IT was some 50 years ago that former United States President Lyndon Johnson declared “war on poverty”.

The debate is ongoing in the United States as to whether or not there has been any significant reduction in poverty levels since the 1950s.

What is however not in debate is the fact that the income gap between the rich and the poor has widened; and there are continuing problems of high unemployment rates, especially among college graduates and out-of-school youth, not to mention the large immigrant population.

The main cause of this undesirable situation is the fact that the system as is currently configured is highly skewed in favour of the rich who pay a disproportionate share of their incomes in taxes as opposed to the lower income groups who pay over a third of their incomes in taxes.

The taxation system in the United States is highly regressive, an issue that has to a significant degree influenced the voting behaviour of Americans in the last presidential election.

Democrats tend to favour lower levels of taxation on the incomes of the poor and increased spending on social welfare programmes, as opposed to the Republicans who are generally in support of tax breaks for the rich and cuts in social spending.

Today, in the United States, there is no longer mention of the ” working class” and every one on the lower-income scale is euphemistically referred to as the ” middle class” which is not only a misnomer, but an attempt to disguise the true condition of the plight of the working class.

It is clear that we are far away from winning the war on poverty, not only in the United States, but the world at large. The only country that has been successful in a major way in terms of bridging the income gap and lifting millions out of the poverty threshold is China.

Some other emerging economies such as Brazil, India and Russia have been largely successful in terms of economic growth, but the benefits of such growth have not filtered down to the bottom in any significant way as in the case of China.

Poverty is not the natural order of things. People are not poor because they chose to be poor, but because of an unjust world order where the fruits of human labour are unjustly expropiated by a small group of people who own and control the means of production.

The struggle for a more just and humane society must continue. As Karl Marx once said, the working class has nothing to lose but their chains.

HYDAR ALLY