![]() ![]() ![]() The variation explained by the model reflects systematic spending in higher poverty areas. Our quantitative findings show that a modest share of the within-state spending is explained by this rich set of covariates (5 to 9 percent versus roughly 37 percent during the New Deal). Department of Defense 2008), and the intensity of sharecropping to proxy for Lee J. Bureau of the Census 1964), riot intensity ( Collins and Margo 2007), the escalation of the Vietnam War (casualty rates from U.S. These county-level data include measures of local demographic characteristics, political importance, local government expenditures and tax revenue per capita ( U.S. Our analysis uses data on OEO grants from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which we link to a variety of other data sources to describe the decade’s complex political economy. Observed funding choices, therefore, provide a great deal of information about the objectives of the Johnson administration during this transformative period of U.S. ![]() These provisions relaxed many of the usual constraints on federal funding choices (for example, cooperation with state and local government officials). This provision encouraged the development of customized programs to combat the root causes of local poverty and also allowed the federal government to work around widespread de jure racial segregation, which had restricted the political participation of African Americans, and de facto exclusion of the poor from the policymaking process. Second, the EOA enabled the federal government to fund local private and nonprofit organizations directly, rather than funneling money through state or local governments. First, the EOA apportioned funding across states according to an index, but it imposed no requirements on how and where to spend money within states. The EOA also contained two radical provisions that facilitate our analysis. 2 This centerpiece legislation created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to coordinate federal antipoverty initiatives and empower the poor to transform their own communities. We analyze how the War on Poverty was fought through the lens of the legislation that came to define it: the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act (EOA). This article contributes a novel quantitative description to the vast narrative, documentary, and oral history of the 1960s political economy. Relative to the large literature that examines the political economy of the New Deal, little quantitative research has considered the political economy of the War on Poverty: how and why it evolved from the small-scale, academic brainchild of the Council of Economic Advisors to a controversial and enduring legacy of the Johnson presidency. Economic historians attribute the policy shift in the 1960s to a long-term decline in Southern planters’ demand for cheap agricultural workers and accompanying decline in plantation paternalism ( Alston and Ferrie 1993, 1999). Using the volumes of oral histories, taped conversations, and archival documents, historians have pieced together competing (but not mutually exclusive) narratives of this decade’s political economy ( Gettleman and Mermelstein 1966 Levitan 1969 Ginzberg and Solow 1974 Davies 1996 Gillette 1996 O’Connor 2001 Germany 2007 Orleck and Hazirjian 2011 Caro 1982, 2002, 2012). These programs more than tripled real federal expenditures on health, education, and welfare, which grew to over 15 percent of the federal budget by 1970 ( Ginzberg and Solow 1974). Over the next five years, Congress passed legislation that transformed American schools, launched Medicare and Medicaid, and expanded housing subsidies, urban development programs, employment and training programs, food stamps, and Social Security and welfare benefits. Johnson asked Congress to declare an “unconditional war on poverty” and to aim “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it” (1965). In his first State of the Union address in January 1964, President Lyndon B.
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