Government subsidies for antisocial behavior stalled decades worth of black progress.
The Democrats’ $3.5 trillion proposal to expand the U.S. safety net is being described as a make-or-break moment for the Biden presidency. Regarding electoral politics in the short term, that may well be true. But some of us are more concerned about what it could mean for the country beyond the next election or two.
Liberals view a larger welfare state as an unalloyed good, but what’s the track record? Entitlement programs were dramatically expanded in the 1960s in the service of a war on poverty, yet poverty fell at a slower rate after the Great Society initiatives were implemented, and overall dependency on the government for food, shelter and other basic necessities increased. According to Howard Husock, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a coming book on housing policy, “The Poor Side of Town: And Why We Need It,” the median time a family spends in New York City public housing today is 19 years. And 10% of public housing residents in the city have been there for more than 40 years. Housing intended to help families through a rough patch has become a multigenerational trap for some.
Democrats are now aiming to create new entitlements and expand the existing ones, not only for the poor but also for the professional class. Workers making $200,000 a year would be eligible for a new national paid family and medical leave program. Earlier this year the American Rescue Plan Act expanded the child tax credit for households earning as much as $150,000. Liberals pitch these social programs in the name of helping underprivileged minority groups and reducing inequality, but the lesson of the 1960s is that government relief can put in place incentives that have the opposite effect.
Between 1940 and 1960 the percentage of black families living in poverty declined by 40 points as blacks increased their years of education and migrated from poorer rural areas to more prosperous urban environs in the South and North. No welfare program has ever come close to replicating that rate of black advancement, which predates affirmative action programs that often receive credit for creating the black middle class. Moreover, what we experienced in the wake of the Great Society interventions was slower progress or outright retrogression. Black labor-force participation rates fell, black unemployment rates rose, and the black nuclear family disintegrated. In 1960 fewer than 25% of black children were being raised by a single mother; within four decades, it was more than half.
Antisocial behavior is closely associated with family breakdown, so it’s no surprise that more fatherless homes led to higher violent crime rates. The criminologist Barry Latzer has noted that black male homicide rates had been falling in the 1940s (by 18%) and in the 1950s (by 22%), yet this trend would reverse itself beginning in the late 1960s and continue to worsen for nearly three decades. The political left likes to cite the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. But what about the legacy of the massive welfare-state interventions in the 1960s?
“The greatest twenty-five years of black progress after Emancipation itself came between the early postwar period and around 1973,” writes labor economist Richard Vedder in the current issue of the Independent Review. “The real median income of the black population more than doubled between 1948 and 1973, increasing an astonishing 3 percent per year. If average instead of medians are used to calculate real income, the increase was even larger.”
Another recent analysis of black upward mobility in the 20th century, by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett, reached a similar conclusion. “Overall, African American incomes rose relative to white incomes for the first two-thirds of the century,” they write, and “most scholars agree that income levels by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.”
The welfare state is often discussed in relation to its effect on racial and ethnic minorities, yet crime, single parenting and drug abuse also increased among poor whites in the aftermath of the Great Society. When the government indulges and subsidizes counterproductive behavior, we tend to get more of it. Aside from how all this indiscriminate government benevolence has affected individuals, there’s also the matter of its long-term effect on America’s standard of living. By undermining the development of human capital and allowing—even encouraging—larger and larger swaths of the less-productive population to live off their more-productive brethren, we risk exacerbating income inequality and nurturing class resentments.
Hard-left ideologues who want to turn the U.S. into Western Europe, and politicians eager to hand out goodies in exchange for votes, don’t much care about these trade-offs. But they’re relevant for anyone who wants to understand the relationship between social progress and government “help.”
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal