The GOP’s impoverished anti-poverty platform

Context Florida, Daniel Tilson

Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th President of The United States, must be spinning in his grave and cursing up a storm this week.

You see, to mark the 50th anniversary of LBJ’s landmark ‘War On Poverty’, congressional conservatives like Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio are taking turns trying to discredit it.

First came a video released by Sen. Rubio posing the question:

“Isn’t it time to declare Big Government’s War on Poverty a failure?”

It’s not exactly a new script.

The GOP has been selling a storyline for a while now that because there’s still rampant poverty in America, the social safety net programs that have helped so many for so long are a failure.

Uh-huh, tell that to your grandparents on Medicare.

Tell that to your old friends who fell on hard times and got a little help with their preschoolers from Head Start.

In point of fact, the array of programs LBJ unveiled in 1964 lowered the percentage of Americans living in poverty by more than 40 percent in their first six years of existence.

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