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Preferred term

war on poverty  

Definition

  • The War on Poverty, announced with great fanfare by President Lyndon B. Johnson in early 1964, was a modestly funded program that had an enormous impact on urban politics and federal social policy. The legislation that created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) launched the War on Poverty with an allocation of $500 million and responsibility for coordinating what President Johnson and many of his aides assumed would be a broad-gauged effort to open the gates of economic opportunity to individuals excluded from the growing abundance of post–World War II America and give them the same chance as others to develop and use their abilities. [Source: Encyclopedia of American Urban History; War on Poverty]

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https://concepts.sagepub.com/social-science/concept/war_on_poverty

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