighborhoods, and
secularizing government-funding requirements that either excluded
religious charities from partnerships or undermined their full vigor.
Doing
nothing was no solution to real problems, but the War on Poverty, while
bringing some relief, also helped to undermine structures, processes,
and attitudes essential for long-term success in overcoming deeply
rooted poverty.
Have
we learned from experience? Are we doing better? Not much better. The
national policy debate seems to have regressed to “more government vs.
less government,” leaving civil society marginalized. We have little
idea of how to help neighborhoods flourish. The consensus that started
to form in the 1990s about the necessity of strong marriages and
families — moms and dads — has been disrupted by other relationship
passions.
One bright spot: The faith-based initiative of the
Clinton, Bush, and now Obama years has highlighted the vital role of
religious organizations, and its reforms, such as Charitable Choice,
have lifted the secularizing pressures from partnerships.
But five
decades after LBJ, we still have a long way to go to understand the
non-economic aspects of persistent poverty. And tragically, contemporary
government’s insistence on enforcing progressive values is undermining
the very civil-society institutions that need to flourish.
— Stanley Carlson-Thies is president of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance.
Grant E. Collins II
To fight injustice, or in this case for the poor, is always noble, and
there are varying opinions on how effective some of the approaches are
in the end. What we can appreciate about the War on Poverty was a
recognition that something needed to be done and that our government
leaders were engaged and met the spirit of the challenge with the
methods of that era. Today the issue isn’t poverty as much as it is a
wider segment of society not flourishing.
Today, many more, even with
jobs, degrees, cars, and garages, also feel this sense of injustice.
Poverty is as much a state of mind as it is the lack of material goods
and resources, and as such, many of us are poor even with a paycheck.
Our challenge today includes addressing the issues of poverty while also
addressing the reasons, causes, and policies that keep so many more
from flourishing.
— Grant E. Collins II
served as deputy director of the Office of Family Assistance at the
Department of Health and Human Services.
Nicholas Eberstadt
According to official U.S.-government figures, there has been no
progress whatever in reducing the prevalence of absolute poverty in our
country for nearly half a century. For the year 2012, the Census Bureau
counted 15 percent of the total U.S. population as having incomes below
the fixed and unchanging official federal poverty line, which is
adjusted only for inflation. Back in 1966, America’s “poverty rate” by
that same measure was reported to be 14.7 percent.
(The poverty
index used for such readings was devised during 1964 at the very start
of the War on Poverty, was publicly unveiled in early 1965, and ever
after has been the main government calculation deployed to track our
country’s performance against poverty.)
If these statistics
accurately reflected conditions in real-life America, they would be
cause for alarm, outrage, and maybe even something much like political
revolution, considering the enormous increases in per capita income and
per capita wealth the nation enjoyed over that same period. But these
figures are nonsense numbers, generated by an obviously cracked
algorithm. Which is why no one in Washington (or in the various reaches
of the academy) really takes them seriously.
Here is the
fundamental and irremediable flaw with America’s official poverty rate:
It measures the wrong thing. It assumes that
annual income is the yardstick for determining living standards. In truth people’s living standards are always determined by
annual consumption: expenditures, asset draw-downs, gifts, non-cash transfers, and all the rest.
Income
levels are a miserable predictor of consumption levels for the bottom
ranks in America today. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the
annual spending power of the poorest quintile in the U.S. income
distribution is well over twice their annual pre-tax reported income —
and that mismatch has been gradually widening since at least the early
1970s. (And we don’t even bother to estimate
total consumption for the poorest quintile, including things such as Medicaid and other public non-cash transfers.)
If
we had a decent set of official poverty metrics and social indicators,
we would know that the sort of material deprivation that afflicted a
troubling portion of our society back in the early 1960s has been
essentially eradicated — and was in fact eradicated some time ago — but
that disturbing pathologies are spreading new forms of misery in our
land nonetheless.
Our government officially declared war on
poverty in January 1964. That long war has been the occasion of many
tragedies. One of them is that we have used a broken compass to guide
our long and expensive campaign to redress material want, and we have
begrudged the relatively trivial outlays that could have allowed us to
get a better statistical sense of our bearings.
— Nicholas Eberstadt holds the Henry Wendt Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.
Chester E. Finn Jr.
Forgive an aging education-reformer’s reminiscences, but LBJ’s
declaration of war on poverty shaped the next 50 years of my life.
