In 1964 Lyndon B Johnson declared war on poverty.
Notice that this war arrested the decline in the rate of poverty which had been declining on its own.
Correlation is not causation.
BUT!
The correlation we have is that the massive spending engendered by LBJ and continued for the past 53 years have done nothing to reduce the poverty rate and that millions more people are living in poverty than were before we began this massive expenditure.
I'll throw my own causitive relationship in here. The rate was coming down from 1959 because the economy was expanding. The Economic Opportunity Act removed literally millions of able-bodied and capable workers from the labor pool and had a mainly deleterious effect on poverty because it established a floor to compare entry level work against.
Why get a job that doesn't pay substantially more than doing nothing? Especially when the money to not work was substantially reduced in response to any, reported, legitimate income.
Add this to your story: the WOP also instituted policies designed to destroy families. They incentivized what we used to call "broken homes"; as a result, we have dysfunctional families giving rise to dysfunctional cities. You can name them yourself: Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and so on.
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