Fighting Poverty is Complicated

And the complete and utter focus on partisan politics does not allow for thoughtful debate.

The article I link to below does a good job of discussing the issue without presenting any recommendations for policy, which is OK, because it is a complex problem and there is no single silver bullet that will eliminate poverty.  There can only be a safety net of some design that does not remove the incentive to work, requires an effort to find work, and does not permanently reward procreation by welfare mothers while helping families with children.

As the article points out, no war on poverty can be a success unless it is really all about forming an environment that encourages the economy to create self-sustaining private sector employment.  That requires education (Link to "Why Students Do Better Overseas") and a public sector that is financially stable.  All you have to do is look at countries that are not financially stable to see how that sends poverty going in the wrong direction:  Argentina, Greece, Cyprus, Spain, Venezuela.

The one thing that the article discusses, where I and RedStateVT will agree, is the issue of should the definition of poverty be a certain minimum basic quality of life or one tied to the median standard of living in the whole country.  I believe society has only the obligation to help maintain a minimum level of housing, food, clothing and health with incentives to find work.  There is no necessity to support more life style that can be afforded by those who have work.  This is why I support changing the Social Security Inflation measure from the measure that it is (a factor of wages including higher productivity) to one that is only a measure of price changes.  This will fix something like 20% of the long term Social Security funding gap, and I do not understand why this is so controversial to the AARP.

Anyway, poverty is a complex topic and one in need of constant review at the policy level to end things that are not working, continue things that are working and try new things that may work.

As for our current situation, I think a Depression era federal work program aimed at infrastructure and using unemployed construction workers would be what we need to drive the unemployment rate to a normal level and then we can work on balancing the budget and normalizing monetary policy.

Link to Article on poverty