Exactly 42 years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson landed in the Tri-State Airport in Huntington, WV, to detail his plan on fighting the war on poverty in the Appalachians. Johnson’s solution was the same as any other liberal and democrat: more government. After all these years it is good to look back and see what a classic democrat’s solution has really done for West Virginia. Are we any better since 1964?

President Lyndon Johnson greeting supporters at Tri-State Airport in Huntington, April 24, 1964

In Johnson’s term, he increased federal aid to education, shoveled funds into the Appalachia region, created the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Medicare, and Department of Transportation, as well as increased Social Security benefits by 13-percent, liberalized unemployment compensation, and expanded the food stamp program.

So how did Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty,” his 100% liberal panacea succeed?

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy formed a federal-state committee that came to be known as the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission (PARC), and directed it to draw up “a comprehensive program for the economic development of the Appalachian Region.” The resulting program was outlined in an April 1964 report.

President Lyndon B. Johnson used PARC’s report as the basis for legislation developed with the support of Congress. Submitted to Congress in 1964, the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA) was passed early in 1965.

There were five areas the liberals sought to improve: income, population, poverty, education and employment.

Income

According to the PARC report, the median income of Charleston, WV, was $5,862 dollars while the United States earned $6,324 dollars. A difference of $462 dollars or 13%.

In 2005, the median income of West Virginia is $48,412 dollars while the United States earns $62,732 dollars. A difference of $14,320 dollars or 22%.

Population

According to the report, West Virginia had 1,860,421 citizens in 1960. Today we have 1,815,354 citizens: a reduction of 45,067 people! By 2030, the Census Bureau estimates we will have lost an additional 900,000.

Poverty

In 1963, 275,000 people — roughly 15% — lived below the poverty line. Today that number is 17.9%.

Education

Those completing high school and college have increased from 30.6% and 5.2% (respectively) in 1960 to 75.2% and 14.8%. It must be emphasized, however, that West Virginia still trails the national average percentage by 5.2% and 9.6% (respectively) and that in 1960, the difference between college educated West Virginians and the rest of the United States was only 2.7%.

Employment

West Virginia’s unemployment rate in the 1950s was 4.8. It sharply rose in the 1960s to 8.3. 40 years later the unemployment rate has returned to 5.0 in 2005.

There was, however, one positive change with the liberal’s solution: the roads in West Virginia are comprehensive and well maintained. Today they are often used by the youth of this state as those with jobs to find and families to support pack up the car and head to a state that has not had the “privilege” of being fixed by a liberal.

The cruelest irony of it all is the site of Johnson’s 1964 speech, Martin County, Kentucky, is currently ranked as “distressed” by the PARC. “Distressed” is the worst ranking.

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It is easy to point a finger at the liberals and democrats when they fail in their social programs, but where have conservatives, republicans, and those who tout less government intervention succeeded? The answer is New Zealand.

According to Maurice P. McTigue, a former member of New Zealand’s parliament and Ambassador to the United States, New Zealand found themselves in an awful shape thanks to excessive government intervention similar to what is proposed by liberals and democrats: “New Zealand’s per capita income in the period prior to the late 1950s was right around number three in the world, behind the United States and Canada. But by 1984, its per capita income had sunk to 27th in the world, alongside Portugal and Turkey. Not only that, but our unemployment rate was 11.6 percent, we’d had 23 successive years of deficits (sometimes ranging as high as 40 percent of GDP), our debt had grown to 65 percent of GDP, and our credit ratings were continually being downgraded. Government spending was a full 44 percent of GDP, investment capital was exiting in huge quantities, and government controls and micromanagement were pervasive at every level of the economy.”

The solution was deceptively simple. Less government and less spending. “When a reform government was elected in 1984, it identified three problems: too much spending, too much taxing and too much government. The question was how to cut spending and taxes and diminish government’s role in the economy. Well, the first thing you have to do in this situation is to figure out what you’re getting for dollars spent.”

For years liberals have spoken of government programs in terms of number of people helped instead of focusing on solving the problem and holding their propositions accountable by quantifiable, real-world numbers. Between 1960 and today, millions of West Virginians have received federal dollars, but what good is it when we are still in the same economic predicament as before?

New Zealand avoided this pitfall by focusing on policy that worked. “The first purchase that we made from every agency was policy advice. That policy advice was meant to produce a vigorous debate between the government and the agency heads about how to achieve goals like reducing hunger and homelessness. This didn’t mean, by the way, how government could feed or house more people – that’s not important. What’s important is the extent to which hunger and homelessness are actually reduced. In other words, we made it clear that what’s important is not how many people are on welfare, but how many people get off welfare and into independent living.”

“When we started this process with the Department of Transportation, it had 5,600 employees. When we finished, it had 53. When we started with the Forest Service, it had 17,000 employees. When we finished, it had 17. When we applied it to the Ministry of Works, it had 28,000 employees. I used to be Minister of Works, and ended up being the only employee. In the latter case, most of what the department did was construction and engineering, and there are plenty of people who can do that without government involvement. And if you say to me, ‘But you killed all those jobs!’ – well, that’s just not true. The government stopped employing people in those jobs, but the need for the jobs didn’t disappear. I visited some of the forestry workers some months after they’d lost their government jobs, and they were quite happy. They told me that they were now earning about three times what they used to earn – on top of which, they were surprised to learn that they could do about 60 percent more than they used to! The same lesson applies to the other jobs I mentioned.”

“We achieved an overall reduction of 66 percent in the size of government, measured by the number of employees. The government’s share of GDP dropped from 44 to 27 percent. We were now running surpluses, and we established a policy never to leave dollars on the table: We knew that if we didn’t get rid of this money, some clown would spend it. So we used most of the surplus to pay off debt, and debt went from 63 percent down to 17 percent of GDP. We used the remainder of the surplus each year for tax relief. We reduced income tax rates by half and eliminated incidental taxes. As a result of these policies, revenue increased by 20 percent. Yes, Ronald Reagan was right: lower tax rates do produce more revenue.”

I recommend you read the rest of McTigue’s speech. It is quite educational on why and how the conservative model of less government works.