how did the great society help the economy

Social insurance, worker protections and aid to small farmers, small businesses and electricity cooperatives, helped spread the benefits of economic growth beyond the financial elite. The Great Society

in part dealt with the unfinished business of the New Deal — giving aid to minorities, the poor, the elderly and the sick.

Full Answer

How did the Great Society change the American economy?

The rapid growth of government and the surge of federal economic interventions that occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency—the much-ballyhooed Great Society, whose centerpiece was the War on Poverty—differed from the four preceding surges in twentieth-century U.S. history, each of which had been sparked by war or economic depression.

What was the goal of the Great Society?

The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States launched by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964–65. The main goal was the total elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty,...

What did the Great Society do in the New Deal?

The Great Society in part dealt with the unfinished business of the New Deal—giving aid to minorities, the poor, the elderly, and the sick. But it also broke new ground in the use of government as an instrument for making the economy more efficient, fairer, and more accountable.

What are some of the Great Society programs?

Great Society 1 War On Poverty. In March 1964, Johnson introduced the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Economic Opportunity Act during a special message to Congress. 2 Medicare and Medicaid. ... 3 Head Start and Education Reform. ... 4 Urban Renewal. ... 5 Support for Arts and Humanities. ... 6 Environmental Initiatives. ...

What was the Great Society Backlash?

Sources. The Great Society was an ambitious series of policy initiatives, legislation and programs spearheaded by President Lyndon B. Johnson with the main goals of ending poverty , reducing crime, abolishing inequality and improving the environment.

What were the two groups of Americans that were uninsured by the time Johnson took office?

By the time Johnson took office, mainly two groups of Americans were uninsured: the elderly and the poor.

How many men and women did Johnson train?

In addition, Johnson tasked state and local governments with creating work training programs for up to 200,000 men and women. A national work study program was also established to offer 140,000 Americans the chance to go to college who could otherwise not afford it.

What was the War on Poverty?

War On Poverty. In March 1964, Johnson introduced the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Economic Opportunity Act during a special message to Congress. He’d hoped to help the underprivileged break the poverty cycle by helping them develop job skills, further their education and find work.

What was the impact of the mass exodus to suburbia after World War II?

Urban Renewal. The mass exodus to suburbia after World War II left many major cities in poor condition. Affordable, dependable housing was hard to find, especially for the poor. The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 provided federal funds to cities for urban renewal and development.

How many children have been served by the ed reform?

Since the program’s inception, it has served over 32 million vulnerable children in America. Education reform was also a key part of the Great Society. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed. It guaranteed federal funding for education in school districts whose student majority was low-income.

What is Community Action Program?

a Community Action program for people to tackle poverty within their own communities. the ability for the government to recruit and train skilled American volunteers to serve poverty-stricken communities. loans and guarantees for employers who offered jobs to the unemployed.

What is the combination of a microeconomic and macroeconomic part?

This term “synthesis” refers to the combination of a microeconomic part, which contains the theory of individual markets that had been developed over the preceding two centuries, and a macroeconomic part, which contains the ideas about national economic aggregates advanced by John Maynard Keynes in his landmark 1936 book The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and further developed by Keynes’s followers during the three decades after the book’s publication.

Why can't neoclassical economists move the earth?

But neoclassical economists cannot move the earth with a mathematical lever because they have no place to stand—no “given” information about (presumably fixed) property rights, consumer preferences, resource availabilities, and technical possibilities. What neoclassical economics takes as given is, in reality, revealed only by competitive processes.

What is the Neoclassical Synthesis?

On the microeconomic side, the Neoclassical Synthesis incorporated the so-called New Welfare Economics that had been developed during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In this form microeconomic theory advanced a general-equilibrium theory of the economy’s various markets, identified the conditions for the attainment of equilibrium in this idealized system, and demonstrated that various “problems”—springing from external effects, collective goods, less-than-perfect information, and less-than-perfect competition, among other conditions—would cause the system to settle in a state of overall inefficiency: The value of total output would fall short of the maximum that would have resulted from systemic efficiency, given the economy’s available resources of labor and capital and its existing technology.

What is the key to keeping the economy on a steady growth path?

For the typical macroeconomist of those days, fiscal policy—changes in government spending, taxing, and borrowing— held the key to keeping the economy on a steady growth path. By employing these instruments policymakers could effectively select from a menu of inversely related rates of inflation and unemployment, a tradeoff schedule known as the stable Phillips Curve. As if to certify the completeness of Keynesianism’s conquest, in December 1965 Time magazine put an image of Keynes on its cover and featured a long, laudatory article titled, “We Are All Keynesians Now.”

What was the most prominent body of economic analysis in the 1960s?

Regardless of how political actors in the 1960s might have sought to exploit economic analysis to gain a plausible public-interest rationale for their proposed programs, the most prominent body of economic analysis in those days—the sort taught by the leading lights at Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, and the other great universities—virtually cried out to be exploited in this way. During the mid-1960s the so-called Neoclassical Synthesis achieved its greatest hold on the economics profession.

What were the measures of the Great Society?

Great Society measures such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (1965), the Higher Education Act (1965), the Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966), and the Truth in Lending Act (1968) , as well as many of the consumer-protection and environmental-protection laws and regulations, found ready endorsement among contemporary neoclassical economists, who viewed them as proper means for the correction of purported market failures.

What is the most sophisticated fallacy in economic theory?

As the great economist James Buchanan has observed, the economists’ obsession with general equilibrium gives rise to “the most sophisticated fallacy in [neoclassical] economic theory, the notion that because certain relationships hold in equilibrium the forced interferences designed to implement these relationships will, in fact, be desirable.”.

What is the Neoclassical Synthesis?

