by Newt Gingrich
As I wrote in my previous essay, one of the most profound and deeply damaging impacts of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society was the destruction of the family for the poor and especially for poor African Americans.
This defines the crisis we are living through today. In many cities, crime is out-of-control crime. There is a massive underground drug economy which kills more than 100,000 Americans a year with overdoses (more annually than were killed in the eight years of the Vietnam War). Schools are overwhelmed by the collapse of parenting and teaching. In some places, entire school systems have just quit trying to educate and simply serve as temporary holding places while children grow older. These children gain no knowledge or skills, so they can’t get good jobs. They then return to neighborhoods with few legal opportunities to make a living, drive by shootings, gang domination, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness and passivity.
These are all the legacy of the profoundly wrong values and principles imposed on the poor by the Great Society.
President Ronald Reagan once said the best social program is a job. It could also be said that the key to a healthy society – rich and poor alike – is based on productive and secure family structure. All the efforts at fixing education, crime, homelessness, drug addiction, and poverty focus on narrowly trying to solve each component. Yet the root of all these issues is the lack of family support systems.
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