Did ‘The Great Society’ Ruin Society? Buchanan…

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it.”Thus did Mitt Romney supposedly commit the gaffe of the month — for we are not to speak of the poor without unctuous empathy.

Yet, as Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation reports in “Understanding Poverty in the United States: Surprising Facts About America’s Poor,” Mitt was more right about America’s magnanimity than those who bewail her alleged indifference.First, who are the poor?To qualify, a family of four in 2010 needed to earn less than $22,314.

Some 46 million Americans, 15 percent of the population, qualified.And in what squalor were America’s poor forced to live?Well, 99 percent had a refrigerator and stove, two-thirds had a plasma TV, a DVD player and access to cable or satellite, 43 percent were on the Internet, half had a video game system like PlayStation or Xbox.

Three-fourths of the poor had a car or truck, nine in 10 a microwave, 80 percent had air conditioning. In 1970, only 36 percent of the U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.America’s poor enjoy amenities almost no one had in the 1950s, when John K. Galbraith described us as “The Affluent Society.”What about homelessness?

Are not millions of America’s poor on the street at night, or shivering in shelters or crowded tenements?Well, actually,…..

EXCERPT

via Did ‘The Great Society’ Ruin Society?.

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