Twl,
You may want to recheck your numbers. The Great Society programs barely got off the ground before the majority of the funding began to be siphoned off to finance the war in Viet Nam. In any case, total funding for all of Johnson's "Great Society" programs was far less than that which was spent on the war effort.
I suspect that you, just as I am, are highly critical of the big, expensive social welfare programs common to European countries. What a lot of people do not realize is that right here in the good ole' US of A, we have a social welfare program that is bigger, and far more expensive than any in Europe. It is called prison.
The number of people incarcerated for drug offences in the US is now greater than what the total prison population of the US was just 15 years ago.
But at least we won the "War on Drugs", by golly.
I live right next to the notorious Cabrini-Green housing project, so I get to see the effects of this social policy first hand. The young men who are imprisoned often leave single mothers behind, to raise their children in poverty. By the time their boys are eleven or twelve, their young mothers can no longer control them. These adolescents get into petty crime, dealing, gangbanging, and killing each other.
Oh well, I suppose we just have to build more prisons.
