Dan Minette wrote:
> I think you can see where the Great Society kicked in..right about 1965. > Although you can see the poverty rate kick up in 1980. It didn't really > fall again until the mid 90s or so. > When was it that Reagan and Co. turned the mentally handicapped people out?* Wasn't it early in his first administration? *AIR, large scale funding for the institutionalization of the mentally handicapped was curtailed by Reagan. -- Doug I'm afraid you're misremembering this one, Doug. The policy was first pioneered under JFK and fully carried out by Carter. Reagan had nothing to do with it, and conservatives, in fact, fought the policy from its very inception. The idea behind it was _compassionate_, not cost-efficient. Supposedly these people would be taken care of more humanely on the outside by their families and so on. Conservatives, having a slightly darker view of the world, pointd out: 1. If their families were willing to do that, they wouldn't be institutionalized in the first place and 2. Releasing lots of people who were completely unable to take care of themselves and of dubious rationality unsupervised into society would probably have bad effects on society. They were not listened to. The modern problem of homelessness is a quite direct result (well, that and rent control, another astonishingly stupid policy that even most liberals have given up on at this point, but that was, again, a "compassionate" policy fought from its inception by the right and pushed through by the left). Deinstitutionalization would mainly be a Carter and Co. policy. Reagan had nothing to do with it. Gautam
