Inner city

In the 1964 President Johnson said “when the family collapses it is the children that suffer and when it collapses on a massive scale the whole community suffers”. Part of Johnson’s Great Society was the so called War on Poverty, which was designed to help the poor black inner city community. One of the main parts of this program was how to deal with the problems of single mothers. The solution was to put them up at government expense in their own apartment and offer food and health care at no charge. In other words the first time a young girl got in a dispute with her mother all she had to do was have baby and she could have her own home. In 1965 some 25% of black children were born to single moms and today that number is 70%. Experts will tell you that the road out of poverty for young women is to finish high school and not have a child until they are married. Johnson was right when he said it will affect the entire community. Today we have 2.5 black men in prison for every one black man in college. The drop-out rate for blacks is higher even though we went through a period where students were promoted just to get them out of school. This resulted in high school graduates who are barely literate.
The situation would likely have been worse if it were not for abortion. Black’s have 40% of abortions even though they are only 13% of the population. Since there have been 52 million abortions since 1973 this means that 21 million black kids were never born.
In the years since 1965 we have spent 9 trillion dollars on the War on Poverty. This was money taken from those who earned it and given to those who did not. It would have been acceptable to most of the givers if it had worked but it has failed. The poverty rate in 1965 was 13% and today it is 15%.
Over this same time period we have increased spending on education by 300% using inflation adjusted dollars but our test scored have remained constant. Perhaps spending money to solve community problems is not the right approach.