Basis for comparison
This post links to two different reports by The Heritage Foundation and Demos, two institutions occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum of U.S. politics. The basis for comparing these posts is three-fold: both reports explicitly mention Lyndon B. Johnson and his anti-poverty initiatives act as a historical frame for both reports’ conclusions; both reports invoke history as a means of addressing a contemporary problem; each report takes a different form, the assessment of results vs. the proposal of initiatives. Please take the time to survey these reports in order to better determine which form your own research assignment will take!
The reports
From the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation: “The War on Poverty After 50 Years” (September 15, 2014) by Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield, a report assessing the results of trillions of dollars spent on anti-poverty initiatives (2014):
In his January 1964 State of the Union address, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed, “This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.” In the 50 years since that time, U.S. taxpayers have spent over $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs. Adjusted for inflation, this spending (which does not include Social Security or Medicare) is three times the cost of all U.S. military wars since the American Revolution. Yet progress against poverty, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau, has been minimal, and in terms of President Johnson’s main goal of reducing the “causes” rather than the mere “consequences” of poverty, the War on Poverty has failed completely. In fact, a significant portion of the population is now less capable of self-sufficiency than it was when the War on Poverty began.
In contrast Robert Hilton Smith and Lew Daly, analysts for the liberal think tank Demos, authored the 2014 report “Underwriting Good Jobs: How to Place Over 20 Million Americans on a Pathway to the Middle Class Using Federal Purchasing Power” [PDF] which, as indicated by the title, advocates for an increased role for the federal government. From the executive summary posted here:
This report presents new research on the scope of federally-supported employment in the private economy and shows how, using our over 1.3 trillion dollars in federal purchasing, the President of the United States can place over twenty million Americans on a pathway to the middle class.
And later:
When faced by past crises of this magnitude, our greatest presidents have not hesitated to make full use of their executive powers to take transformative action. Franklin Roosevelt brought millions of workers into the middle class by requiring federal contractors to sit down at the bargaining table with unions in order to end widespread labor unrest. Responding to citizens’ moral outrage and mass unrest during the civil rights era, Lyndon Johnson opened the door to economic opportunity for women and minorities by ordering every firm doing business with the federal government to implement affirmative action and nondiscrimination policies.
Extra Effort
Another great comparison might be the “work” section of the AEI/Brookings report mentioned in this post vs. the labor initiatives put forth by the Demos report: how is the problem of “work” addressed by both reports? When analyzing an argument, look for the claim(s) made by the authors, the reasons for their claims, and the evidence/data that they use to support their argument. Do the conclusions match the data? What method of analysis is used in each report? (A helpful resource that you may want to check out: the chapter in the book Writing Analytically, located in the Google Drive Folder, for more info about claims vs. reasons vs. evidence!)