On the microeconomic side, the Neoclassical Synthesis incorporated the so-called New Welfare Economics that had been developed during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. In this form, microeconomic theory advanced a general equilibrium theory of the economy’s various markets, identified the conditions for the attainment of equilibrium in this idealized system, and demonstrated that various “problems”—springing from external effects, collective goods, less-than-perfect information, and less-than-perfect competition, among other conditions—would cause the system to settle in a state of overall inefficiency, causing the value of total output to fall short of the maximum that would have resulted from systemic efficiency, given the economy’s available resources of labor and capital and its existing technology. Attainment of such an inefficient state was characterized as a “market failure,” and economists expended enormous efforts in alleging the existence of such market failures in real-world markets and in proposing means (for example, taxes, subsidies, and regulations) by which the government might, in theory, at least, remedy these failures and thus maximize “social welfare.”

What role did economics play in the Great Society?

Although the Great Society should be understood as primarily a political phenomenon—a vast conglomeration of government policies and actions based on political stances and objectives—economists and economic analysis played important supporting roles in the overall drama. Even when political actors could not have cared less about economic analysis, they were usually at pains to cloak their proposals in some sort of economic rationale. If much of this rhetoric now seems to be little more than shabby window dressing, we might well remind ourselves that the situation in this regard is no better now than it was then—witness, for example, the stampede of mainstream economists back to vulgar Keynesian remedies in wake of the economic crisis that assumed panic proportions in 2008. [14]

What were the groups that organized the Great Society?

While longstanding lobbies for business, labor unions, farmers, and middle-class professional groups continued to operate, many new interest groups organized and gained political clout on behalf of so-called “oppressed minorities”: women, Indians, Chicanos, students, homosexuals, the handicapped, the elderly , and many others, none of whom had been directly represented as such to an important extent in U.S. politics. These groups demanded that the federal government solve a variety of racial, urban, employment, and consumer problems, real and imagined. As Conkin notes,

What happened after the Civil Rights Revolution?

After 1965, as the civil rights revolution dissolved into urban riots and violent splinter groups and as the growing U.S. engagement in Vietnam lengthened American casualty lists and increased Pentagon outlays, the public first soured and then turned increasingly against both LBJ’s domestic program and his foreign war. By the beginning of 1968, if not earlier, the president had conceded the impossibility of his reelection, and his leading advisers had lost much of their previous enthusiasm for the administration’s crusades at home and abroad. Although Richard M. Nixon was elected in 1968, many elements of the Great Society lived on, and some were extended and made ever more expensive, especially the food stamp program, Medicaid, and Medicare. Indeed, the currently looming fiscal train wreck associated primarily with the federal medical-care programs attests that in fundamental ways, the U.S. economy continues to suffer grave damage as a consequence of programs initiated during the Great Society.

What were the political developments of 1964?

More prosaic political developments also played an important role. Lyndon Johnson, who had begun his political career as a New Dealer and political horse-trader in Texas, possessed not only boundless energy and ambition, but also keen political instincts and skills; he knew how to move Congress in the direction he wanted it to go. Moreover, the elections of 1964 gave the Democrats huge majorities in both houses of Congress and brought into office an extraordinarily leftish group of freshman legislators. According to Aaron, “No administration since Franklin Roosevelt’s first had operated subject to fewer political constraints than President Johnson’s.” [10]

What did the corporate elite vote for in the 1964 election?

The nation’s corporate elite, abandoning its traditional preference for the GOP, voted for the party that had stimulated sales, fueled profits, and lowered corporate taxes. An estimated 60 percent or more of the Business Council—the semi-official link between the corporations and the government—favored LBJ. The lion’s share of the big contributions flowed into his campaign coffers. And on September 3 [1964] a group of corporate leaders met in the White House to organize a business committee for Johnson’s re-election. Its forty-five founding members included Henry Ford II, Edgar Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum, Joseph Block of Inland Steel, two members of Eisenhower’s Cabinet, and several New York bankers. Corporate liberalism paid big dividends for the Democrats at last. [9]

What percentage of the business council favored Lbj?

An estimated 60 percent or more of the Business Council—the semi-official link between the corporations and the government—favored LBJ. The lion’s share of the big contributions flowed into his campaign coffers.

How many chapters are there in The Great Society?

Ginzberg, Eli and Robert M. Solow (eds.) The Great Society: Lessons for the Future ISBN 0-465-02705-9 (1974), 11 chapters on each program

What did Johnson do in 1966?

Laws were passed to extend the Food Stamp Program, to expand consumer protection, to improve safety standards, to train health professionals, to assist handicapped Americans, and to further urban programs.

What was the Great Society's contribution to the environment?

has suggested that the Great Society's main contribution to the environment was an extension of protections beyond those aimed at the conservation of untouched resources. In a message he transmitted to Congress, President Johnson said:

What was the Kennedy Center for the Arts?

Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to the assassinated president. Fundraising for the original cultural center had been poor prior to legislation creating the Kennedy Center, which passed two months after the president's death and provided $23 million for construction. The Kennedy Center opened in 1971.

What was the most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society?

The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. The Kennedy Administration had been contemplating a federal effort against poverty. Johnson, who, as a teacher, had observed extreme poverty in Texas among Mexican-Americans, launched an "unconditional war on poverty" in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger, illiteracy, and unemployment from American life. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs.

What was the most important achievement of the Great Society?

Historian Alan Brinkley has suggested that the most important domestic achievement of the Great Society may have been its success in translating some of the demands of the civil rights movement into law. Four civil rights acts were passed, including three laws in the first two years of Johnson's presidency.

What is the Naked Society?

The Naked Society is a 1964 book on privacy by Vance Packard. The book argues that changes in technology are encroaching on privacy and could create a society in the future with radically different privacy standards. Packard criticized advertisers' unfettered use of private information to create marketing schemes.