wrote in message
...
On Mon, 21 Sep 2009 22:26:50 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

Pretty hard to offer services onezee twozee don't you think? Not very
cost
effective or practical. The Great Society did a lot of good, but it
wasn't
perfect.

The problem is that the federal government was doing this. If it was
local government or even local charity, onezee twozee is not that
hard to do.
I lived in SE DC when the great society programs hit and I saw those
neighborhoods decline into the cesspools they are now (Marion Barry's
8th ward for you folks outside the beltway)
People flocked to the cities because that was where the money was.
What used to be families of "working poor" (a government defined term)
became non working welfare recipients.
The programs rewarded women without a man in the house and punished
the families where dad stayed, so the men left.
It doesn't take many generations of absent fathers to create the mess
we have now.
I said then and I still think, we went the wrong way. The incentive
should have been to spread these people out, not concentrate them.
It is a whole lot easier to accommodate and find jobs for a few
families in the country than it is to do this for a half million
people in a city.
Unfortunately I think the way the great society was implemented was
racist in the worst way. Instead of encouraging people out in flyover
country to embrace a few black people, they created an all black
ghetto in the city where there was very little contact with each
other.



There are some things that the Federal gov't does better than local
gov'ts.
Just because what you saw was bad doesn't mean the concept or even a lot
of
the implementation was bad. One can always find examples of system abuse.
Certainly the answer to the problem now is not to abandon people in the
inner city (well, any more than we've already done).

We shouldn't have lured them to the city in the first place.

I really don't think you can blame the Great Society program for "luring"
poor people to cities. Most came (and still come) to cities to find work.
We're not in the 1800s any more.

If the federal government was really so great at this they would have
fed these people out in the country.

Come on. The vast majority of the population has lived in cities for a long
time.

In the early part of the 1800s only a few percent lived in cities. After the
Industrial Revolution, cities started taking up the vast majority of
people... something like 90% today.

In the city they just became welfare dependents and lost the ability
to work. The opportunity for work was limited there anyway.

?? That's where the work is and has been for a long, long time.

When the government would give you more than you could make working,
why work. That problem was not addressed for 30 years, until Bill
Clinton and the 104th congress took a swing at it. It was too little
too late.

They reduced the welfare roles significantly.

--
Nom=de=Plume