In his first State of the Union address in January 1964, President Lyndon B. 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). 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. 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).
