Sally Steenland: The conservative fairy tale about government

  When people tell stories rooted in fantasy, they’re called fairy tales. Such was the case last fall when Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) spoke at an anti-poverty forum at the Heritage Foundation. His remarks spun a mythical tale of our nation’s past, when kind, hard-working men and women helped their neighbors and didn’t need the big, bad government. According to Sen. Lee, a free-market economy and a volunteer society were all we needed to thrive. These two magical ingredients supposedly spurred "millions of ordinary Americans to make our economy very wealthy and our society truly rich."

50 Years after LBJ’s War on Poverty

  Fifty years ago, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared an "unconditional War on Poverty" in his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964. The War on Poverty created a number of important federal and state initiatives that remain in place today—from Head Start to nutrition assistance to Medicare and Medicaid. These initiatives, coupled with the civil rights advances of the era and the overall strong economy in the 1960s, led to a reduction in the number of people living in poverty from around 19 percent to a historic low of 11.1 percent by the early 1970s.