What is not usually recognized is that social welfare programs expanded greatly under the Republican president Richard Nixon as well. Despite Nixon's anti-welfare rhetoric, government spending on welfare and public housing increased more during his administration than during Johnson's.
A major change in welfare during this period was the expanded use of the Aid to Dependent Children program, which had existed since the New Deal. The program was initially small and mostly confined to widows with dependent children; it had remained so until the 1960s, when the increasing feminization of poverty meant a drastic increase in applications, mostly from women who were divorced, separated, or never-married rather than widowed. Other political forces encouraged or at least allowed a higher fraction of the eligible to apply, a fraction that increased from about one in three in the early 60s to more than nine out of ten by 1971. ADC (eventually changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children [AFDC]) became a large program supporting many families in the inner city. It is this program that most people call "welfare."
The Medicaid program, which provided grants to states intended for medical assistance to the poor, has become more than four times as costly as AFDC. The cost of Medicaid ballooned primarily for four reasons. First, the program was an "entitlement," meaning that the government had legally committed itself to provide whatever funds were necessary to cover anyone who fit the guidelines, regardless of the cost. Second, the number of poor people and the depth of their poverty increased. Third, Medicaid covered the growing costs of nursing home care (often to formerly middle-class elderly who had become poor by virtue of illness). Fourth, and probably most significant, the cost of medical care rose precipitously over the next decades. Although Medicaid became a most important program, nationally only about a third the people living below the poverty line have been eligible for its benefits.
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By far the most massive of the social welfare programs of the Johnson and Nixon administrations and certainly the most effective were not directed specifically toward the poor at all. During this time, the expansion of Social Security and the creation of Medicare—from which
everyone benefited—dwarfed funding for all of the other social welfare programs combined. It is not coincidental that these two programs were also the most effective in alleviating poverty. Because they targeted everyone, they enjoyed broad political support. Not only have they been adequately funded but (unlike AFDC, for example) their benefits increase
automatically with inflation. As a result, however, the Federal government spent about 75% of its social welfare budget during this period on the non-poor!
Footnotes
27 Although partially federally funded, Medicaid is a locally administered program. Not enough funds have been appropriated to cover all who are poor, so each state decides how to allocate those funds. The District of Columbia, for example, gives benefits only to those poor who are completely disabled or parents of small children.
