The Dependency Agenda

by Kevin D. Williamson

Each year, the United States spends $65,000 per poor family to “fight poverty” – in a country in which the average family income is just under $50,000. Meanwhile, most of that money goes to middle-class and upper-middle-class families, and the current U.S. poverty rate is higher than it was before the government began spending trillions of dollars on anti-poverty programs.

In this eye-opening Broadside, Kevin D. Williamson uncovers the hidden politics of the welfare state and documents the historical evidence that proves Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” was designed to do one maximize the number of Americans dependent upon the government. The welfare state was never meant to eliminate privation; it was created to keep Democrats in power.

Genres: Economics, History, Politics

48 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2012

About the author

Kevin D. Williamson is National Review's roving correspondent. He is the author of The End Is Near and It's Going To Be Awesome: How Going Broke Will Leave America Richer, Happier, and More Secure, The Dependency Agenda, and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, and contributed chapters to The New Leviathan: The State Vs. the Individual in the 21st Century and Future Tense: Lessons of Culture in an Age of Upheaval. When he is not sounding the alarm about fiscal armageddon, he co-hosts the Mad Dogs & Englishmen podcast with fellow National Review writer Charles C. W. Cooke.

Williamson began his journalism career at the Bombay-based Indian Express Newspaper Group and spent 15 years in the newspaper business in Texas, Pennsylvania, and Colorado. He served as editor-in-chief of three newspapers and was the founding editor of Philadelphia's Bulletin. He is a regulator commentator on Fox News, CNBC, MSNBC, and NPR. His work has appeared in The New York Post, The New York Daily News, Commentary, Academic Questions, and The New Criterion, where he served as theater critic. He is a native of Lubbock, Texas.

Reviews

[Drew]

More a pamphlet than a book.

Don’t read if you want to have any respect for Lyndon Johnson.

[Harley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, but too big a topic for only 48 pages. It reads like you've walked in on a conversation already in progress and you need to try to piece together what was said before so you can understand what's being said now.

[Paul Sand · Rating 5 out of 5]

[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]

So back in June, Kevin D. Williamson wrote a National Review Corner post, "Infantilization, which began:

I know this is an old and familiar observation, but it is worth reminding ourselves: There is a theme that runs through a great deal of progressive thinking, from gun control to student-loan giveaways to speech codes and safe spaces and the universal basic income, and that theme is — infantilization. The Left wants a government that will treat you like a child, keep dangerous things out of your hands, put the other kids in time-out if they step out of line, and give you an allowance.

I don't often comment at NR post, but:

The corollary to infantilization is dependence. Progressives seem to see "progress" as making ever more swaths of people dependent on government. Think "Life of Julia" kicked up to 11.

Commenter "d3jo" replied to that:

Good point. I seem to recall a bald-headed writer putting out an entire tract on "The Dependency Agenda." It was pretty good, too.

Oops. I caught the gentle rebuke. My comment was like trying to teach physics to Feynman. So I bounced over to Amazon and bought the book for a cool $5.99.

Cheap, right? Well, the "book" is 43 small pages of largish print. Not much longer than a longish magazine article. Cost per word? I don't know, but pretty high, I bet.

But it's KDW, so I'd think it's still a bargain. He looks at the evolution of Federal Government handouts. (The government takes your money; it gives some of it back to you in cash or "free" stuff; convinces you it has done you a favor.) Starting with FDR's Social Security, originally designed as a program to help out poor oldsters who had way outlived their life expectancy, now throwing cash at everyone who's made it to 67 or so.

But it took LBJ's "Great Society", specifically the "War on Poverty", to give us programs explicitly designed to make large swaths of American citizens dependent on transfer payments from the state. (Credibly alleged, but disputed, LBJ quote: "I'll have those [invidious term for members of a certain racial group] voting Democratic for 200 years.")

Not only the direct recipients of cash are made dependent; other (willing) dependents on state largesse are the armies of bureaucrats both in and out of government devoted to providing "services to the needy". Whose very careers would be endangered if those services actually worked to make people non-needy.

Jesus said we'd always have the poor with us. He probably saw this coming.

The book lacks footnotes, a shame. But I think KDW's usually quite meticulous in his reporting.

It would be nice if we could reverse things: let people keep more of their money, instead of getting "free" stuff that the government thinks they should have. Encourage private philanthropy, localism, and the like. Unfortunately, the nature of the titular agenda is to get its users hooked like addicts, and their "fix" is voting for continued dependence at the polls.

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great pamphlet! Highly recommended for anyone who truly cares about helping the poor rise out of poverty and also for anyone who wants to know the truth about LBJ and his Great Society.

Quotes:
“The social-welfare and wealth-transfer aspects of the Great Society were to play the role for middle-class whites that Johnson’s loveless embrace of civil rights played for blacks: a tool for building a permanent Democratic majority under which the interests of the state would be made identical to the interests of the Democratic Party - and state dependents made in effect dependents of the Democratic Party.”

“The New Deal was an iron fist; the Great Society is a velvet glove.”

“Dependency became a valuable commodity. At the apex of the dependency food chain are the highest-ranking members of a political machine ultimately dependent upon dependency and highly invested in its spread.”

“The poverty rate had been declining steeply for years before the War on Poverty was announced. It was nearly halved before the Great Society began to be implemented… After the first skirmishes in the War on Poverty, the rate began to climb: War was declared, and poverty won.”

“We have a great deal of evidence that massive federal entitlement programs do not work. Health outcomes for Medicaid patients are in fact worse than for those who have no health insurance at all…”

“The Great Society was built for some other purpose than to help those whom Johnson et al. purported to help. There is no doubt that many of the architects of the Great Society were idealistic progressives, but each and every one of them would have had to have been blind not to have seen what they were building and for whom they were building it - a Faustian bargain at best.”

“But the fiscal nightmare (of Social Security and Medicare), while terrifying, is not as terrifying as the moral nightmare behind it. Millions of Americans are being exploited for the benefit of the permanent political class. In the name of a War on Poverty, we have needlessly impoverished many millions of Americans. We have needlessly ruined many millions of lives.”

“Even Johnson’s own keystone civil-right legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was much more strongly supported by congressional Republicans (75 percent voted for it) than by Democrats (just over half voted for it)."

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dependency Agenda by Kevin D. Williamson looks at the many so-called anti-poverty programs and enabling legislation including who the claimed target population was and who the real target population was. The author shows how money planned to fight poverty among the poorest in the country ends up mostly going to middle-class and upper-middle-class population while the American poverty rate continues to increase to levels higher than it was before the creation of these government programs. The author claims this is the hidden politics of what is referred to as the Welfare State that grew out of President Lyndon Johnson's programs of his Great Society. He provides evidence to support his claim that these programs were designed with the primary purpose of growing the number of people who would become dependent on government payouts across all classes. In other words it was not really intended to cure or resolve poverty but rather to grow supporters for the democrat party and hopefully keep them in power. To paraphrase his crude statement about the black population "we'll have those (financially) dependents voting democrat for 200 years!" An interesting look at some very expensive yet seemingly ineffective government programs! Who would've predicted this monster?