johnsons great society

Tackling poverty and unemployment

• Economic opportunity act of 1964 – created the office of economic opportunity (OEO), which had the task of co ordinating the war on poverty.

• VISTA (volunteers in service to America) gave middle class people the opportunity to directly help the needy in the us.

• By 1968, 3000 people had volunteered.

• Community action programmes (CAPS) - the aim to allow poor t to play a part in federal programmes.

• But were eventually taken over by militants who criticised LBJ for not doing enough.

• Introduction of job corps – to improve the skills of unemployed inner-city noughts, training was done in camps and faced discipline problems.

In February 1965 Johnson proudly informed congress of progress

• Fifty-three Job Corps centres that provide job training were receiving thousands of applications a day.

• Ninety thousand adults were enrolled in basic education programmes.

• Eight thousand volunteers in VISTA

• 17$ distributed in rural loans in 1968.

Johsons achievements

• Head start – enabled poor pre-school children to catch up with older children before beginning school – eight million.

• Upward bounds – linked higher education institutions to poorer students with college potential.

• Food stamp programmes

• A thirty-five-cent rise in the minimum wage.

• Families in poverty dropped from 40 million in 1959 to 28 million in 1968.

• Big democratic majority in congress

• expenditure on the poor had increased from $13 billion in 1963 to $20 billion in 1966.

•  It costs more to put a ghetto youth into the Job Corps than into Harvard

• ⅓ of non-white families still lived below the poverty line.

Improving education

• Schools were overcrowded and run down, and there was a shortage of good teachers.

• Johnson persuaded Congress to double deferral expenditure on education to eight billion.

Eight million had less than five years of schooling.

The ESEA, 1965

•  Federal funding to aid deprived children.

• The act allocated $1 billion a year to schools with a high concentration of low-income children.

• The Act also gave aid to church-run schools. In 1968, the Act was amended, resulting in the Bilingual Education Act, offering more aid to non-English speakers.

• The ESEA,, as an antipoverty programme, local officials made sure it never was In 1985, the National Institute of Education estimated that half the expenditure had gone to children living above the poverty line.

• Difficult for the federal government to extend its reach into local school districts.

The HEA, 1965

• The Act provided loans for students to pay college fees, allowing many children from low-income families to have a university education.

• Eleven million of them benefited from the $650 million it provided. By 1970, 25% of college students received some financial aid.

• The importance of the Act is demonstrated by the fact that it was reauthorised by Congress 8 times.

• Millions of children had benefited from federal aid to education,

Housing and urban problems

• The 1965 Housing and Urban Development Act provided for the construction of 240,000 houses and $2.9m for urban renewal.

• Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Act of 1966. The federal government offered local governments 80% grants to deal with issues such as crime prevention, healthcare, and job creation.

• $1.2 billion, the programme was underfunded.

• Omnibus Housing Act (1965) financed rent supplements and $8 billion worth of low- and moderate-income housing in the ghettos.

• The Housing Act proposed to build twenty-six million homes in ten years.

$1.7m in funds. There were few planning restrictions on developers as LBJ wanted the houses built quickly, and the Act led to the building of cheap, poorly built homes

Johnson's achievements

• ⅘ of the Detroit ghetto rioters arrested in 1967

• The minority housing problem was surely too great for any one president to solve.

Medicare and Medicaid, 1965

• Established Medicare (federal health insurance for the elderly and people with disabilities) and Medicaid in the Social Security Act of 1965.

• It provided medical care for those 65 years old and above who did not have health insurance.

• Over nineteen million Social Security recipients registered for the programme.

• Medicaid was a programme designed to aid the poor who had no medical coverage from insurance. This was financed by both the federal and state governments and was administered by the states.

• Healthcare for poorer citizens has increased from $1.3 billion to over $2 billion.

• Varied in impact and quality from state to state.

Johnson’s achievements

• healthcare revolution

• far more expensive than Johnson anticipated. For example, because the legislation allowed hospitals and doctors to set the fees.

• Medicare and Medicaid 1976, the problem of reasonably priced care for all Americans remained.

Johnson’s achievement in domestic policy

• Gross National Product increased by 7% in 1964,

• Tax Reduction Act of 1964 cut taxes by $10 billion.

• This left the city underfunded, exacerbating the issue of inner-city decline.

Rise of silent majority

• Richard Nixon accepted the republican nomination for presidency in august 1968.

• 3^rd November 1969, Nixon addressed the American people.

• Nixon called for ‘peace with honour’ and proposed handing over most of the fighting to the south Vietnamese.

• Nixon’s silent majority were those who did not protests the war.

• Led to a backlash of student demonstrations, those students who were born in the ‘baby boomers’ were brought up in a traditional American family where patriotism was a common place.

• Counterculture particularly offended the Christian church communities as they were often offered by women’s groups which legalised abortion.

• The Christian right became increasingly important source of support for the republic party.

• Nixon narrowly won the presidential elections of 1968, partly due to democratic disunity and the voters who wanted a return to the Christian values.

• The silent majority formed a bedrock of those who supported the republican party and party the reason he won a landslide victory in 1972.