WSJ.com - In Poverty Tactics, An Old Debate: Who Is at Fault?

A fascinating read on the history of U.S. gvnm't anti-poverty programs...

WSJ.com - In Poverty Tactics, An Old Debate: Who Is at Fault?: "More than 40 years ago, Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty with an ambitious declaration: 'We know what must be done, and this nation of abundance can surely afford to do it.'

Despite decades of economic growth and technological progress, tens of millions of Americans still live in poverty. Efforts to reduce the ranks of the poor persist, but they have moved underground. Today's War on Poverty isn't marked by lofty presidential rhetoric. It is a guerrilla war with platoons of idealistic crusaders and skeptical scholars, with dozens of small-scale experiments and local initiatives that largely escape public notice.

Sprawling government Great Society programs are out. And it has been a full decade since Bill Clinton signed a Republican-backed bill 'to end welfare as we know it.' Except for a flicker of attention in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina last year, poverty is neither in the headlines nor on the lips of politicians. When President Bush refers to it, he usually is referring to other countries. ('Free trade is the only proven path out of poverty for developing nations,' he says.)"
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"Either you blame the poor -- 'the poverty is in the people' -- or you blame the system," says James T. Patterson, a Brown University historian. "It is a constant divide." If the poor are primarily responsible for their plight, then government ought to prod them to change their ways. If poverty is primarily the consequence of economic and social forces largely beyond their control, then government ought to give them money and change the rules of the economy.

Among those who dominate American politics and poverty policy today, the argument that government programs create dependency rather than foster independence has stuck
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But at last count, according to the Census Bureau, there were 37 million Americans below the official, albeit flawed and controversial, poverty line. That is 12.7% of the population, about the same fraction as in 1968. Alternative measures that take account of tax credits, food stamps and other noncash government aid put many fewer Americans below the line, but most show a similar trend: ups and downs with the economy, but little sustained, significant progress in the past three decades. (See sidebar: Counting the Poor.)

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There is today, however, a different sense about the potency of any government response to poverty than when the War on Poverty was born. "There was a sense in those early...days that the possibilities were endless," Lisbeth Schorr, who worked in the Johnson White House, recalled at a recent retrospective sponsored by the Brookings Institution and Georgetown University. "Of course," she said, "nobody knows what would have happened if we had been able to continue and expand what we started