After the Medicare/Medicaid catastrophe the single greatest policy failure of modern America is urban policy. Since the Great Society era of Lyndon Johnson, the country has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into poor urban neighborhoods. The violence and crime generated in these neighborhoods costs hundreds of billions more. And after all this time, all this money and all this energy, the inner city populations are worse off than before. There is more drug addiction and more social and family breakdown among this population than when the Great Society was launched. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world (though they make for safer streets); the inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most resolute pro-choicers not on the Planned Parenthood payroll. Forty percent of all pregnancies in New York end in abortion, with higher rates among Blacks; nationally, the rate among Blacks is three times the rate among white women. Put it all together and you have a holocaust of youth and hope on a scale hard to match.
This is not a lot to show for almost fifty years of fighting poverty — not a lot of bang for the buck.
It’s worse than that. It’s a lot of destruction of lives, at a cost to the productive of trillions over the past four decades.
Back in the 1960s, if the most vile racists of the KKK (all Democrats, BWT) had conspired to create maximum damage to blacks, they couldn’t have done a more effective job than what LBJ did with his policies.
How much of this, though, is blowback from the War on Drugs (see other thread as well)?
It had been said, and I wish I remembered the source, that President Nixon was faced with a returning army of Vietnam veterans, many addicted to opiates as this stuff was as available as cigarettes, in fact it was in cigarettes sold by the locals, and maybe it was even a grand strategy of the enemy to get our soldiers “hooked.”
Faced with this, President Nixon instituted a program of “treatment on demand”, where instead of jailing addicts for drug and related offenses, “whatever money was needed” was spent on drug treatment clinics.
According to the narrative, what changed was the War on Drugs, which may have preceded President Reagan, to the First Lady’s “Just Say No Campaign.”
Don’t know how much of this you can pin on Reagan — the throw-the-bums-in-prison response to the drug problem and the crime waves it spun off had broad populist appeal. Whereas marijuana and perhaps more dangerous drugs as cocaine and heroin have been illegal for at least since Alcohol Prohibition times, the high incarceration rate for drugs is a recent social experiment.
Prohibition ran from 1919 to 1933. Heroin was banned in 1924. Previously it was a prescription medicine and prior to 1914 it was completely unregulated. Marijuana was banned by different states between 1913 and 1927. It wasn’t until 1935 that a federal ban was accepted.
As a Libertarian I’m opposed to all the bans. As a matter of contract law the government should ensure accurate labeling and as a matter of public health they should be able to discourage the sale to minors, but there’s simply no justification for prohibition of any mind altering substance.
John Gilmore got it right when he said the control of mind altering substances is nothing short of government mind control. see http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/8/233340/034
Seems a bit late in the day to be blaming current urban problems on LBJ. The other party has had their turn to make things better or worse.
Entropy is a bitch, Will. All the kings horses…
I suppose pointing out that all types of crime is down to levels not seen since the 1950s would be seen as irrelevant. /sarcasm/
With all the Dane Geld we are paying Chris, it should!
“Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world…”
“…all types of crime is down to levels not seen since the 1950s…”
Hmm.