Honest opinion about government from Jack Kemp:
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was built on an invigorating, exciting, but nonetheless erroneous, idea that government sharing can end poverty and urban squalor by taxing away resources from the "haves" and giving them to the "have nots." As is usual, the resources were taxed away from middle-class Americans and, except in the rare instance, never got to the lower-income classes. Giant federal bureaucracies were established to run programs and dispense funds that would lead to this Great Society, and by the time the federal tax dollars got through the bureaucratic "in" and "out" baskets there were left only nickels and dimes. The war on poverty became a war on the middle class–and on the poor.
Where tax dollars were actually spent [in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society], there almost always occurred an increase in bitterness and frustration in the segment of society that was supposed to benefit. All over the nation poor blacks, Hispanics, and whites, were trained by government bureaucrats for jobs that didn't exist in the private sector. Urban renewal meant that low-income housing, designated "substandard" by government bureaucrats, was torn down to make way for gleaming new–and taxable–offices, factories, and shopping malls. In 1979, a dozen years later, the nation is pockmarked with the razed acreage of defunct projects. Those evicted generally had to fend for themselves, and because they usually could only move to housing they could not afford the government had to begin new programs to transfer income to citizens it had displaced. And since only a tiny number of such projects resulted in the expected taxable properties, the unlucky people whose properties surround the pockmarked urban-renewal areas now have to pay off bonds floated to ravage their towns and cities.
An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's, 1979
Former U.S. Congressman from New York (1971-1989) and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (1989-1992), Jack Kemp was also a special assistant to the governor of California and a special assistant to the chair of the Republican national convention. He has been a strong advocate of free enterprise, as when he has supported programs enabling industrious people in public housing to become self-sustaining and to buy their homes. His appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit and his manifest enthusiasm and optimism have appealed to millions of people. Kemp is the author of An American Renaissance: A Strategy for the 1980's (1979).
Quotation and short bio from The Quotable Conservative: The Giants of Conservatism on Liberty, Freedom, Individual Responsibility, and Traditional Values. Rod L. Evans and Irwin M. Berent, editors. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Publishing, 1996.