President Lyndon Johnson shared a small theory of how poverty works in his state of the union address in 1964. A key passage:

  • Very often a lack of jobs and money is not the cause of poverty, but the symptom. The cause may lie deeper -- in our failure to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and training, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in which to live and bring up their children.

Later in the spring he sent a message to Congress which elaborated:

  • What does this poverty mean to those who endure it ?

  • It means a daily struggle to secure the necessities for even a meager existence. It means that the abundance, the comforts, the opportunities they see all around them are beyond their grasp.

  • Worst of all, it means hopelessness for the young.

  • The young man or woman who grows up without a decent education, in a broken home, in a hostile and squalid environment, in ill health or in the face of racial injustice-that young man or woman is often trapped in a life of poverty.

  • He does not have the skills demanded by a complex society. He does not know how to acquire those skills. He faces a mounting sense of despair which drains initiative and ambition and energy.

This basic understanding still states the case, I believe.

01/08/14; 10:00AM

Last built: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 10:53 AM

By Ken Smith, Wednesday, January 8, 2014 at 10:00 AM.