Charlie Kirk on How Welfare Created Poverty and Destroyed Minority Communities

Economist Thomas Sowell famously said that welfare programs pay people to fail. By incentivizing failure, liberal policies have created generations dependent on welfare and increased the likelihood of sons failing in school, landing in prison, and fathering children who themselves become dependent on welfare.

When Christian commentator Charlie Kirk argued that Black Americans were better off before the civil rights movement’s accompanying welfare expansion, critics labeled the claim racist. However, the data, and six decades of scholarship, support him. Census records, vital statistics, labor economics, and decades of scholarship produced by economist Thomas Sowell, the Hoover Institution economist widely regarded as one of the most rigorous empirical voices on race and poverty in American academic life, arrive at a similar conclusion.

In 1940, the Black poverty rate stood at 87 percent. By 1960, before a single Great Society program existed, it had fallen to 47 percent, a 40-point drop driven entirely by economic growth and cultural capital rather than government intervention. Thomas Sowell noted the contrast in his essay “A Legacy of Liberalism“: “Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.”

In the 20 years following the Great Society’s launch, the poverty rate fell only 18 more points, less than half the pace of the preceding two decades. Today the Black poverty rate remains at 21 percent, roughly 2.5 times the white rate.

The collapse in family structure tracks the same timeline. According to the 1960 Census, two-thirds of Black children lived in two-parent homes and only 22 percent were born out of wedlock. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat serving in the Johnson administration, published his 1965 report warning that a 25 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate signaled a family structure in crisis, he was denounced and his findings buried. That rate has since tripled.

The 2018 National Vital Statistics Report put Black out-of-wedlock births at 69.4 percent. The share of Black children growing up without their biological father, 20 percent in 1960, now stands at 67 percent.

The Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, expanded dramatically under Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, tied eligibility to the absence of a working male in the household. A single mother who married the father of her children lost her AFDC cash assistance and her Medicaid coverage simultaneously. In many cases the family was materially worse off married than apart.

Charles Murray documented this in Losing Ground (1984): the program did not merely fail to incentivize marriage, it penalized it by design. Sowell drew the same conclusion: “What the welfare system and other kinds of governmental programs are doing is paying people to fail. Insofar as they fail, they receive the money; insofar as they succeed, even to a moderate extent, the money is taken away.”

By 2014, 50.1 percent of households simultaneously receiving SNAP, TANF, and rental subsidies were Black. Today nearly 9 million Black Americans receive food stamps monthly, with those benefits constituting 26 percent of total monthly income for the typical participating family, a dependency ratio that illustrates Sowell’s point that the welfare state is not a ladder out of poverty but a floor that discourages the climb.

The damage to Black economic independence predates the welfare state’s full expansion but was accelerated by it. Between 1957 and 1967, the number of self-employed Black managers, officials, and proprietors fell 39.6 percent. Through the 1970s, Black unincorporated business ownership fell a further 8 percent. Desegregation, while morally necessary, dissolved the captive consumer base that had sustained Black-owned enterprises under Jim Crow, and the welfare expansion that followed provided dependency rather than the capital formation that might have replaced it.

Government wage policy compounded the damage further. Sowell documented in Basic Economics that from the late 19th century through 1930, the Black labor force participation rate was slightly higher than that of whites, and the Black unemployment rate was lower. “The minimum wage law changed that,” he wrote. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, openly advocated in Congress as a means of preventing Black construction workers from underbidding unionized white labor, was followed by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

By 1954, Black unemployment was double the white rate and has remained so. In a 2023 interview at the Hoover Institution, Sowell noted that Black teenage unemployment has not fallen below 20 percent in more than two consecutive decades and reached 52 percent in the early years of the Obama administration.

The Black-white high school graduation gap narrowed from 27.6 percentage points to roughly 9 points today, but the underlying Black graduation rate was essentially stagnant for a generation: 69.7 percent for Blacks born between 1957 and 1960, and 69.1 percent for those born 25 years later. The data suggests the gap closed largely because white graduation rates fell, not because Black rates rose. The graduation rate itself, moreover, measures completion rather than competency.

The 2024 Nation’s Report Card found that 32 percent of 12th-grade students performed below the NAEP Basic level in reading, a 12-point deterioration since 1992. Studies also found that 85 percent of Black students lack reading proficiency and 84 percent lack math proficiency. In Chicago, where just 14 percent of Black 11th-graders are proficient in English and 13 percent in math, the district simultaneously recorded an 84 percent graduation rate. Black 12th-grade reading scores dropped 11 points, almost twice the rate of their white counterparts.

A diploma produced by that system measures attendance, not education, a distinction economist Walter Williams understood from his own experience. “I’ve benefited from receiving virtually all of my education before it became fashionable for white people to like black people,” Williams wrote in Up from the Projects (Hoover Institution, 2010). “The result: whatever grades I received were earned, as opposed to given. Teachers provided an honest assessment of my learning. They weren’t reluctant to tell me, ‘Williams, that’s just plain nonsense.’”

Thomas Sowell echoed the sentiment in a 2023 interview at the Hoover Institution: “Walter Williams used to say that he was so lucky to be born before white people wanted to be nice to blacks. He traced his own career to when a white teacher in a school in a Philadelphia ghetto chewed him out unmercifully.”

The persistence of the gap also correlates with family structure. Heritage Foundation research found that 90 percent of Black students from intact families received A’s and B’s, compared to 41 percent from father-absent homes, returning the education crisis, as every other metric does, to the collapse of the Black family that followed the Great Society.

Sowell is careful to separate the Civil Rights Act itself from the welfare expansion that accompanied it. The 1964 Act, he argued, corrected a genuine constitutional wrong. What followed it did not. “The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow,” he wrote, “but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals’ expansion of the welfare state.”

The political economy that sustains the system is, in Sowell’s reading, self-reinforcing. “The more people who are dependent on government handouts,” he observed, “the more votes the left can depend on for an ever-expanding welfare state.” The Moynihan Report identified the crisis at 25 percent. The warning was dismissed as racist. Sixty years later the out-of-wedlock birth rate stands at nearly 70 percent, the father-absence rate at 67 percent, and the welfare dependency rate among Black families at levels that would have been unimaginable in 1960, when, under segregation, measurable indicators of Black family stability and economic trajectory were, by virtually every available metric, stronger than they are today.

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