I
was a Harvard undergraduate at the time, dabbling in social reform and
social action via a slew of student-volunteer programs in schools,
settlement houses, public-housing projects, and hospitals; not studying
very hard; and expected by my family to join my father and grandfather
in their Dayton law firm.
Then two things happened.
Professor
Edward Banfield brought into his course on “urban problems” a young
assistant secretary of labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose
enthusiastic explanation of the nascent “war” fired my imagination — and
introduced the man who would later become my doctoral adviser, chief
mentor, and the source of three riveting jobs.
And Lyndon Johnson’s oft-stated conviction that
education
was the surest route to vanquishing poverty engaged both the do-gooder
inclinations of a 20-year-old and reflected what I was seeing among
children in poor neighborhoods of Cambridge and Boston and the miserable
schools they attended.
Between LBJ and Pat Moynihan, I now had a
sense of mission. So I applied to the ed school instead of the law
school. And on it went from there.
In retrospect, I have no career
regrets, but I’ve also learned a ton about the limits of formal
education (which makes up a relatively small part of a person’s life);
about the difficulty of changing our major institutions; about the
hazards of inflating what Uncle Sam, in particular, can do to bring
about such changes; about the predilection of our politics to place
adult interests ahead of children’s; and about poverty’s dogged capacity
to defeat just about every intervention that a free society can devise.
In short, I became both an education reformer and a neoconservative (back in the days when that honorable term had more to do with domestic than foreign policy).
Older. Wiser (or at least chastened). Less confident — but still determined.
— Chester E. Finn Jr. is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
David FrenchAfter
50 years and trillions of dollars, the War on Poverty has brought new
meaning to an old phrase: “The road to hell is paved with good
intentions.”
Would any of the War on Poverty’s architects drive through our nation’s worst ghettos or enclaves of rural poverty and think,
Mission accomplished?
Or would they be appalled at the now-entrenched fatherlessness, the
multi-generational poverty, and the addiction to “the draw” — the
monthly government check that sustains entire local economies?
It’s
time for a new anti-poverty program, one that begins with a seemingly
modest step — a step, however, with transformational potential. It’s
time to tell the government, “Do no harm.”
In other words, stop hurting the poor.
How does Big Government hurt the poor? Let me count the ways:
By trapping students in failing public schools, with meaningful reform
held hostage to teachers’ unions and the entrenched bureaucracy;
By imposing lengthy jail sentences for even nonviolent, petty crimes,
thus saddling young men with criminal records that render them largely
unemployable while also sending them to prisons that double as veritable
graduate schools in crime;
By regulating small businesses so thoroughly that becoming an entrepreneur is increasingly a rich man’s game; and
By creating legal regimes surrounding marriage, family, and sexuality
that de-privilege marriage, create the illusion of single-parent
autonomy, fund ghastly abortion mills, and have all together helped spur
increases in fatherlessness that do more than anything else to
perpetuate poverty.
This list could go on and on. At present, we
have the worst of both worlds. Big-government anti-poverty programs
foster dependence and drive our nation deeper into debt at the same time
that other big-government programs actively harm our nation’s most
vulnerable citizens.
The message is simple, but the execution is
difficult. Government, stop hurting the poor. Citizens, extend your
hands to your brothers and sisters in need. That’s a “war on poverty”
I’d sign up to fight.
— David French is senior counsel at the American Center for Law and Justice.
John Goodman
We have spent $15 trillion “fighting” poverty since 1965, and we are
currently spending $1 trillion a year — an amount equal to about $22,000
per poor person or $88,000 for a family of four. Yet our poverty rate
today (nearly 16 percent) is higher than it was in 1965 (14 percent)! If
there has been a war on poverty, poverty won.
If not to reduce
poverty, what difference does all this spending make? These programs are
destroying the culture of the recipient communities. They are replacing
a culture of self-reliance and self-help with a culture of dependency.
Amazingly, a record 91.5 million people of working age — almost
one-third of the entire population — are not working and not even
looking for a job. Is it not obvious that we are subsidizing and
enabling a way of life? To put it bluntly, we are paying young women to
have children out of wedlock. We are paying them to be unemployed. And
we are paying them to remain poor.
What is more, the welfare state
appeals especially to those in near-poverty, promising a wide range of
non-cash benefits in exchange for only one thing: a low income.
