It was 1964 — I was in the 8th grade — when Lyndon Johnson, newly elevated to the presidency by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, announced the launch of the “War on Poverty” and the imminent coming of the “Great Society.” The U.S. economy was in the midst of achieving new levels of prosperity unprecedented in human history. For the first time, the resources appeared to be at hand to eradicate poverty and to reach for universal fairness and justice. All that was needed was to put the powers of government to work to apply the available societal resources to the problems at hand; and presto! the problems would be solved. This was obvious to all thinking people. Experts within the government agencies would quickly set to work to devise the programs that would use the gusher of federal tax revenue to end poverty and bring about universal fairness and justice in short order.

Running on a platform emphasizing the War on Poverty and the Great Society, Johnson swept to a landslide victory in the 1964 election. The landslide brought with it super legislative majorities in both houses of Congress. Programs designed by the experts to eradicate poverty proliferated rapidly, both before and after the 1964 election — Medicaid, the Community Action Program, the Job Corps, the Food Stamp program, Project Head Start, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Housing and Urban Development Act, and on and on.

Fifty-five years on, is it possible to name any public policy disaster in the United States greater than the disaster of the War on Poverty and Great Society? Over the half-century-plus, spending on so-called “anti-poverty” programs has soared from initial levels of a handful of billions of dollars per year, to current amounts well in excess of a trillion dollars per year (including federal, state and local spending). Meanwhile, the so-called “poverty rate” has barely budged (it’s been between about 11% and 15% for the whole five plus decades), and the number of people deemed to be “in poverty” by the official measure has about doubled as the population has grown.

And it’s not just that all the government spending has not reduced the measured rate of poverty nor the number of people in poverty. It’s that the failures of the anti-poverty and Great Society programs are well-documented and out there for everybody to see and study. Medicaid beneficiaries have no better health outcomes than non-beneficiaries; job training program beneficiaries have no better job prospects than non-beneficiaries; Head Start program beneficiaries have no better educational outcomes than non-beneficiaries; etc., etc., etc.

And on top of all that, where the goal of all the spending was to achieve societal justice and harmony through redistribution of resources, instead we have only fomented anger and resentment in the program beneficiaries. The latest fashion — particularly on trendy college campuses — is for members of racial and ethnic minorities to declare themselves ”marginalized” and “oppressed” by the “dominant culture.” How about some gratitude for all the benevolent redistributions? Sorry, that’s not how this works.

You would think that by now the whole idea of government redistribution programs as a means to reduce poverty and achieve a Great Society would be completely discredited. How could it not be? And then you watch the candidates for the Democratic nomination for President and the Democrats in Congress engage in what seems to be a bidding war to see who can propose to create more and yet more of the same sorts of failed programs, to the point that the new programs promise to swamp the entire economy.

For today I’ll just go into the single example of public housing programs. In the arena of completely failed and discredited ideas for alleviating poverty, there can be no more failed and discredited idea than the idea of having the government build and operate government-owned and subsidized housing to warehouse the poor. Some local housing authorities proved more able than others to resist — temporarily — the corrosive incentives of the socialist model that inevitably bring decline and decay; but with socialist-model schemes, the only question is when, and not whether, they will fail. In the public housing arena, the first big one to go was the massive Pruitt-Igoe complex (33 buildings) in St. Louis, dynamited in the 1970s, barely 20 years after construction, after becoming too dilapidated and too dangerous to sustain. Chicago’s housing authority did a somewhat better job, and its big projects lasted somewhat longer; but after 2000, Chicago’s signature projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes also fell to the wrecking ball. From CityMetric in 2015: “Cabrini-Green had come to symbolise the violence, social ills, and miserable living conditions that struck fear in [residents’] hearts.”

Well into the 2000s, the projects of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) were held up to the nation as the shining example of how a well-managed public housing enterprise can resist decay and successfully perform its anti-poverty mission. It was all an illusion. In 2014 City Comptroller Scott Stringer started to pull back the curtain, when he came out with a Report documenting the rapidly deteriorating conditions at the NYCHA projects. Suddenly the NYCHA projects, previously thought to be the model of proper maintenance in public housing, were said to need an immediate capital infusion of some $18 billion. That figure has since leapt to $32 billion. It’s the same old story of socialist-model disaster. Some of my previous posts on the subject are here, here, and here. Any fair evaluation would say that NYCHA is in its final death spiral.

You just can’t get any worse than the failure of public housing in the United States.

Which brings us up to the past couple of weeks. On November 14, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, along with (who else?) freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a bill they call the Green New Deal for Public Housing. $180 billion from the infinite pile of free federal loot to upgrade all the public housing in the country, particularly as to energy efficiency. But isn’t that just a rounding error in the maelstrom of plans for everything from Medicare for All to free college? Representative Ilhan Omar immediately noticed the opportunity, and jumped in on November 21 with her own $1 trillion plan for building some 12 million new homes on the public housing model over the course of the next decade. Kriston Capps at CityLab — generally sympathetic to progressive redistribution schemes — can’t help himself in expressing a degree of skepticism:

Don’t look for a pay-for mechanism for Omar’s trillion-dollar housing plan: There isn’t one. Even $1 trillion couldn’t subsidize millions of new housing units. The math in Omar’s bill works out to a per-unit cost of $83,000, far too little to actually build all those homes in the places where they’re needed, especially given that the bill that requires these homes to be located in neighborhoods with equitable access to transit and amenities.  Instead, the Homes for All Act functions primarily as a statement of progressive values.

I’m gathering that the “progressive values” Kriston is talking about include never learning anything about the past and never attempting to do basic arithmetic.