Americans love a war. It is in our nature. We in this nation, love the notion of a contest, a challenge to be bested, and as such there is no greater challenge than war. With any hot-button issue to arise on a national level, it can be certain that a war will be declared. In the 1950s, Senator McCarthy declared a war on communism, in the 1970s, President Nixon declared a war on drugs and in 1964, President Johnson declared a war on poverty. The driving factor in this war was to “be an investment in the most valuable of our resources-the skills and strengths of our people. And in the future, as in the past, this investment will return its cost many-fold to our entire economy” (Patterson Chapter 8, Location 1918, paragraph 1). Has this been the case? Has an “investment” in the nation’s poor and the provision of a federally-administered safety-net contributed to overall economic stability, and moreover, what is the cost of this war? In analyzing cost, a threefold approach must be taken: budgetary, final and opportunity cost. With any decision to spend, opportunity cost must be analyzed. Opportunity cost is the trade-off accepted for pursuing one course of action over another. Final cost is analyzed as the eventual benefit received by the recipient, or in other words, the final value of the benefit. The budgetary cost is all funds allocated to specific programs. In 1953, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) was established to consolidate the plethora of welfare programs established by the federal government. Having grown from the seeds of the New Deal, many of these programs saw their number of beneficiaries grow with the end of the War, and continue to expand. Upon its formation, HEW was appropriated a budget of $2 billion, which was at the time 5 percent less than all national defense expenditures. Most of the nation’s social