Guest Voice: The Powell Doctrine and Social Programs
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Today’s Guest Voice post is by Hunter Hatfield, currently a doctoral student in linguistics and cognitive science at the University of Hawaii with a previous M.A. in philosophy. In between these academic jaunts he spent a decade in the computer industry. He publishes the thoughtful weblog Goat Skin Pants.
The Powell Doctrine and Social Programs
By Hunter Hatfield
Hi, TMV readers. Any feedback on this post is most welcome. It’s why I’m writing it. Here you go:
Are social programs the liberal version of Vietnam, and possibly Iraq, in which the desire for limited warfare is sabotaging the outcome?
In other words, have the Great Society programs of the Johnson era or the New Deal gotten to a point where 1) there aren’t really any clear goals to achieve, but instead we just muddle along with no ability to “win”; 2) we see that poverty is just as bad (if this is true) as when we started, but we think we have to “stay the course” until someone comes up with something better? After all, the argument may go, we are doing some good. 3) We have thousands of social workers and government employees doing everything they can to help people in these programs, just like American soldiers were/are doing everything they could to help Vietnamese and Iraqis, but the system they are operating in is simply dysfunctional?
There are surely problems with such an analysis.
One problem is the idea that you might win over Homelessness or Hunger or Poverty. Such a goal is designed for failure, but, while failing to achieve World Peace, we often do feed actual hungry people and help the unemployed get jobs, and isn’t that far more important than conquering an abstraction?
But let’s say there is a kernel of truth to my analogy as well. If so, then perhaps they both have similar solutions. What was supposed to be the policy solution to prevent quagmires like Vietnam from happening again? The Powell Doctrine – Use overwhelming force; only go in when you have exact ideas on how to get out.
In short, decide exactly what you want to do and then throw everything and the kitchen sink at it. This doctrine seems to have worked decently well militarily until Iraq, at which point we ignored the idea in large part.
My question is: do we need to be applying the Powell Doctrine to social programs? Instead of choosing between small bits here and there, which we then apply across the U.S., choose some specific problem and then do everything you possibly can to fix it. Of course, as said, you can’t fix Poverty. But the Powell doctrine isn’t supposed to end all war either. It is, however, supposed to keep you out of ill-defined never-ending war.
So for a social program, you can’t cure poverty. But maybe you can choose one broken neighborhood and attack its problems like no one has ever seen. Take East St. Louis or the 9th Ward or “across the tracks” and go after it. Beautify the neighborhood, give tax breaks to small business, have Head Start programs in every neighborhood, find mental health treatment for the homeless who need it, triple the community policing, get drug treatment in there, engage every church and civic organization you can to participate in creating the solutions, build schools throughout the district, issue tough requirements on parents and teachers, and right on down the list.
Of course, you cannot do this in every single place at once. We’d all go bankrupt. But if you can truly “fix” a neighborhood in 5-10 years, based on some defined, community-supported goal before you started, then you can move to the next place. When East St. Louis supports itself, you don’t have to spend the money there anymore. Ironically, one drawback to such a solution is that people might start moving to that location to take advantage of the new schools and the tax breaks on business. But if people are now moving to the place most people were afraid to go before, then it seems you have succeeded. Time to find the next problem.
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I would never have thought of it in terms of the analogy to the Powell Doctrine, but that is exactly the approach that I believe is needed to fight poverty. And the problem with Johnson’s Great Society is that it was mainly about redistributing wealth; the strategy instead should be as you’ve described, to provide resources and leadership for communities to tackle the problem neighborhood by neighborhood, with resources being used to recreate opportunities instead of creating a perpetually dependent class of citizens. That’s an approach that could be ‘sold’ to conservatives and liberal/progressives, if only we had a leader who would come forward and take the risk of abandoning our old stereotypical soundbites that appeal to voters on one side or the other.
The prob w the Great Society was not the old canard of wealth redistribution (Reds, Reds, get under the bed!) but that the Vietnam War meant they were never fully funded from the get go.
Imagine a horse getting kneecapped before the gate opens, then wondering why it didn’t run the way it used to. Of course, some programs were ill-designed and short-sighted, but others worked. The CETA program was much maligned, but ot helped many inner city kids straighten out there lives. Reagan decimated it, and guess what? a few years later, teen unemployment rose, and a ‘crack epidemic’- a fallacious term, occurred.
