Kennedy’s vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, took his place in 1963 and vowed to fulfill Kennedy’s promises from the “New Frontier”. Johnson came up with his own administration called, the “Great Society”, which relies on abundance and liberty for all and demanded an end to poverty and racism. The “Great Society” essentially got more done and was more successful than the “New Frontier” because there was more time to accomplish the promises made. Johnson did keep and achieve Kenney’s promise of the tax cut by signing in 1964. The “Great Society” wanted to do more than end poverty and racism, it wanted to give aid to education, housing, the environment, the welfare of citizens and the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid. Along with the tax cut, Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act, which made discrimination in employment illegal. He also passed the Voting Rights Act, which banned literacy tests and allowed federal intervention to ensure access to voting booths. In order to help stop poverty, Johnson went through the Office of Economic Opportunity to create a new food stamp program to give poor people more food opportunities and also to give the poor necessary skills and education to find jobs. Since the “Great Society” and Kennedy’s “New Frontier” included improvement of welfare and even health care for everyone, the Medicare and Medicaid programs were authorized. Medicare provided the elderly with medical insurance financed by Social Security taxes and Medicaid gave …show more content…
Since many of these ideas are liberal and are focused on giving, conservatives believed that the poor people were being given “handouts” and their drive to get an education and get a job was gone. Liberals believed that the focus put on training and education blamed the poor people rather than the system that made it that way. The economic system that could not provide enough well-paying jobs to employ these people. Overall the “Great Society” avoided a structural reform of the economy and instead created public works projects to provide jobs for the poor. Even though the “Great Society” programs did help the public more, the funds were from more jobs available rather than from new taxes on the middle-class or rich citizens. Although the “Great Society” did not end poverty, it did benefit the poor by allowing them to make and spend a little more thus building the economy back up and even getting some families out of