Nearly half a century ago, I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted as a foot soldier in America’s War on Poverty. Today, I’m still on the front lines, working to move people out of dependency and into employment. But with an important difference: I’ve become fed up with the useless policies that I once supported, and I’m trying to change the strategy of our bogged-down army.
We know for certain that income transfers, the preferred tactic of generations of liberals, have utterly failed to end poverty. My firsthand experience with welfare clients has shown me why: being on the dole encourages dependency. Working at a real job, by contrast, is the surest way for a person to climb out of poverty. Accordingly, the surest way for the government to fight poverty is to eliminate cash assistance almost entirely and offer jobs instead.
During his all-too-brief presidency, John F. Kennedy signaled that he wanted to reform the nation’s Depression-era welfare system by giving “a hand, not a handout” to the poor. As Charles Murray noted in his magisterial study Losing Ground, Kennedy’s small initiative, which “consisted of a few training programs and other rehabilitative efforts amounting to only $59 million in the 1963 budget, . . . represented a major departure nonetheless,” since it shifted welfare policy “away from the dole and toward escape from the dole.” When President Lyndon Johnson expanded Kennedy’s program into the War on Poverty, he likewise wanted not to mire generations in dependency but to free them from it. “The days of the dole in this country are numbered,” Johnson promised at the signing ceremony for the War on Poverty legislation in August 1964.
http://city-journal.org/2012/22_4_poverty.html

