GOVERNMENT SPENDING DOESN'T RESOLVE POVERTY

America has been fighting the "war on poverty" since 1966, when President Lyndon Johnson declared the conflict. Wars are ultimately defined by who wins and who loses. And what is the outcome of this battle? It is ongoing, but research shows that big government is trailing in its attempt to solve the problems of the poor.

A recent study by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, shows that the nation's poor are no better off for the trillions of dollars spent on programs to help them. Consider this: From 1950 to 1966, the percentage of poor Americans fell from 32 percent to 14 percent. After Johnson launched his war on poverty, government welfare spending escalated sharply. Through 1990, $3.5 trillion (adjusted for inflation) had been spent in trying to beat poverty. The U.S. Bureau of the Census reports that 12.8 percent of Americans lived below the poverty level in 1989. (For those anxious to blame policies of the Reagan administration for this phenomenon, it should be noted that the percentage of poor in 1989 was down slightly from the 1980 numbers.)

The bottom line is this: For the money spent, the improvement was not dramatic.

Not only are the poor no better off for all this government help, the Heritage Foundation suggests that conditions for needy Americans have actually worsened because welfare programs have wayward inducements that increase dependency on the government. And poverty has a way of breeding poverty, setting up this wicked cycle for generations.

To combat poverty, the nation can rightfully turn its eyes to Washington, but not to enact more programs that produce more federal spending. Instead, the nation's capital can work to revise welfare programs that make it advantageous for recipients to remain unemployed and unmarried, and it can help ease excessive regulations on private businesses, which create jobs and can more readily lift people out of poverty.

There will be plenty of well-intentioned talk about helping the nation's poor when the new administration takes over in Washington next month. With luck, this new group of leaders will take a lesson from history, observing that more government spending has not translated into less poverty.