But there was no correlation seen between removing job training and idle crime.
As for the Powell Doctrine- it’s a nice try to give the man historic heft, but he’ll be forever known as the puppet w W’s hand up his ass at the UN, lying about WMDs.
He’s a disgrace.
cosmo,
I’ll concede that I generalized excessively by calling LBJ’s programs ‘income redistribution’. Some were, some weren’t. But it’s also a canard to say that Reagan ‘decimated’ programs. Mostly what he did was promote devolution back to state governments in order to stem the growth of federal entitlement spending and bureaucracy at the federal level.
Take the example you chose, CETA. When it expired in 82, instead of renewing it Congress enacted the Job Training Partnership Act, which itself was replaced in ’98 by the Workforce Investment Act. If you have specific criticisms of the way the subsequent programs were set up or funded, that’s fair enough- but your statement implied that the program was just obliterated and the objective of job training was considered unimportant, which simply isn’t true.
Reagan decimated the programs. Poverty and starvation, which were huge problems pre-LBJ, were nearly extinct by 1980. When Reagan left the economy was in shambles, there was starvation again, in inner cities and rural areas, and none of the subsequent programs that replaced CETA were as centered on actually getting kids into jobs where they could learn skills. It was lip service, and ill-funded, at that.
Reagan cut state funding, shifted the money to the military, increased taxes and spending, while the states had less to spend on programs, and the people had less to give since they were spending for a wasteful military buildup.
LBJ’s programs were not Nirvana, but most of what is in place now is a joke, on so many levels. Only the government can do certain things. Look at W’s Faith Based charities. They’re a joke, propped up by ideologues who want to mix state and church.
CETA actually worked- there are no similar success stories in the last quarter century, because tokenism never works, for individuals nor for societies.
The analogy is incorrect. The amount of money and effort expended on social programs was, and has been, gargantuan; there has not been neither a lack of trying nor a lack of funding when it comes to social programs, which really aren’t the legitimate business of the federal government to begin with.
untrue then, untrue now — same as the anti-American alien liberals in New England huffing and puffing in outrage at Bush’s efforts to “destroy education”…
Back in the real world….
The amount of money spent on social programs has always been a fraction of that spent on pork and the defense industry- and we’re not talking Social Security, but those Great Society type programs that had specific goals.
They were wounded out of the gate, and then shot a few years later, with Lite substitutes as appeasement.
And there is no entity BUT gov’t for certain social ills. Capitalism, when given a fre hand, always ends up needing bailouts from gov’t, and so do the actually needy.
Yes, on DLS world there may be perfect solutions to tiny problems, but on the big blue marble it still takes collective will- aka gov’t.
I actually ignored Social Security and Medicare here as well. Social Security and Medicare simply dwarf everything else and are set eventually to consume the entire revenue of the federal government at traditional federal government share of the GDP.
The Budget of the United States [federal] Government historical tables are the best source of information if you are interested in fractions of government expenditures. Military spending forms by far the greatest share of discretionary spending, though we should also be looking at so-called “mandatory” spending in addition (and of course, at Social Security and Medicare). ALL OUTLAYS need to be examined (table 3.1).
2006, millions of dollars
National defense 521,840 (19.7%)
Human resources 1,672,076 (63.0%)*
Physical resources 164,800 ( 6.2%)
Net interest 226,603 ( 8.5%)
Other functions 138,366 ( 5.2%)
*Education, training, employment, and social services: 118,560 (approximately 4.7%)
Historical tables
There was no decimation (not even in the etymolygically correct sense, killing 10%).
ND = National defense HR = Human resources
ND vs. HR, percentages of federal outlays
ND HR
1981 23.2 53.4
1982 24.8 52.1
1983 26.0 52.7
1984 26.7 50.7
1985 26.7 49.9
1986 27.6 48.6
1987 28.1 50.0
1988 27.3 50.1
Too many Ys — rushed; sorry about that.
“etymolygically” => “etymologically”
(in this case the literal sense, “decimation” really meaning the killing of one tenth)
DLS- how much of that is spent on waste and bloated payrolls? I.e.- pork?
My mama, an acct, always said that #s are easier to tain than puppies.
Again, though, that’s not on DLS world.
Military money? Probably quite a bit, even more so in places than with the social spending.
No, in the HR- dooes this count the IRS and other agenncies that have not a whit to do with social programs?