Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidency

During the debate I hope to prove that the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson was a complete and utter failure. I will focus on three main areas for this presentation. They are the Vietnam War, runaway entitlements and a failed war on poverty. In addition I hope to prove that the fate of African Americans had less to do with Johnson's policies and more to do with good old hard work. By far the most famous,not the most expensive and dangerous failures resulted from LBJ"s escalation of the Vietnam War. More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy. Our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense. It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s and in addition to the interest on the debt from this foolish war we are still paying the pensions and medical costs for the vets and their spouses. Johnson continued to send and keep troops in Vietnam and was hated for his escalation of the war. He lost public support and was heckled by the phrase: "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" (1) The largest expense destroying the nation is the Medicare/Medicaid black hole. These entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face. They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like chump change. They not only cost money we don"t have , and are scheduled to cost much more until they literally ruin the nation. They have distorted our entire health system into the world"s most bloated and expensive monstrosity. Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost. By comparison Social Security can be relatively easily reformed to be solvent for the next 75 years. The New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, was almost infinitely more realistic and sustainable than the Great Society. (2) The War on Poverty, and specifically the attempt to treat inner city poverty primarily as a racial problem is another great failure. 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 began. Incarceration rates have risen to levels that shock the world. The inner city abortion rate has reached levels that must surely appall even the most fervent 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 imagine. (3) Most liberals claim the Great Society deserves so much credit as its backers like to claim. However, most of African-American progress since 1965 is due to the dogged hard work of a people determined to change their own lives. Government action did play a role, but clearly racial attitudes in the United States have dramatically changed, perhaps especially so among conservatives. When conservative Republicans whose parents were Dixiecrat segregationists cheering on Lester Maddox and George Wallace now swoon at the rhetoric of Herman Cain, give standing ovations to Condoleezza Rice, write angry letters to editors when liberal journalists attack Clarence Thomas and elect an African American Republicans to the House and Senate. Sources 1. Brands, H. W. The Wages of Globalism. 2. Dallek, Robert. "Presidency: How Do Historians Evaluate the Administration of Lyndon Johnson?" 3. "The Impact of the Great Society Upon The Lives of Families and Young Children". Infant & Toddler Coordinators Association.