Lyndon B. Johnson declared a war on poverty during his presidency, but what President Johnson didn’t realize, is that all of the programs that would be put in place to end poverty would cause the very thing he declared war on. Dr. Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University, explains these factors in the “War on Poverty” and how they have affected the poor community in a video called, “Good Intentions.” Dr. Williams explains three main reason as to why we are losing the war on poverty, the first beginning with the school systems. In the early days of 1960, education funding was well below one billion dollars per year. However this number had risen nine-hundred percent within the next four years, but even though funding for the educational system had been rising, the quality had been steadily decreasing. Years ago, teachers received more than fifty cents for every dollar spent on public education, but today, that amount has dropped to forty cents for every dollar. The Public education system had simply crumbled underneath the new …show more content…
Whether or not the poor children made it through school or dropped out, they all ran into the federal and state regulations which made it difficult to find a job. Jobs started getting scarce when the minimum wage laws were put into place. This law prevented employers from paying workers below a certain amount, meaning that they were forced to pay workers for than what they were worth. This badly affected the poor community by limiting the amount of risks the employers were willing to take or even afford. An example of another regulation put into place by a state government is the amount of money to acquire a taxi cab license in Philadelphia. This amount is $20,000, being that this price is way too high for any one person to handle, this prevented many people from creating their own taxi service and working for