THE GREAT SOCIETY $22 trillion, yes, that much has been spent along with so much more to get the black community out of poverty and hopelessness. Where are we today? Well, it seems we re in the same spot as decades ago with the inner cities still struggling:The Great Society welfare state entitlement programs remain the largest drivers of red ink at both the federal and state level. It gets worse as Obamacare, the inevitable capstone of the Great Society, kicks in (and  kick  is precisely the right word).Most of the Great Society was designed to fight LBJ s War on Poverty, the total cost of which has been the sum of $22 trillion in current dollars, as reckoned by the Heritage Foundation. The tally rises by about $1 trillion a year as more than 80 overlapping means-tested federal programs sap resources the country does not have. The $22 trillion figure is  three times the amount of money that the government has spent on all military wars in its history, from the Revolutionary War to the present,  says Heritage s Robert Rector.What do we have to show for all this federal largesse? The poverty rate hasn t budged. Instead, we ve seen the rise of multigenerational welfare dependency. For the $2 trillion the federal government has spent on education since 1965, test scores have plummeted and the achievement gap between minority students and their peers has barely budged. Families, the bedrock of an authentically great society, have suffered most in LBJ s great social experiment. The overall out-of-wedlock birth rate has ballooned from 8 percent in the mid-1960s to more than 40 percent today; from 25 percent to 73 percent among blacks.Now we have Obama asking the American taxpayer for more money because he s claiming the rioters have been  stripped away of opportunity Obama commented on the Baltimore riots and those who have been  stripped away of opportunity where there are no fathers  to offer  guidance,  where  manufacturing has been stripped away; and drugs have flooded the community, and the drug industry ends up being the primary employer for a whole lot of folks .  The president intimates that burning buildings, cars, and looting businesses is the result of hopelessness. I assure you, this is not hopelessness.Drug addictions strip away opportunity, but a future is there if you want it. Robbing neighbors, burning cars, and destroying businesses strips away opportunity for the community as a whole, but a future lies ahead if there is a will to grab it.Are you a young person fighting a terminal illness? If not, you are not without opportunity. You don t have the right to be hopeless.Having an absent father is heartbreaking when the father made the choice to leave. A one-parent home makes it harder, but not opportunity-less; just ask Dr. Ben Carson, Bill Clinton, Samuel L. Jackson, Gene Simmons, Louie Armstrong, Jackie Robinson   or the boy or girl down the street from a one-parent home, who WILL move ahead and make his/her opportunities.Ask any among those whose  opportunity  has been  stripped away,  if he/she will trade his current opportunity-deprived situation with a person suffering from terminal cancer   a cancer that has nothing to do with lifestyle. Take your pick of any devastating disease. It happens to you. You, a person from wealth, or a blue-collar home, or the poorest among us, and yet you have never had an addiction, or lived an unhealthy lifestyle outside of the occasional double cheeseburger, with bacon, and a side of cheese fries. You made a choice not to hang with a dangerous crowd. You innately know the difference between right and wrong, because, you know, all of us do know the difference.Your choice: live a productive and lawful life, or die soon of cancer. How fast will you find  opportunity?  In the blink of an eye? Probably.You picked your friends carefully, and got yourself into a working environment at the first opportunity. You appreciated your minimum wage, and took pride in the job you did. You went to school, graduated, and either went on to higher education or entered the work force   and you liked it, yet the cancer found you, and you know that without a miracle, your life will end at an early age. This is opportunity stripped away, not what s happening in Baltimore.Via: Maggie s Notebook