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Old 05-20-2011, 12:10 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,871,363 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pman View Post
Yes, civil rights was a good thing but that's not what we're talking about here.
It was a big part of the Great Society.

Quote:
I'd also say that you're citation of poverty facts is specious at best. poverty rates were declining prior to the passing of the Great Society calling into question your basic assumption that it was the laws that produced those improvements.
The rate of poverty decline accelerated, as did the rate of educational attainment improvements, and so on. And the acceleration was particularly stark in the targeted populations: seniors, children, and minorities.

Quote:
it was economic forces that caused the dip in poverty rates. specifically, a growing economy with good jobs where rising incomes was more evenly disbursed among classes.
First, this is inapplicable to the elderly, and only partially applicable to children. That was part of why the Great Society targeted those groups: the growing wealth of the nation after WWII was not doing as much as it could to aid those who were not current participants in the labor force.

Second, this is part of why you can't separate out the civil rights components of the Great Society and treat them as irrelevant to the economic components. Educational, housing, and employment discrimination was preventing women and minorities from gaining fair access to those opportunities. And thus the civil rights component of the Great Society programs helps explain why African-Americans and other minorities saw an accelerated decline in poverty rates, accelerated increase in educational attainment, and so on: they were being provided improved access to those opportunities.

Quote:
obviously claims that the great society rather than the civil rights movement was solely responsible for gains for african americans is also specious.
Again, the civil rights laws were PART of the Great Society program, not something completely distinct, and these various programs worked together to the great benefit of African-Americans.

Quote:
you cannot completely overlook the devastating impact generational welfare had on urban neighborhoods (and it's urban neighborhoods we're talking about rather than rural).
I'm not sure what your jargon "generational welfare" means. If you are claiming that programs that helped poor seniors and poor children necessarily devastated urban neighborhoods, you are going to need to flesh that argument out for me.

I also don't think you can separate out urban from rural issues, because people are mobile, and in this period mobility was increasing. Specifically, the rapid reduction in rural poverty and increase in rural educational attainment led to new groups moving to cities--many of them African-Americans, but also white people from rural Appalachia and so forth.

As I noted before, this did help make some problems worse for some cities. But the alternative would have been worse in general.

Quote:
In reality, it wasn't the ONLY cause for urban revival but suffice it to say, a large chunk of the urban renaissance did, in fact, come after 1996.
It was already well in swing before then in most cities. I really don't see the connection you seem to think exists. In fact, based on timing I'd suggest a much more relevant change was the adoption and expansion of the EITC. But really, I think it had to do with a simple bounce-back from an unnatural situation--basically, a new generation of wealthier white people realized that they could quickly take back large chunks of cities and not have to worry about persistent concentrated poverty or crime in their immediate locale.

Quote:
simply because poverty rates declined in the 1960's doesn't mean the laws passed by the great society caused it.
To sum up the point above, the basic evidence is that the rate of poverty reduction accelerated among the populations specifically being targeted. That is good prima facie evidence the programs in question helped achieve their intended ends.

Quote:
the flip side of that is that rising poverty will not be solved by more welfare but by structural changes in our economic competitiveness that allows value creating jobs, not just the employment of capital, to compete.
The lesson of recent decades is that good overall growth in the economy, or of total income, or so on, doesn't necessarily benefit every group of people, and in fact it may only benefit a few people. For the benefits of economic growth to be widespread, you have to work to provide equal access to those benefits, and you have to insure people against things like disability, longevity, temporary loss of work, and so on.

I agree that "welfare" is only a small part of that (although it is larger if you insist on calling all public insurance programs "welfare"). We also need policies that address education, housing, transportation, health care, retirement savings, and so forth.

Quote:
I think what we've learned over the past decade is the a good charter can take many of the same low income students and teach them successfully...but also just because a school is a charter, doesn't mean it's a good school (though in some cases, parents aren't even getting basic safety at their local ps much less education)
The evidence that charter schools can systematically outperform traditional public schools is weak to non-existent. I more see them as a quick route to parents taking control of their local public schools and resetting them in ways that make sense for the current population of potential students. As such, though, they help solve the chicken-and-egg problem I described above.

