A New War on Poverty

Instead of a "War on Poverty", Democrats gave us a war on the poor. It's time for Republicans to change that.

by Rod D. Martin
July 13, 1998

Thirty years ago, liberal Democrats declared a War on Poverty. What they gave us was a war against the poor.

The carnage was breathtaking. Medicare and Medicaid, those greatest programs of what was to be a Great Society, more than doubled the cost of every medical service in America within three years of passage, forcing more and more Americans onto the dole and rocking the greatest health-care system on Earth to its foundations. The Social Security trust fund, always largely a scam, became a complete and total fraud as the Johnson Administration began to use it to hide the true federal budget numbers and thus produce a sham surplus for fiscal year 1969 (a fraud continued by every administration since).

Welfare programs such as AFDC spawned a hopeless cycle of dependency and illegitimacy which has, for the first time in our history, created a true underclass, a veritable nation of multi-generational single welfare mothers which has neither the skill nor the …