Every single time I’ve responded to you, you bring up the fact that I admire a handful of communists.
Well, it does sort of explain things where you are concerned.
My, my, my the wall of text surely is your favorite way to discuss anything. Must really irk you that I never denied that the Japanese had it rough during and after WWII.
Wall of text? LOL! It must really irk you to know that I disposed of your argument so easily … in less than 362 words.
I don't follow your "logic" here BAC.
Well I tried folks. But I guess logic wasn't one of the things they taught would be communist admirers.
if the welfare state is responsible for keeping people in poverty then why did poverty decrease most drastically during expansions of welfare?
This is false, KF. But then communist admirers never have had trouble spouting falsehoods, have they? Here are the facts, folks.
LBJ announced the WOP in 1964, when the number of people "in poverty" was officially about 35 million and the poverty rate was about 19%. It's true that the number in poverty fell to about 25 million and the poverty rate fell to about 12 percent by 1968. But it took years for WOP spending to really get underway (in fact spending on the program didn't really get going until the Nixon and Ford years). So what caused the poverty rate to drop to 16% in 1965, just one year after LBJ announced the effort?
Could it be that the poverty rate was already headed lower? Well that's exactly what was happening. Just 5 years before the WOP began, the number in poverty was 40 million and the rate was 22%. So in those 5 years, the number in poverty and the poverty rate was falling just as "drastically" as it did in the 5 years after WOP funding actually got underway. And there was no reason to believe it wouldn't have continued falling even if the WOP hadn't started. Is there?
Indeed, an argument can be made that the WOP actually slowed then stopped the fall in the poverty rate and number in poverty because within 4 years of announcing the effort the number in poverty and the poverty rate bottomed out. Yet the spending continued. Trillions and trillions of dollars. And what happened? No further decrease in poverty. Indeed, both the number in poverty and the poverty rate started going back up. By 1983, the number in poverty was back up to 35 million and the rate was back up to 15%. Where it basically stayed for the next 20 years, despite the government spending trillions and trillions of dollars more.
In 2004, the government was devoting nearly 15 percent of all spending to WOP-type programs. The percentage is even higher today. The poverty rate for blacks was nearly 25% in 2004 with the rate for hispanics not far behind that. Now you would think that after 45 years of removing racial barriers and spending an amount almost equal to the current national debt on eliminating poverty, that rate would be below 25%. But it isn't.
And lest you think I'm just making this up, here's a source:
http://www.friesian.com/stats.htm
The "capitalism alone" phase of poverty reduction can be seen operating from 1950 to 1966. In that period the poverty rate (column H) fell from 30% to 15%. Even poverty in the non-white population (column I) fell from almost 60% in 1960 to 40% by 1966. ... snip ... What attends the striking increase in anti-poverty activity is the actual slowing and halting of the fall in the poverty rate. The percentage of the population below the poverty line bottoms out in 1973 at 11.1% and then stagnates or increases from then on. By 1981, only the first year of the Reagan Presidency, the poverty rate is already back up to 14%, where it hadn't been since 1967. At the same time, the percentage of families on AFDC had skyrocketed, from the disturbing 2% of 1963 to what must be the even more disturbing, or shocking, 6.5% of 1980. Programs intended to reduce "dependency" had instead more than tripled it.
Here's the poverty rate data the above mentions (from the same link) where H is the total poverty rate and I is the rate for non-whites:
Year H (total, %)
1950 30.2
1951 28.0
1952 27.9
1953 26.2
1954 27.9
1955 24.5
1956 22.9
1957 22.8
1958 23.1
1959 22.4
1960 22.2
1961 21.9
1962 21.0
1963 19.5
1964 19.0
1965 17.3
1966 15.7
1967 14.2
1968 12.8
1969 12.1
1970 12.6
1971 12.5
1972 11.9
1973 11.1
1974 11.6
1975 12.3
1976 11.8
1977 11.6
1978 11.4
1979 11.6
1980 13.0
and
Year I (non-white, %)
1959 58.2
1960 56.4
1961 56.8
1962 56.1
1963 51.1
1964 49.8
1965 47.1
1966 40.8
1967 38.2
1968 32.8
1969 30.9
1970 31.6
1971 31.3
1972 32.4
1973 29.3
1974 30.5
1975 29.8
1976 29.5
1977 29.0
1978 29.4
1979 28.9
1980 29.9
Remember, the WOP was announced by LBJ in 1964. So any reduction in the poverty rate before that cannot be due to the WOP. And it's even questionable whether the reduction in the rate the first few years after that date can be ascribed to the WOP because it took years to ramp up and establish the programs that are part of the WOP.
