On January 4, 1965, President Lyndon Baines Johnson gave his State of the Union Address in which he laid out a laundry list of legislation needed to achieve his plan for a “Great Society.”

Congress – eager to usurp as much power and exert as much control over the American people as possible — took up Johnson’s mantle and began violating its powers by enacting legislation covering civil rights, health care, education and environment. These are all areas over which the federal government has no authority under the Constitution.

The legislation resulted in the creation of Medicare/Medicaid, Head Start, the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the White House Conference on Natural Beauty. The Foundation of the Arts and Humanities Act led to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Economic Opportunity Act – part of LBJ’s “War on Poverty,” led to federal meddling in childhood education and employment policies, Green policies and legislation relating to air- and water-pollution.

Previous Democrat administration policies had been devastating to the people they purported to help and, with his Great Society programs, Johnson continued the assault on the poor under the guise of giving them a hand up.

Within three years of assuming the presidency in 1963, Johnson had requested 200 major pieces of legislation and Congress had approved 181 of them, according to Leslie Carbone in “Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform.” She writes:

“Roosevelt had peddled the drug of government give-aways primarily in the poor neighborhoods; Johnson set up shop in middle-class cul-de-sacs, and most Americans, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, are forced to shoot up. Johnson’s sweeping proposals sought to address almost every issue of concern to Americans: civil rights, poverty, education, health, housing, pollution, the arts, cities, occupational safety, consumer protection, and mass transit, to name only the most prominent.”

As she quotes Johnson aide Joseph Califano from the book “Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society,” “LBJ adopted programs the way a child eats rich chocolate-chip cookies.”

And what have these programs wrought? Mark Owen, adjunct professor of economics at Northwood University, wrote a column for LewRockwell.com on Feb. 7, 2007 titled The Welfare State: Shredding Society. In it he said:

“Births out of wedlock were consistently at or below 5% between 1940 and 1960. By 1970, the rate had risen to over 10% and has continued to rise to 33% of all births today… Divorce rates increased from 9 to 23 per 1,000 married couples annually from 1960 to 1980, while leveling off at 20 per 1,000 through 1998. How much of this leveling off in divorce rates is the result of relationships in groups with higher divorce tendencies never evolving past cohabitation is difficult to ascertain. Over half of children born today in the US will live in a single parent household, while in some areas the rate is much higher. It is hard to ignore the statistical relationship between crime and family dissolution.

“While crime and family destabilization may be two of the more obvious results of the welfare state, there are many others. The stigma for single mother births has virtually disappeared. Intergenerational dependency on government programs with the related lack of skills for self-sufficiency, much like a farm animal unable to live without the farmer for food and shelter, has created people without hope or ambition.”

The welfare state has created a cycle of dependency that perpetuates itself. Now there are third and fourth generations of single women living off welfare and raising children in single parent homes.

Typically these women live in urban areas and their children are held hostage to failing inner city schools systems. And Democrat Great Society policies are to blame for these failing schools.

In 1965 Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It provided for aid to poor children in slums and rural areas, created a five-year program for school libraries to buy textbooks and other instructional materials and provided for educational research, among other things. Essentially, the Federal government took over the education of the children, according to Carbone.

Carbone writes: “Representative Charles Goodell warned that the bill’s ‘clear intent is to radically change our historic structure of education by a dramatic shift of power to the federal level.’”

The National Education Association (NEA) teacher’s union, a supporter of Democrat candidates and causes, opposes any and all efforts to inject competition or reform into the failing schools. Therefore Democrats oppose them as well. Combined with local teacher unions, the NEA also fights efforts to change the tenure system which protects the jobs of bad teachers to the detriment of the children.

LBJ’s War on Poverty programs have been dismal failures. As Carbone writes, $800 million was appropriated for the Economic Opportunity Bill of 1964. That bill created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and 10 other programs. The next year Congress appropriated $1.5 billion for OEO. Between 1965 and 1972 Congress spent $15 billion on the War on Poverty.

“Launching the War Poverty, Johnson declared, ‘[T]he days of the dole are numbered.’ Within two generations, more than $10 trillion have been spent on this war, more in current dollars than was spent to win World War II,” Carbone writes.

Beginning in 2000, George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservativism,” which was nanny-state progressivism in a pretty neoconservative wrapper, made Socialism acceptable to Republicans. Congressional Republicans rubber-stamped his welfare state programs as eagerly as his wars.

We have reached a point through propaganda and dependency to where the majority of people under age 30 are attracted to socialism over capitalism. They’ve been indoctrinated and taught pseudo-history of state worship that glosses over the millions of deaths caused by democracy and socialism.

Social democracy is a disguised system of stealing the wealth and production of the producers of wealth with spurious laws under the legitimacy of the vote. Stealing or taking from producers and transferring it to nonproducers is very sophisticated and concealed class warfare.

Socialism is not possible without fiat money. Socialism – even that socialism disguised as democracy — and fiat money are the twin towers of public deception. They are required to deceive Americans concerning their own affairs.

Now both Democrat and Republican politicians support socialism and are always looking for ways to spend money to fund programs to fight the War on Poverty. But like all government wars on this or that, they aren’t meant to be won.

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