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James Johnson of Salt Lake City, UT, asks:
Of the trillions of dollars spent so far on the "War on Poverty,"
how much has been wasted? What gains can be attributed to the
vast sums spent thur far? Has poverty been reduced by all this
spending?
Dr. Wilson responds:
I wish it were true that "trillions of dollars" have been spent on the War on Poverty. Indeed, I would settle for a small fraction of the trillions of dollars we spent on the military in the 1980s. In fact, the money we spend per-capita on programs for the poor in America is trivial in comparison with per-capita expenditures for the poor in western Europe.
As I pointed out in "When Work Disappears," the most rapid growth in expenditures for U.S. welfare programs has been in universal entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare--programs whose elderly recipients tend to be members of the working and middle classes. In western European countries, where services such as medical care are considered basic collective goods, the poor tend to be covered by the same comprehensive programs as the working and middle classes. In the United States, programs for the poor such as Food Stamps, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI) do provide some relief, but as currently designed, they have virtually no effect on the continuing poverty rate among the non-elderly.
In short, targeted programs for the poor in the United States do not even begin to address inequities in the social class system. Instead of helping to integrate the recipients into the broader economic and social life of mainstream society--to "capitalize" them into a different educational or residential stratum, as the GI bill and the postwar federal mortgage programs did for working- and middle-class whites--they tend to stigmatize and separate them.
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