The welfare state has trapped generations in poverty.  High tax rates are not an effective way to redistribute income.  The minimum wage eliminates jobs for those at the bottom.

In America today we have forty-five million Americans on food stamps at a cost of $75 billion. That is about one-in-seven Americans. It is nearly three times as many on the food dole as in 2000. But is the program lifting Americans out of poverty or keeping them there?  As Charles Murray once put it, the tragedy of the $10 trillion welfare state is not how much it cost, but how little it bought.

From Who’s The Fairest of Them All? By Stephen Moore

If there was any accountability to government our efforts to reduce poverty would be clearly labeled one fo the greatest failures fo government in history.  The good intentions of poverty programs that may have guided the motives of Lyndon Johnson has become a corrupt source of political power with high paid bureaucrats always justifying their jobs with a problem that will never go away and is thus always in need of more money.  We have created a poverty industry and business is booming.

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