Being of a certain adolescent age at the time, I distinctly remember watching (on a black-and-white television set) then-President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) deliver his 1964 State of the Union address, during which he declared America’s “War on Poverty” and challenged Congress with these words:

“Unfortunately, many Americans live on the outskirts of hope — some because of their poverty, and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity. This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America. I urge this Congress and all Americans to join with me in that effort. It will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won. The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”

I also recall the disbelieving look on my father’s face when I turned to him after LBJ finished speaking and said, “You know, Dad, it would be great if he can really do all of that.” It instantly became obvious that Dad was impressed by neither my callow optimism, nor LBJ’s glowing promises of “better schools, and better health, and better homes, and better training, and better job opportunities to help more Americans, especially young Americans, escape from squalor and misery and unemployment rolls where other citizens help to carry them.”

Johnson further declared that “whatever the cause, our joint federal-local effort must pursue poverty, pursue it wherever it exists — in city slums and small towns, in sharecropper shacks or in migrant worker camps, on Indian Reservations, among whites as well as Negroes, among the young as well as the aged, in the boom towns and in the depressed areas.”

As it turns out 62 years later, Dad’s skepticism was right on target because a rapidly growing body of data from official, academic, and nonprofit sources make crystal clear that the federal government spent an estimated $20 trillion without coming even remotely close to achieving the former president’s goal of not only relieving “the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”

It should be noted here that my father was a proud career federal civil servant working for the Air Force at Tinker Field in Oklahoma City for 27 years before a medical condition forced his retirement. At the heart of Dad’s skepticism about LBJ’s declaration was his deep understanding gleaned from a personal insider understanding of how government bureaucracy typically functions and misfunctions.

The government’s distressing record of utter failure decade after decade in the War on Poverty is thoroughly documented in a recent analysis written by Tyler Thurman, a Cato Institute research associate, and published by The Daily Economy. As Thurman succinctly puts it: “From 1939 to 1963, absolute full-income poverty plummeted by 29 percentage points, from 48.5% to 19.5%. Then, despite the government pouring trillions of taxpayer dollars into combatting poverty, poverty fell only 15.7% points from 1963 to 2023. Barely half the progress in twice the time.”

That sounds like a crucial fact for federal policymakers, to say nothing of American taxpayers, yet such facts are all-but-never reported by The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, or any of the rest of major outlets in the mainstream media. And even more significant is this: The full story is not only that the government lost its War on Poverty, but that it was the absence of government and a vibrant free enterprise economy in the two-and-a-half decades prior to the conflict’s declaration that liberated more than twice as many people from poverty than did LBJ’s all-out assault paid for with federal tax dollars.

“Before 1964, the main engine of poverty reduction was increases in market income — a measurement that includes wages, salaries, and other forms of income from employment. From 1939 to 1959, market income poverty fell by 26.1 percentage points, nearly all of the 27.3% decline in full-income poverty over the same period. In short, before the rapid expansion of the welfare state, most people were earning their way out of poverty,” Thurman observed.

Thurman doesn’t stop there, he also points out multiple fascinating datapoints highlighted by George Mason University’s Professor Don Boudreaux’s “hockey stick of prosperity” that make clear a similar pattern is found in many places where economic freedom enables millions of men, women, and children to climb out of the abject poverty that generations of their ancestors assumed was their permanent plight.

Take life expectancy: Before the Western world’s Industrial Revolution and the growth of economic freedom (particularly in Britain and the U.S.), adults could expect to live 30-40 years — while today it’s not at all uncommon for Americans to live four score (80 years). Similarly, before the Industrial Revolution, one of every five infants born alive would die before reaching the age of five years old. Today, only one in 200 such children passes away before reaching their fifth year. And the average American male then was about 5’4” tall, compared to today’s 5’10” in height.

Thurman adds that “the most powerful anti-poverty program had no enrollment forms, caseworkers, or spending bills. It was a growing economy that helped millions of people earn their way to a better life. As such, subsequent efforts should focus on removing government-created barriers to economic growth, occupational opportunities, and job market entry, rather than adding another layer of expensive, inefficient wealth transfers. …When analyzing the best ways to combat poverty, policymakers should reflect on whether the welfare state was ever the right tool for the job.”

Let it also be noted that such realities won’t surprise anybody familiar with the Bible, which is replete with warnings about the perils for people and nations of failing to encourage hard work, individual responsibility, and personal accountability. To cite just one example, Proverbs 13:4 reminds us that “the soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied.”