So your response is that whatever economic strides the poor have made since 1964, they would have been better off without Johnson’s programs, but that Johnson’s programs destroyed black families.
I’d be interested in seeing some numbers from the conservative Heritage Foundation or the libertarian Cato Institute – organizations which at least strive to put some REAL analysis behind their claims that might indicate the poor would have been better off without Johnson’s programs.
As for Sowell’s arguments that the poverty programs destroyed black family structure, it deserves to be looked at more closely.
Percent of black families with female head, no husband.
1950 – 18%
1960 – 22%
1970 – 28%
1991 – 46%
In other words it’s increased by about 2 1/2 times.
So the data don’t support that the Great Society programs disproportionately destroyed black families (a trend that had begun earlier) – and can even be read to support the argument that they had LESS impact on blacks than on whites.
Again, I’d like to hear from someone with better access to data and no axe to grind.
These three video’s show LBJ for who he really was. There is some great history and video from the archives on the Kennedy assasination. The motorcade footage is very interesting.
That’s some dandy character assassination they engage in, there. Lots of innuendo and accusation, but zero evidence. <Lionel Hutz>Well, Your Honor. We’ve plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence. </Lionel Hutz>
The real after tax income of Americans rose by 30% during the Kennedy/Johnson years. That duing an expensive war.
And declining to run again for the presidency given his reservations about the war puts Johnson near the top of American presidents. He put country before himself.
**So your response is that whatever economic strides the poor have made since 1964, they would have been better off without Johnson’s programs,
Not at all. The “Great Society” programs put in place programs that hobble us to this day.
Had we had real economic growth (free investment and innovation), instead of the dead hand of government, we would NOT have today:
-enormous urban slums (public housing projects)
-uninhabitable inner cities (the crime in the inner cities inhibits business and drives people away)
-welfare programs that discourage marriage and promote out of wedlock births
What do you think about such disasters as the Cabrini-green project? A high rise housing complex, it was torn down after the inhabitants made it uninhabitable.
Did you see the motorcade scene? That was not evidence? That was about as close as you get to seeing Kennedy was set up by his own people. Did you see the bodyguard called off Kennedy? How he threw his hands up in the air? I am not saying it was LBJ but it was planned and they found Wallaces prints in the room of the building he was shot from.
I never knew that Kennedy was about to expose LBJ paying bribes. I’m sure there is a lot we are not privy to. A lot of the video is all historic footage I had never seen before.
Cabrini Green was built in phases starting in 1942 and ending in 1962. Pruitt-Igoe (an even more notorious example of public housing) was built in 1954-55. In other words, before Johnson and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
No, California is sliding into bankruptcy because we only tax new homeowners at superhigh rates and then pay public servants large six figure incomes for jobs that could employ two people at half the wages. See corrections officers. Then to top it all off, we have to have two-thirds of the legislature vote to pass a budget, which leads to more pork. All other taxes are regressive and property taxes decrease over time due to the inflation in the cost of homes. It is possible for someone who lives in a $2 million home to pay less property taxes than someone living in a $300,000 home by virtue of having lived there a long time. So the taxes fall most heavily on newer families. It is highly regressive. Oh, and everybody buys from Amazon to avoid the exorbitant sales tax.
No, California is sliding into bankruptcy because we only tax new homeowners at superhigh rates and then pay public servants large six figure incomes for jobs that could employ two people at half the wages. See corrections officers. Then to top it all off, we have to have two-thirds of the legislature vote to pass a budget, which leads to more pork. All other taxes are regressive and property taxes decrease over time due to the inflation in the cost of homes. It is possible for someone who lives in a $2 million home to pay less property taxes than someone living in a $300,000 home by virtue of having lived there a long time. So the taxes fall most heavily on newer families. It is highly regressive. Oh, and everybody buys from Amazon to avoid the exorbitant sales tax.
The above link seems to indicate that your assertion is a propagandist version of history. After the Long March the Kuomintang was finished. And your statement about George Marshall is completely inaccurate and again, propaganda and libelous to Marshall. If Chiang was actually “on the brink of crushing the Communists” there was nothing that the US or George Marshall could have done to stop him. The statement is so absurd as to be laughable: if General Chiang was so foolish as to “negotiate” his defeat on the brink of a victory over his enemy, then he was no general to begin with.
Curtis LeMay in WWII in the Pacific theater was interchangeable with his staff man Robert McNamara who did all the numbers analysis justifying the firebombing campaigns of the Japanese cities. McNamara put the methods and goals of LeMay into operations and carried them on. These methods did not work in Vietnam.
The only way to win a war like Vietnam is to remove the entire population and resettle them in different areas or commit genocide against the populations. It worked for the ancient Romans. It is not something that the US is willing to do.
Here’s my problem with Great Debates: Great Debates is simply a platform for the mindless repetition of established partisan talking points. Nobody is interested in actually looking at data or considering questions empirically.
So, people can advance a notion like “The Great Society was detrimental to poor black families because this one guy said so this one time.”
kunilou goes to the trouble to pull some data together to consider the question, and lo and behold it looks like over the same span of time, the number of single parent white households increased at a faster rate.
What’s the outcome? A chorus of chirping crickets, and then right back to the mindless blathering, and the same talking points get carried over from thread to thread.
It’s this experience that led me to propose Hentor’s Law of Post Construction, which says that there is an inverse relationship between the time you take composing a post and the impact that post will have on the discussion. It’s almost like people would rather hear “You’re a great big doodoo head” than “Gee, if we look at the actual rate of change in single parent households, it doesn’t look like the Great Society can be described as detrimental to black families.”
I’m not suggesting that each post has to be founded upon a novel analysis of data, but I’d like to see a greater respect for data based arguments, and for those who put forth arguments which are inconsistent with the data to at least acknowledge such.
Curtis - do you have some kind of legitimate cite that would back up this frankly farcical claim?
You are parroting the completely unsubstantiated claims of Joe McCarthy, who does not need to be debated on these boards as a lying sack of shit.
[URL=“Marshall Mission - Wikipedia”]Specifically McCarthy alleged (and has never proven): “When Marshall was sent to China with secret State Department orders, the Communists at that time were bottled up in two areas and were fighting a losing battle, but that because of those orders the situation was radically changed in favor of the Communists. Under those orders, as we know, Marshall embargoed all arms and ammunition to our allies in China. He forced the opening of the Nationalist-held Kalgan Mountain pass into Manchuria, to the end that the Chinese Communists gained access to the mountains of captured Japanese equipment. No need to tell the country about how Marshall tried to force Chiang Kai-shek to form a partnership government with the Communists.”[4]
Hentor, I’d settle for even less. I’d appreciate if people would at least check their facts before they post, or acknowledge those “facts” are actually opinions.
Here’s a hint: If you want to prove that LBJ had anything to do with a plot to assassinate Kennedy, you’re gonna have to prove that there was an conspiracy first. After that, you’re gonna have to prove LBJ was involved. I had a lot more than this written, but then realized that I was debating someone who believed in Kennedy assassination conspiracies. I give you best wishes and lots of luck in your endeavors, but I will not be debating this particular topic further.