In the half century plus two years since President Lyndon B. Johnson announced during his 1964 State of the Union address that “this administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America,” one thing should be clear: It’s been a quagmire.

There was immediate success when this nation began an unprecedented transfer of wealth as the nation’s poverty rate dipped from 20 to 13 percent, but it has hovered around that mark since then, and has risen more recently to 15 percent. This has occurred despite a transfer of wealth from top to bottom of about $25 trillion. For better perspective on how much money that is, it amounts to $80,000 for each of the 318 million people in the United States today.

It is more distressing to recognize that because of this nation’s growth, more Americans today live below the poverty line than ever before.

So LBJ’s war is far from won.

The news in Robeson County is even worse. According to a recently released report from the N.C. Justice Center’s Budget and Tax Center, a full 33 percent of Robeson County residents —250 percent higher than the national average — live in poverty, and almost half of those 43,000 people have to worry about where they will get their next meal. That represents a 65 percent increase in the local poverty rate since 2000, when it was 20 percent in this county.

Unemployment, which is currently 7.5 percent in Robeson County, is higher than the 6.6 percent mark for all of 2000, but that doesn’t fully explain the poverty rate’s steep increase. Simply put, Robeson County has replaced good jobs — those with a decent wage and excellent benefits — with bad jobs, primarily in the service industry, retail, restaurants and tourism, where pay is poor and benefits often don’t exist. Yes, they are better than nothing, but not by a bunch.

So what happened? Trade agreements made it more profitable for manufacturers to do their work out of this country, and President Bill Clinton lodged a successful war on tobacco that knocked to its knees a $100 million industry in this county that not only fattened the bank accounts of growers, but their suppliers and outward from there.

It isn’t that this county has not enjoyed some economic home runs, the largest being Sanderson Farms’ decision to build a plant in St. Pauls and a hatchery in Lumberton, but it seems for every job we win one has been lost. Traction has been difficult to gain.

It goes without saying that so much of what ails this county — high crime rates, unemployment, illiteracy, drug and alcohol addiction, single-parent homes, an unhealthy population — spring from poverty, but poverty is also a consequence of some of these maladies. So the wheel goes round and round and isn’t easily bent.

We wish we could end this on an happy note, but we don’t have one. If the United States in 52 years, with all its might and a machine that prints money, has been unable to put a significant dent into the nation’s poverty rate, what hope is there for a county such as ours that suffers from so much, and has inadequate tools, including poor leadership?