Are Transfers Replacing Work For America’ Poor?
25th February 2026
President John F. Kennedy once said, “We must find ways of returning far more of our dependent people to independence.”
President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to meet that challenge by launching the War on Poverty in 1964, insisting that its purpose was not to make people “dependent on the generosity of others,” nor merely to “relieve the symptom of poverty,” but to “cure it and, above all, to prevent it.”
Sixty years and some $20 trillion in welfare spending later, that message appears to have gotten lost. Rather than helping the poor climb out of poverty toward self-reliance, government handouts have instead pulled the ladder away by supplanting work as their primary source of income.