Fifty-five years ago, as he was ramping up what would become the Poor People’s Campaign, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. slammed the government’s approach to poverty, calling U.S. programs woefully inadequate.
The social safety net was too piecemeal and indirect, he argued. And poor people of all races were struggling.
“The curse of poverty has no justification in our age,” he wrote in 1967. “… The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.”The way to do that, he asserted, was through a government-funded guaranteed income.King’s call for economic justice fell […]
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