Here's another source to support that assertion:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3864
The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of virtually no major civil rights legislation or anti-poverty programs. It dropped another 17 percentage points during the decade of the 1960s and one percentage point during the 1970s, but this continuation of the previous trend was neither unprecedented nor something to be arbitrarily attributed to the programs like the War on Poverty.
Go ahead, KF ... explain to folks what caused the poverty rate for non-whites to drop from 58% in 1959 to 50% in 1964 ... before the War on Poverty got started? Explain what caused the drop in the total poverty rate from 30% in 1950 to 19% in 1964? It certainly wasn't the War on Poverty, was it, because that hadn't even started yet. Can you offer any explanation for why the total poverty rate dropped almost 10% (from 27.9% to 19%) in the ten years prior to the start of the WOP (more than it did in the 10 years after the start of the WOP)?
Well, for starters BAC you’ll notice that I said massive movement and not massive reparations.
Oh, so you were just pointing out that people wanted reparations, not that they actually got them. I'm not sure what that proves, but very well.
Second, you’ll also notice that I didn’t argue the economic impact of the reparations was enough to bring Japanese-Americans above the poverty-line but that the fact they received reparations at all was evidence that they weren’t receiving the same sort of discrimination facing blacks.
You're mixing apple and orange timeframes. The issue is not how blacks were being treated immediately following WW2. The issue is whether blacks were treated any worse following 1964, than Japanese-Americans were treated following WW2. Because within 20 years of WW2, Japanese Americans had recovered financially. The question is why 20 years after civil rights legislation and the massive welfare programs that began in 1964, did blacks not recover financially? And to understand the answer, you need to look at the response of each community in both cases. As I pointed out, the Japanese after WW2 worked hard, emphasized education (and not the liberal kind), taught the next generation a good work ethic, chose not to make themselves dependent on the government, and didn't cry racism at every perceived affront. The black community (in general) did just the opposite, at the urging of democrat and black leaders. It doesn't take a genious to see the correlation here, KF.
immigration from Asia (especially Japan) increased after WWII.
Japanese immigration did not really resume until the "aliens ineligible for citizenship" rule was removed in 1952 (7 years after WW2 ended).
Here is a source that shows the Japanese population in the US:
http://www.kasei.ac.jp/library/kiyou/2003/7.ONOZAWA.pdf
In 1940, there were about 285,000 Japanese-Americans. In 1950 that number was still only 326,000. By 1960, the number of Japanese immmigrants had grown to 464,000, and it climbed to 591,000 by 1970. But do you think that it was wealthy Japanese who came over in the 50s and 60s?

That is not what caused the economic status of Japanese Americans to change so dramatically.
Also, do you think that no blacks migrated to the US following 1964? Let's look at that. Quite the contrary, it was primarily the more well to do and well educated blacks who came to the US during that time. In fact (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_immigration_to_the_United_States ), "African immigrants to the United States were found more likely to be college educated than any other immigrant group, other than Asians. African immigrants to the U.S. are also more highly educated than any other native-born ethnic group including white Americans. Some 48.9 percent of all African immigrants hold a college diploma. This is slightly less than the percentage of Asian immigrants to the U.S., nearly double the rate of native-born white Americans, and nearly four times the rate of native-born African Americans." If anything, immigration should have helped the black community recover economically … but that doesn't seem to be the case.