Putting
more money into the system to combat poverty would probably only
increase the number of poor, not decrease it. If we want to win the War
on Poverty, we need to move away from government-provided aid and toward
the private sector. We could funnel aid through private organizations
by allowing taxpayers to allocate a portion of taxes to qualified
charities that provide assistance to the indigent, rather than sending
those tax dollars to government programs, such as the food-stamp system.
By moving away from the public sector, which only reinforces the
behaviors that make the need for aid permanent, we could wage an actual
war on poverty.
— John C. Goodman is president of the National Center for Policy Analysis.
Samuel Gregg
In many ways, the War on Poverty, which was such a key part of President
Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society program, represents the apogee of
progressivism in America in the 20th century. Though the groundwork for
this and other programs had been laid decades earlier by figures such as
Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, even the latter’s New
Deal paled by comparison, in terms of resources devoted, with Johnson’s
effort to abolish poverty from the United States.
As we know now,
Johnson’s offensive against poverty did not have the impact envisaged
by its progenitors. By the early 1970s, the failure was stark. Even
today, this failure remains Exhibit A for the ineffectiveness of
government intervention when confronting many economic problems. Not
that this has led to any major rethinking on the part of most modern
leftists when it comes to their conviction that you really cannot have
enough state intervention or spend enough taxpayers’ money when you’re
addressing an issue like poverty. Their approach remains unchanged: Pass
more laws and throw more dollars at the problem.
If there is any
good news coming from the War on Poverty’s failure, it’s that we now
understand more about what causes poverty — and that sometimes the
causes have little to with economics per se. More of us recognize that
family breakdown, addictive behavior, and mental illness often
contribute to people’s descent into substandard living conditions.
I
fear, however, that until America exorcizes the demon of false hope —
thinking that there’s nothing that can’t be fixed by a few enlightened
bureaucrats armed with mountains of cash — we will continue to repeat
the progressivist error over and over again. Which is, of course, the
definition of insanity.
— Samuel Gregg is research director at the Acton Institute and author, most recently, of Becoming Europe and Tea Party Catholic.
Kay Hymowitz
Conservatives often complain, with some justification, that President
Johnson’s War on Poverty did more to increase the taxpayer-supported
adult work force than to improve the lives of poor children. But we
shouldn’t neglect one of the major reasons that rates of child poverty
have not budged in 50 years.
The poverty war coincided with a massive
cultural shift in attitudes toward fathers. Starting in the mid 1960s,
Americans grew increasingly blasé about the universal connection between
marriage and childbearing. Daniel Patrick Moynihan was observing the
first signs of this transformation when he noted in his legendary 1965
report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” that black
births outside marriage were on the rise even as marriage-friendly black
male employment was also improving.
To be entirely fair, Johnson
was deeply affected by Moynihan’s findings and gave a graduation talk at
Howard University, which he later called “the greatest civil-rights
speech” of his presidency, warning of a crisis in the making. Still, the
protest against Moynihan’s paper by black leaders and feminists was so
intensely bitter that Johnson dropped the issue and for decades no one
in official Washington dared to mention the growing connection between
poverty and family breakdown. Today almost three-quarters of poor
families are headed by a single mother.
Much as we might condemn
government fecklessness, the prevalence of poor single mothers raises
challenges for thoughtful conservatives who wish to wage war on today’s
poverty. Marriage-promotion programs run by the government have had
disappointing results. Though the 1996 welfare-reform law sent a record
number of single mothers into the work force and briefly reduced child
poverty, its impact on the poor has been limited. The truth is that a
low-skilled single mother will have to depend on hefty government
assistance even if she is working. Over the past decades — partly in
response to changes in the low-wage labor market and partly in response
to the inexorable decline of two-parent families — federal, state, and
local governments have created an expensive infrastructure that enables
and sustains the fragile single-mother household. The support system
comprises food stamps, health insurance, subsidized housing, child care,
afterschool programs, and in many cases, Social Security disability
benefits and special education.
It’s by no means clear how to
entirely dismantle this infrastructure, even if it were politically
possible — or morally wise — to do so.
— Kay Hymowitz is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
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Para complementar, eu lembro que Judas Iscariotes também quis ajudar aos pobres e exigiu isto de Cristo (João 12:1-8). O que Cristo respondeu?