Incidentally, I agree that parents paying taxes and using private schools isn't necessarily a bad thing in the short run from the perspective of a purely self-interested school district administrator--but that is part of the problem, because that can still be a bad state of affairs for the kids left behind in the public schools, regardless of funding levels, and in the long run it can be bad for the social and economic health of the relevant jurisdiction.
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Old 05-20-2011, 12:39 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,871,363 times
Reputation: 2910
Not the ideal chart because it doesn't go back far enough, but nonetheless you can see the acceleration in the downward trend among children and seniors:

http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/files/images/med/Poverty_age_all-years_without_titles_2.png (broken link)

The fact that children and seniors closed the gap on the 18-64 group shows it wasn't all background trends, and that the targeted efforts of the Great Society likely helped.

Subsequently we managed to solidify those gains with seniors, but we did much worse when it comes to children--there were lots of periods of back-sliding, and although the mid-late 1990s was another good period for poor children, it just wasn't enough to overcome the collective effects of the other recent periods.
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Old 05-20-2011, 01:29 PM
 
Location: The canyon (with my pistols and knife)
14,169 posts, read 22,592,446 times
Reputation: 17328
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
Not the ideal chart because it doesn't go back far enough, but nonetheless you can see the acceleration in the downward trend among children and seniors:



The fact that children and seniors closed the gap on the 18-64 group shows it wasn't all background trends, and that the targeted efforts of the Great Society likely helped.

Subsequently we managed to solidify those gains with seniors, but we did much worse when it comes to children--there were lots of periods of back-sliding, and although the mid-late 1990s was another good period for poor children, it just wasn't enough to overcome the collective effects of the other recent periods.
But according to that chart, there was effectively no change in the rate of poverty for anybody except the elderly between 1965 and 2000.
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Old 05-20-2011, 01:47 PM
 
Location: Philly
10,220 posts, read 16,729,984 times
Reputation: 2971
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
Not the ideal chart because it doesn't go back far enough, but nonetheless you can see the acceleration in the downward trend among children and seniors:
it shows that raising the social security payments increased senior income and not much else. that will likely reverse since demographic trends turn unfavorable. as noted social security is a ponzi scheme, it's "return" depends on ever increasing numbers paying into the system. overall, you can see poverty rates were already in decline. it's also interesting that 1965, when much of the GS programs kicked in, doesn't support your claims...particularly when you look over a more meaningful ten year period.
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Old 05-20-2011, 02:05 PM
 
Location: Philly
10,220 posts, read 16,729,984 times
Reputation: 2971
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
It was a big part of the Great Society.
it wasn't part of the war on poverty.

Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
The rate of poverty decline accelerated, as did the rate of educational attainment improvements, and so on. And the acceleration was particularly stark in the targeted populations: seniors, children, and minorities.
actually, that isn't the case, and educational attainment was raised by lowering standards which brings us full circle. it was this false attainment that, in part, led to the destruction of urban school systems. as schools were constantly pushed to show progress, particularly with minorities, it became an absolute joke. people graduated with few basic skills but hey, the numbers looked good.


Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
First, this is inapplicable to the elderly, and only partially applicable to children. That was part of why the Great Society targeted those groups: the growing wealth of the nation after WWII was not doing as much as it could to aid those who were not current participants in the labor force.
that's only partially true. today's working stiff is tomorrow's elderly. part of the reason PA is becoming slightly younger is because it got older a long time ago/ demographic shifts take a long time to play out. my grandmother lived through the depression and was able to save very little in that decade and, consequently, had little to retire on over her teachers pension (worse, of course, she retired in the 70's when her holdings did nothing for another ten years). my parents didn't live through the depression and have saved a lot more. they had their holdings in more aggressive stuff in the 80's and 90's and benefitted from the property boom.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
Again, the civil rights laws were PART of the Great Society program, not something completely distinct, and these various programs worked together to the great benefit of African-Americans.
but not part of the war on poverty, which had its most devastating impact on cities.



Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
I'm not sure what your jargon "generational welfare" means. If you are claiming that programs that helped poor seniors and poor children necessarily devastated urban neighborhoods, you are going to need to flesh that argument out for me.
it created a system where people lived and died in poverty. this seniors and children stuff is merely diversionary.

Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
I also don't think you can separate out urban from rural issues, because people are mobile, and in this period mobility was increasing.
sure you can. maybe not completely, but certainly different policies have different affects on different areas.




Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
It was already well in swing before then in most cities.
wrong. since the mid 90's when people who had never worked a day in their lives entered the workforce and public housing began to be downsized, cities have come back...specifically in areas that were once most affected by these things.



Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
To sum up the point above, the basic evidence is that the rate of poverty reduction accelerated among the populations specifically being targeted. That is good prima facie evidence the programs in question helped achieve their intended ends.
not really. you are basically only looking at what you deem successes and ignoring the rest. what really happened was a lasting impact on seniors (although some credit is due to greenspan who kept it going in the 80's) but the rest had a short term impact and faded. longer term, it stopped working, helped destroy school systems, establish generational poverty, particularly among african americans, and lock that poverty into high concentrations in urban inner cities.



Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
The lesson of recent decades is that good overall growth in the economy, or of total income, or so on, doesn't necessarily benefit every group of people, and in fact it may only benefit a few people.
actually in order for you to learn something, you'd have to look at all decades. the type of growth and where it's occurring is, perhaps, more important than overall growth. the feds are all too reliant on inaccurate measures like GDP.

Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
I agree that "welfare" is only a small part of that (although it is larger if you insist on calling all public insurance programs "welfare").
that's true on a national level but on more localized level, welfare had an outsized impact as did the drug war.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
We also need policies that address education, housing, transportation, health care, retirement savings, and so forth.
which was my original point. obviously great society primary educational policies failed so it's time for some new ones...which is exactly the point I originally made.



Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
The evidence that charter schools can systematically outperform traditional public schools is weak to non-existent.
which is what i said. OTOH, certain charter schools have shown they can systematically outperform the local schools...particularly at the HS level.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
I more see them as a quick route to parents taking control of their local public schools and resetting them in ways that make sense for the current population of potential students.
which is difficult to do with large schools run from a central bureaucracy as described earlier.
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Old 05-20-2011, 02:12 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,871,363 times
Reputation: 2910
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gnutella View Post
But according to that chart, there was effectively no change in the rate of poverty for anybody except the elderly between 1965 and 2000.
I don't quite agree. First, children seemed to bottom more like 1968 or so, and given the early 1970s recession, I'd say that second bottom around 1972 is an equally good date to pick.

Second, the poverty rate for children did in fact change after 1972--it went up. In fact it went up a lot overall in the next 20 years to 1993 or so. Between 1993 or so and 2000, it went back down somewhat, and now has gone back up again between 2000 and present.
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Old 05-20-2011, 03:03 PM
 
20,273 posts, read 32,871,363 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pman View Post
it wasn't part of the war on poverty.
Well, it actually was, as I explained previously, since combating discrimination in employment, education, housing, and so on was part of reducing the extremely high poverty rates among African-Americans.

But in any event, we were originally talking about the Great Society, and that term unambiguously includes the civil rights laws of that era.

Quote:
actually, that isn't the case
Actually, it is. People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. (More on this in the conclusion below).

Quote:
and educational attainment was raised by lowering standards which brings us full circle.
That is also false. The Great Society programs for the first time introduced significant federal funding into the U.S. public education system, which directly helped improve many schools. I think people today sometimes don't understand exactly how terrible some schools were prior to the modern era.

Those programs also introduced a bunch of mechanisms that helped poorer people pay for college, which is why college attainment accelerated so much, and the descendants of those programs continue to help less wealthy people pay for college today. None of that has anything to do with reducing standards.

Quote:
my grandmother lived through the depression and was able to save very little in that decade and, consequently, had little to retire on over her teachers pension (worse, of course, she retired in the 70's when her holdings did nothing for another ten years). my parents didn't live through the depression and have saved a lot more. they had their holdings in more aggressive stuff in the 80's and 90's and benefitted from the property boom.
I'm not sure where you are trying to go with your anecdotes. We know that senior poverty continued to be a huge problem as we entered in the 1960s--this is long after the Great Depression was over. We also know that senior medical bills were a significant part of that problem, because seniors were proving uninsurable. And that problem would have gotten much, much worse in light of subsequent increases in health care costs.

I really don't know anything about your parents, so I have no idea if they are representative of most people. But we do know that most of the elderly today are getting most of their income from Social Security. And most of the elderly would have no way to get health insurance or otherwise pay for their medical bills if not for Medicare and Medicaid.

