Great Society at 50: LBJ’s Job Corps will cost taxpayers $1.7 billion this year. Does it work? By David A. Fahrentold, May 19, 2014, Washington Post: “In the middle of an Oklahoma wildlife refuge — at a campus so remote that buffalo wander in — about 100 young people are taking classes in the hope that the U.S. government can turn their lives around. Given the statistics, most of them will be disappointed. This is the Treasure Lake Job Corps center, an outpost of a job-training program created as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. The program began with a noble, untested idea: Government could save troubled youths one at a time, taking them in and teaching them a trade. Today, students here learn subjects such as cooking, nursing and plumbing. . .”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty