Economist Thomas Sowell famously said thatwelfare programspay people to fail. By incentivizing failure, liberal policies have created generations dependent on welfare and increased the likelihood of sons failing in school, landing in prison, and fathering children who themselves becomedependent on welfare.
When Christian commentatorCharlie Kirkargued that Black Americans were better off before the civil rights movement’s accompanying welfare expansion, critics labeled the claim racist. However, the data, and six decades of scholarship, support him. Census records, vital statistics, labor economics, and decades of scholarship produced by economist Thomas Sowell, the Hoover Institution economist widely regarded as one of the most rigorous empirical voices on race and poverty in American academic life, arrive at a similar conclusion.
In 1940, the Black poverty rate stood at 87 percent. By 1960, before a single Great Society program existed, it had fallen to 47 percent, a 40-point drop driven entirely by economic growth and cultural capital rather than government intervention. Thomas Sowell noted the contrast in his essay “A Legacy of Liberalism“: “Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.”
In the 20 years following the Great Society’s launch, the poverty rate fell only 18 more points, less than half the pace of the preceding two decades. Today the Black poverty rate remains at21 percent,roughly 2.5 times the white rate.
The collapse in family structure tracks the same timeline. According to the1960 Census,two-thirds of Black children lived in two-parent homes and only 22 percent were born out of wedlock. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat serving in the Johnson administration, published his 1965reportwarning that a 25 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate signaled a family structure in crisis, he was denounced and his findings buried. That rate has since tripled.
The2018 National Vital Statistics Reportput Black out-of-wedlock births at 69.4 percent. The share of Black children growing up without their biological father,20 percent in 1960,now stands at 67 percent.
The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, expanded dramatically under Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty,tied eligibilityto the absence of a working male in the household. A single mother who married the father of her children lost her AFDC cash assistance and her Medicaid coverage simultaneously. In many cases the family was materially worse off married than apart.
Charles Murray documented this inLosing Ground(1984): the program did not merely fail to incentivize marriage, it penalized it by design. Sowell drew the same conclusion: “What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing ispaying people to fail.Insofar as they fail, they receive the money; insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.”
By 2014,50.1 percentof households simultaneously receiving SNAP, TANF, and rental subsidies were Black. Today nearly 9 million Black Americans receive food stamps monthly, with those benefits constituting26 percentof total monthly income for the typical participating family, a dependency ratio that illustrates Sowell’s point that the welfare state is not a ladder out of poverty but a floor that discourages the climb.
The damage to Black economic independence predates the welfare state’s full expansion but was accelerated by it. Between1957 and 1967,the number of self-employed Black managers, officials, and proprietors fell 39.6 percent. Through the 1970s, Black unincorporated business ownership fell a further 8 percent. Desegregation, while morally necessary, dissolved the captive consumer base that had sustained Black-owned enterprises under Jim Crow, and the welfare expansion that followed provided dependency rather than the capital formation that might have replaced it.
Source: The Gateway Pundit
