In this thread, I was entirely gobsmacked by this post by xtisme:
Come on, we’re not even in YMMV territory here! Reasonable minds could differ on whether the Great Society was well-executed or whether the Vietnam War starved it of necessary funding, but I would have thought the value of the GS would be a no-brainer for all but the most radical Libertarians, which x is not.
Please enlighten me: What about the Great Society was ill-conceived? Could it have been done better? Is there any reason why it should never have been done at all? Please be specific.
(I posted this OP already but, due to some epileptic hamster, it appeared with the thread title but not the OP. Three times.)
Imagine that… a pair of Democrats practicing “voodoo” economics, and a Democrat highly critical of a Republican doing the same lauding it on its merits.
As well intentioned as it was, the Great Society turned out to be anything but with the exception of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and arguably the environmental legislation. Medicare/Social Security has been a disaster, the “War On Poverty” has been an unmitigated failure, and his education initiatives did not have the desired effect. For my part, I think that the Gun Control Act of 1968 was ill-conceived and completely ineffective, with the only effect being that I can’t obtain collector items or items of historical value because they cannot be imported due to what are essentially cosmetic reasons.
Naturally, most of his positives have been overshadowed by Vietnam. Johnson did his level best to destroy the same social fabric that he was trying to repair with the escalation of the war. How can someone claim to be interested in the welfare of his people when he’s quite literally making decisions calculated to completely destroy another society in a war that was entirely unnecessary? How can someone pass legislation guaranteeing equal rights to minorities only to send mass numbers of those same minorities against their will to die for nothing?
It’s simply not very obvious that the Great Society reforms had much impact on the problem of poverty or quality of life. “Great society” generally implies a lot of other stuff but poverty was the centerpiece of it. Poverty dropped steadily after WWII before the Great Society reforms and shortly thereafter, and certainly the 1970s saw a lot of regression in terms of many social indicators, most notably in urban areas. Declines in poverty rates were tied almost entirely to overall economic growth; there’s isn’t much correlation with Johnson’s giant government programs. The GS reforms certainly did create a huge tax burden and a lot of government jobs, but you could pretty easily construct a case that they had virtually no marginal effect on poverty.
I’m not necessarily saying they DIDN’T help, but this is a perfectly debatable issue.
Medicare and Medicaid are growing at such a rate that both the federal and state governments are facing huge burdens down the line. Social Security will also soon overburden the federal government. His education spending has done nothing to improve education in this nation. Welfare was a complete failure until reorganized in 1996 (and it still has a lot of problems). I could go on, but just leaving this legacy should put you in the bottom five in any Presidential ranking.
Sorry, don’t have a cite, but i’ve heard that, as of 2000, the “war on Poverty” (and associated programs) have consumed about 11 TRILLION dollars. It would have been cheaper to have given EVERY person labelled “poor” 1$ million in 1964. now we have huge federal bureaucracy that wastes billions/year, and delivers nothing! That is LBJ’s leagacy
Perhaps “Reaganomics” was more what I was referring to. From your favorite cite factory, Wikipedia:
I find it a bit more than ironic that the supply-siders, often skewered by the left for irresponsible fiscal policy, took their cues from two of the most historically venerated Democrats, and that you are trying to make the case that the Great Society was in fact great even though it was funded based upon policies that you hate.
Oh, puh-leeze. Medicare and Medicaid have kept a lot of old and poor people from getting sick and prevented untold suffering by making palliative drugs and so forth affordable. Not a disaster in my book … maybe yours.
Oh, puh-leeze. Medicare and Medicaid have kept a lot of old and poor people from getting sick and prevented untold suffering by making palliative drugs and so forth affordable. Not a disaster in my book … maybe yours.
I don’t consider a system as jacked up as Medicare a success. I have not attempted to make an argument that some of the programs were ill-intentioned, I’ve only advanced the argument that whatever the intention was the programs have been unmitigated financial and administrative disasters. That in and of itself is more than enough to take the shine off of any good that they may have done.
It may be that his predecessors have jacked it up. It may be that Congress has failed to administer the program properly. But that’s Johnson’s legacy: failed programs started by him abound throughout the government.
Ah, I see you finally got the thread off the ground. Not that it was your fault, but I kept seeing it pop up last night with no text over and over again.
As I said in the other thread, its all a matter of perspective on whether those programs were good or not. From MY perspective (and a few others in this thread who have already hit the high points), most of them were partial or complete failures. The fact that the economy nose dived during his reign and then pretty much stagnated afterward should give you SOME indication of this (though I suppose who and what was at fault could be debated).
To my mind (since you used my post to kick off the thread), I think Johnson’s domestic agenda was, at best, a mixed bag of success’s and failure’s (and if I’m being honest, most of his economic policies were failures from my perspective). Some of his SOCIAL policies were successes and I acknowledged that in the other thread (though I have to say that most of his social initiatives were progressions of things that were already happening, or things that Kennedy intended anyway but just didn’t get around too…IMHO. Not to take anything away from Johnson wrt Civil Rights, since he’s the one who finally brought it to a head, but he was standing on the shoulders of past presidents and also changing times wrt race relations by the American people). On balance though, when we factor in the fuckup that was Vietnam and the mixed bag of his domestic policies I think he bottoms out as one of the worst presidents…and IMHO THE worst president.
Give it 20 years though…GW’s turn for a real review of his legacy is still hanging out there after all, and its possible he’ll even manage to one up another Texan.
Tell you what BG…why don’t you list out the domestic things you think were a success and we can debate that if you like. Perhaps you can somehow build a case that his domestic agenda was so great that it somehow mitigates what he did wrt the Vietnam war. I don’t THINK you can possible come up with anything that could possibly counteract that, but I’ll try and keep an open mind.
Spare me the smilies. Johnson took full advantage of tax policies that you reviled when Republicans initiated them. You’re not confused. What you’re doing is trying to hand-wave them away as irrelevant.
:rolleyes: Johnson had no need to buy votes. He was riding the highest crest of postwar liberalism. Remember how soundly he defeated Goldwater in '64? That was before he started implementing his GS programs; and he started implementing those long before it became apparent Vietnam was going to cost him votes in '68.
Is there something in the words that makes you incapable of reading them? Those policies increased tax revenue. Here, let me quote it for you again:
How does a massive increase like that make things harder to fund? That’s as ludicrous as me saying that I would have trouble paying my bills if I made $100,000 a year. I know that you’re loathe to admit that such a policy works, but man, facts are facts.
Doors, a 90% top marginal tax rate was unquestionably to the right of the peak of the Laffer Curve. I do not think the tax rates under Reagan were as high, and were thus more debatable.
Tax revenue increased after the tax cuts. Tax revenue increased because the economy was growing. That does not mean:
That the economic growth resulted from the tax cuts, in whole or in significant part. You still have to make a case for that.
That Kennedy cut taxes in the first place for economic-stimulus purposes. Perhaps he just expected coming economic growth would increase revenue anyway, so a lower marginal tax rate would be sufficient for the federal government’s needs.
Not that it was your fault, but I kept seeing it pop up last night with no text over and over again.
smilies. Johnson took full advantage of tax policies that you reviled when Republicans initiated them. You’re not confused. What you’re doing is trying to hand-wave them away as irrelevant.