By the way, you have a citation for the "TRILLIONS" that we've given blacks?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,131174,00.html
CATO
September 01, 2004
... snip ...
One thing the pundits and presidential candidates aren't saying much about, however, is how much money has been spent fighting the "war on poverty"—$9 trillion and counting. Yes, $9 trillion.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16860
Democrats' War on Poverty Has Failed
09/06/2006
... snip ...
The public expenditure on the variety of governmental schemes devised in the last forty years to eliminate poverty has been extraordinary. Since 1964 we have spent $8–10 trillion on antipoverty programs. In 1996, at the midpoint in the Clinton administration, the federal government expended $191 billion on poverty programs, fully 12.2 percent of the federal budget. President George W. Bush actually increased the effort. The 2006 budget, at the midpoint of Bush’s administration, calls for a massive increase in poverty programs, increasing the expenditure $368 billion to 14.6 percent of the federal budget. The Bush administration oversees a host of continuing poverty programs that includes Medicaid, food stamps, supplementary security income, temporary assistance to needy families, child day-care payments, child nutrition payments, foster care, adoption assistance, and health insurance for children. The conclusion is virtually inescapable: if the availability of nearly an unlimited amount of money and the determination of countless government bureaucracies were the necessary and sufficient conditions to eliminate poverty, then in 2004 we should not still have more than 12 percent of the U.S. population—nearly 37 million people—in poverty.
Now mind you, the whole WOP began as an effort to eliminate poverty in the black community. LBJ constantly talked of racial injustice. And the fact is that since 1964, the government has taken over $10 trillion dollars from the pockets of producers (mostly caucasians and asians) and transferred (after siphoning off a *small* fee to run the program) that to non-producers (of which many, indeed most, were black and hispanic).
You want to see this growth graphically? Here:
http://www.heritage.org/research/re...2010/b2427/b2427_chart2.ashx?w=500&h=459&as=1
In fact, more than $10 TRILLION has been spent since 1964:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Re...st-of-Means-Tested-Welfare-or-Aid-to-the-Poor
Since the beginning of the War on Poverty, government has spent $15.9 trillion (in inflation-adjusted 2008 dollars) on means-tested welfare.
So even if only a third of welfare went to blacks (and they actually got a disproportionate share of welfare spending), there clearly have been TRILLIONS of dollars in aid to the black community over the last 45 years.
With essentially little progress in reducing poverty:
http://www.heritage.org/static/reportimages/022C44298D6CDDA28C12A757B4A56F57.gif
Oh ... before you make a big deal of the tail end of that figure, you'd better ask yourself why it was dropping then and why it has since crept back up to about 34% despite even more trillions in spending.
In conclusion ... what a
monumental and destructive waste by liberal thinkers …
And, unfortunately, there appears to be no end in sight to this utter stupidity:
http://www.heritage.org/research/re...010/sr0078/sr78_chart6.ashx?w=600&h=1052&as=1
Originally Posted by BeAChooser
Again, I'll just point out the obvious.
In 20 years, the Japanese went from essentially having nothing in a country where large segments of the populace hated them intensely, to being one of the wealthiest groups and widely accepted by people of entirely different skin color. And they did it without government help but by focusing on hard work and education … not by whining that this or that injustice was racist.
Contrast that with the black community which in 1964, was relatively well off compared to 1945 Japanese Americans. Here we are 45 years later, having spent upwards of ten trillion dollars on social welfare programs of which most were aimed at blacks, and the black community is less well off now then in 1964. And the reason is obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense.
"Common sense" meaning “whatever agrees with my ideology”. History seems to disagree with you in regards to welfare.
What I said is worth noting again, in response to YOUR *ideology*.
You can find that article here
LOL! Steve Kangas. You sure you only admire communists?
Wow, just wow. After reading this I truly think that there isn’t a right-wing meme that you won’t believe.
Wow, just wow. After reading your last link I truly think that there isn't a left-wing meme that you won't believe.
