The Destruction of America, johnson came into power in 1964 on the biggest
landslide in U.S. history, and then he brought about the largest expansion of
government in our history, surpassing even the expansion of government
initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s. Instead of lifting
Americans out of poverty, LBJ's 40 federal programs trapped millions of
Americans in poverty and permanent dependency.
Today's legislative battles--raising the minimum
wage, expanding and perpetuating government-financed health care for seniors
and the poor, extending long-term unemployment benefits, and big appropriations
to the education establishment are all about extending government spending for
Johnson's programs.
LBJ announced his War on Poverty in his 1964 State
of the Union address. He then expanded his goal to the Great Society, using the
"great" concept 16 times in his commencement speech in May before a
crowd of 70,000 at the University of Michigan.
With his insufferable ego, LBJ declared that he
planned "to move us not only toward the rich society and the powerful
society, but upward to the Great Society." Johnson summoned his young
speechwriter, Richard N. Goodwin, and told him to use the unfinished John F.
Kennedy program "as a springboard to take on Congress" and turn it
into an "aggressive Johnson program."
With a super majority of Democrats in Congress and
using his famous bullying tactics known as the "Johnson treatment,"
LBJ pushed Congress to pass 200 expensive new laws. Key pieces of Great Society
legislation were enacted by 1968 and Joseph A. Califano Jr. boasted that
"This country is more the country of Lyndon Johnson than any other
president."
These new spending bills included the start of
Medicare, Medicaid, direct federal aid to public schools, bilingual education,
Head Start, food stamps, vocational education through the Job Corps, urban
renewal programs, new spending for the arts and humanities, a giant expansion
of immigration, public housing, aid to college students, and handouts to
non-commercial TV and radio including PBS and NPR.
LBJ's pie-in-the sky promises, followed by
expansion of the taxpayer spending he rammed through Congress, gave us a dozen
years of what we, with hindsight, can see was a massive change in the role of
government.
Charles Murray's influential book "Losing
Ground" showed that the Great Society's changes actually made the problems
of the poor and the disadvantaged worse, not better. The policy of channeling
all welfare money to mothers made the father family-provider unnecessary, and
thereby broke up millions of intact families.
Unfortunately, most of LBJ's spending programs
survive to this day and continue to rise. The federal government is now five
times as big in real dollars as it was in 1964.
LBJ's Great Society spending was not merely an
Obama-style strategy to redistribute the wealth. Johnson's purpose was to shift
power from the states to the federal government, from Congress to
executive-branch regulators, and from big-city political machines to
Alinsky-style community groups so they could organize and make demands to
increase federal control.
For example, federal meddling in public school
education, encrusted with lavish federal spending, started with LBJ's Great
Society. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Higher Education
Act were both born in 1965.
Prior to that, the federal powers-that-be never
presumed to tell schools what to teach or to bribe them with federal money. The
only pre-LBJ money that went to education was the GI bill to help World War II
veterans attend college.
When LBJ started to hand out the tax-paid goodies,
polls reported that a big majority of Americans trusted the federal government
to do what is right. But by 1966 the favorable view of Washington declined and
kept going down. Reagan wrote in his diary: "I'm trying to undo the 'Great
Society.' It was L.B.J.'s war on poverty that led to our present mess."
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