Amity Schlaes, Great Society; A New History

"Despite the Trump administration’s thriving economy, or perhaps because of it, Democratic Party progressives are calling for new welfare programs even more radical than those advocated in the 1960s by the socialist architect of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, Michael Harrington." (Edward Short, https://www.city-journal.org/history-of-1960s-welfare-programs

Remember him? I read Harrington's book when I was 25--was absolutely sucked in. I was sitting in my living room at 911 W. Charles in Champaign-Urbana, a grad student. I'm not surprised that today's snowflakes are no smarter than I was. They've actually grown up on this drivel--I didn't. I was too naive to know that the best future for a poor person was a good job, not a government program. In the renamed 2020 schemes for wealth redistribution, Democrats are recycling the failed programs of debt relief, socialized medicine, green everything, and universal guaranteed income. If trillions didn't do it, let's throw more at the problems. Please sir, I want some more (Oliver Twist) But at least in the 60s, I think we really did care--even the politicians. Today it's all about power. Government power.

Before the Great Society, black unemployment and white unemployment were the same says Schlaes.  Not wages, and not jobs, but unemployment rates.  Now when unemployment, whether 3% or 15% is given, the black rate is also shown, just so you know things aren’t fair.  One more disparity.  Looking through the graphs and charts on the internet (may need to go to a real library), I can’t see that black unemployment was even tracked until about 1965.  Schlaes perhaps had other sources:

“Black unemployment, which had been the same as that of whites in the 1950s, from the early 1960s rose above white unemployment. The gap between black and white unemployment widened. Welfare programs funded by presidents Johnson and Nixon expanded rolls to an appalling extent—appalling because welfare fostered a new sense of hopelessness and disenfranchisement among those who received it. “Boy, were we wrong about a guaranteed income!” wrote that most honest of policy makers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1978, looking back on a pilot program that had prolonged unemployment rather than met its goal, curtailing joblessness. The “worker versus employer” culture promoted by the unions and tolerated by the automakers suppressed creativity on the plant floor and in executive officers. Detroit built shoddy autos—the whistleblower Ralph Nader was correct when he charged that American cars were not safe. Detroit failed to come up with an automobile to compete with those made by other foreign automakers. Whereas in the 1930s American automakers’ productivity amounted to triple that of their German competitors, by the late 1960s and 1970s, German and Japanese automakers were catching up to it or pulling ahead. In the end the worker benefits that union leaders in their social democratic aspirations extracted from companies rendered the same companies so uncompetitive that employers in our industrial centers lost not merely benefits but jobs themselves. Vibrant centers of industry became “the rust belt,” something to abandon. . . . What the 1960s experiment and its 1970s results suggest is that social democratic compromise comes close enough to socialism to cause economic tragedy.”