Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id591959061
The discovery of poverty as a national problem in the late 1950s and early ’60s redefined economic inequality from a description of relative material circumstances to a cultural issue deriving from the inadequacies of individuals or groups.
id591959030
poverty stemmed primarily from the economy’s inability to generate sufficient gainful employment. In their view, the most effective anti-poverty strategy would involve the kind of substantial federal intervention that would tighten labor markets—including public investment, serious job training, and direct job creation.
id591959206
The other view, which won out, insisted that poverty was a residual problem in the United States, distinct from the issue of unemployment.
id591959211
That view was advanced by administration economic advisers and other proponents of growth politics or “commercial Keynesianism,” the postwar liberal alternatives to redistributive social wage policies and active government involvement in managing the economy.
✏️ The parties that were personally invested in replacing economic inequality with poverty. 🔗 View Highlight
id591959296
It held that most unemployment could be eliminated through tax cuts intended to stimulate aggregate demand, which in turn would generate jobs through increased private investment. That view also reflected the contention that chronic unemployment and poverty resulted from deficits of skills or motivation, attitudinal problems, or in the case of Black Americans in particular, the effects of racial discrimination, and were unlikely to be ameliorated by a rising tide of economic growth. Anti-poverty efforts, therefore, should target the affected groups for special remedial interventions—character-building rather than redistribution.
✏️ The reasoning to call it poverty instead of inequality is that it shifts the onus of the solution away from capitalists and towards the indvidiuals. 🔗 View Highlight
id591960063
Most important, separating poverty from political economy fit the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ commitment to forswearing significant new domestic spending, which had been a condition of business and congressional conservatives’ support for the proposed tax cut intended to stimulate aggregate demand.
id591960058
The community action approach was much less costly than the interventionist alternative, and it satisfied the strictures against government involvement in resource allocation, production, prices, and wages that had been imposed in the postwar defeat of social-democratic or left-Keynesian tendencies in domestic politics.
id591960090
Defining poverty as a cultural rather than an economic problem comported with the Cold War propaganda that extolled an American way of life in which the promise of endless growth had supposedly overcome class tensions by providing access to a steadily improving standard of living for all who were not hampered by idiosyncratic limitations.
id591960278
the tax cut did not solve the unemployment problem, as rates declined only in response to increased public spending on the Vietnam War. As Judith Stein noted sardonically, “It was Ho Chi Minh, not Keynes, who brought [unemployment] down to 4 percent.”