Quote:
but not part of the war on poverty, which had its most devastating impact on cities.
Again, anti-discrimination efforts were a very significant part of reducing poverty among disfavored minorities and women.

Quote:
it created a system where people lived and died in poverty.
Again, you'll have to do better than just state talking points. People were living and dying in poverty long before the Great Society came along, and in fact more people were living and dying in poverty before the Great Society came along. Meanwhile, we haven't exactly been trying to build on those programs consistently in recent decades. What we do know is that a lot of people were able to escape poverty around that time, and specifically the people the programs were trying to target saw the greatest reduction in poverty rates.

Quote:
this seniors and children stuff is merely diversionary.
So the Great Society programs specifically targeted poverty among seniors, children, and minorities, and then poverty rates accelerate downward among seniors, children, and minorities, but mentioning all that is "diversionary"?

Quote:
sure you can. maybe not completely, but certainly different policies have different affects on different areas.
Again, that is so vague I can't figure out what you are trying to say. We know that as upward economic mobility among the rural poor and minority poor (with lots of overlap between those categories) increased in the 1960s and into the 1970s, the rate of minority and/or rural people moving into central cities accelerated. I can't figure out if you are saying this dynamic is good or bad, or if you are trying to change the topic so you don't have to answer that question, or what else you might be trying to say. But if you want to understand how the Great Society programs impacted central cities adversely, you can't really ignore this dynamic.

Quote:
wrong. since the mid 90's when people who had never worked a day in their lives entered the workforce and public housing began to be downsized, cities have come back...specifically in areas that were once most affected by these things.
Wrong yourself. It hasn't been "since the mid 90's", since the revitalization of many central cities started long before then. That claim is really coming out of nowhere.

I do agree that dismantling the old projects and replacing them with new mixed-income developments and vouchers has been helpful for cities (this is a new topic--previously you were claiming this was all about the 1996 welfare reform).

You are actually on much better ground when it comes to timing there: Section 8 started subsidizing private development of affordable housing in 1978, and the Section 8 voucher program started in 1983. Boston privatized the Columbia Point Housing Projects in 1984, leading to the mixed-income Harbor Point Apartments. HOPE VI then adopted that model for dealing with failed housing projects as an official HUD program in 1992.

So there was in fact a gradually increasing shift away from affordable housing on the old projects model that was concurrent with the revitalization of many central cities. I don't think that was the only relevant factor, but it certainly helped in some areas.

Quote:
not really. you are basically only looking at what you deem successes and ignoring the rest.
I think it is clear who amongst us is cherry-picking.

Quote:
what really happened was a lasting impact on seniors (although some credit is due to greenspan who kept it going in the 80's) but the rest had a short term impact and faded. longer term, it stopped working
Again, the later parts of the story are way more complicated than that. You can't just ignore seniors, since they were a major target of the Great Society. As for poorer minorities and children, it has been up and down since then, basically as a function of how much we are actually trying.

And I think it is pretty clear (to the non-religious--see below) that if you did things like end federal spending on primary and secondary education, end federal subsidies for higher education, end SCHIP, Medicaid, and food stamps, and so forth, things would undoubtedly get much worse for poorer minorities and children. What we could also be doing to do better, however, is a good topic of conversation--a lot of developed countries do better than us on these issues, so looking to those other countries for tips would be a good idea.

Quote:
helped destroy school systems, establish generational poverty, particularly among african americans, and lock that poverty into high concentrations in urban inner cities.
This is really just mythmaking of the kind I described above. Things were not just hunkydory for minorities and poor children prior to the Great Society coming along and ruining everything. Things got much better, and despite reversals during certain subsequent periods, things are still better now.

Quote:
actually in order for you to learn something, you'd have to look at all decades. the type of growth and where it's occurring is, perhaps, more important than overall growth. the feds are all too reliant on inaccurate measures like GDP.
Oh yeah, I remember this. As a last resort, if the data makes your talking points look false, claim the data must be false instead.

I don't really want to go through that nonsense again. For people interested in what the data says, I think I have made my point, and there is no use arguing with the religious (those who take certain things on faith regardless of what the data says). So I will end my participation here.
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