Poverty  and  Dependency  in  America


This page is here to illustrate two things:  First, people who live in (what we call) poverty in America are fairly well off, compared to the poor in other countries.  Second, decades of government intervention has only made the problem worse.  Trillions of tax dollars have been spent fighting poverty, but instead of encouraging people to get jobs and get themselves out of a financial rut, the welfare system creates conditions favorable to pregnancy, childbirth and illegitimacy.  The "safety net" has become a hammock for the laziest people in our society.

Please notice, if you will, that the cities which have the greatest difficulty with homeless bums and panhandlers are the cities where liberal politicians are in control.

New:  As mentioned above, trillions of dollars have been spent on Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty," but estimates vary.  At the bottom of this page, I have put together a table of estimates by various authors, excluding anonymous bloggers and one-time-only "letters to the editor" and the like.  The most widely accepted estimates seem to be somewhere between 5.0 and 5.4 trillion dollars, although other apparently credible estimates are much higher.



How Poor Are America's Poor?  According to the US Census Bureau, 36 million Americans are "living in poverty."  Can this alarming claim really be true?  The simple answer is: No.

'Poverty' in America:  Some material hardship does exist in America, but it is quite limited in severity and scope.  According to the government's own data, the typical person defined as "poor" by the Census has cable or satellite TV, air conditioning, a microwave, a DVD player or VCR, and two color TVs.  Three quarters of these "poor" own a car and nearly a third have two or more cars.

Populists equalize poverty.  To be sure, there are some very rich people in America who earn and possess hundreds or thousands of times what poorer people earn or possess.  But the poor in this country are only relatively poor.  We have no abject poverty.  On the contrary, America's "poor" have cars, TVs, appliances, computers, $200 basketball shoes and own their own homes.  Their lifestyle would be the envy of most of the world's population.  As long as there's relative wealth, there will always be relative poverty.

Are Our 37 Million Poor Really Poor?  Robert Rector of The Heritage Foundation is a national authority on poverty and the U.S. welfare system.  Specializing in welfare reform and family breakdown, Rector has done extensive research on the economic and social costs of welfare.  With presidential candidates of a certain hue decrying the suffering of the 37 million Americans who have been officially classified as poor by the U.S. Census Bureau, we thought we'd ask Rector if these poor people are really as poverty-stricken as we have been led to believe.

Priceless politics:  Among the many rationales used to defend the welfare state, the most powerful is that it is necessary, in order to take care of the poor and the downtrodden.  But the amount of money required to bring every poor person in the country above the official poverty line is a fraction of what is spent by government on the welfare state.

The imps of the impoverished.  Ah, the good old days!  When the word "poverty" really meant something!  In the Middle Ages, thousands of city dwellers might starve to death during a drought.  "The poor" were people who walked around without clothing.  To be destitute meant eating tree bark to survive.  Today, obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than is hunger.

ACORN's Nutty Regime for Cities:  [ACORN] promotes a 1960s-bred agenda of anti-capitalism, central planning, victimology, and government handouts to the poor.  As a result, not only does it harm the poor it claims to serve; it is also a serious threat to the urban future.  It is no surprise that ACORN preaches a New LeftŠinspired gospel, since it grew out of one of the New Left's silliest and most destructive groups, the National Welfare Rights Organization.  In the mid-sixties, founder George Wiley [ ... intended] to flood the welfare system with so many clients that it would burst, creating a crisis that, he believed, would force a radical restructuring of America's unjust capitalist economy.

Acorn Squash.  While Acorn now operates in more than 100 cities with a national budget of $37 million, it never truly left behind the welfare-rights mentality.  One is hard-pressed to find in the organization's many antipoverty initiatives any programs that address social dysfunctions like illegitimacy and single parenthood. ... While [the Community Reinvestment Act] spurred Acorn's growth, the "living wage" is the group's most successful local issue.

Activist Blames Poverty on Liberalism.  Blaming poverty on liberalism and the federal government, a conservative activist on Friday [9/14/2007] said:  "It is very sad what the liberals have done with their war on the poor in this country."  "After 40 years of failure, they still insist that they want to expand this war, that they think they should pour more money into this war," said Star Parker, president of the Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education.

East Berlin, D. C.  Increasingly, visiting our nation's capital can only be likened to visiting a distant dystopia, with problems that don't seem quite at home in America.  Criminals are the most obvious malefactors, but surely part of the problem is government.  The seat of our own government is run as if it were the reductio ad absurdum of government everywhere … Whole segments of the population are now snared in the trap of government assistance.  Call it "welfare," if you must … but how much of this money increases the actual welfare of those caught in the cycle of poverty?

The Dumb Leading the Dumber:  George Mason's "Hunger Banquet" is simply a small part of widespread indoctrination, propaganda and miseducation at America's universities that misleads and confuses our young people and promotes class envy.  It happens for at least two reasons:  the 1960s flower children are in administrative positions, and members of boards of trustees, whose duties are to direct and oversee, are derelict in these duties.

Preserving a vision:  Part II.  For decades, the liberal media and the intelligentsia have had to struggle mightily against good economic news.  Their whole vision of the world — and of themselves — is at stake.  It's not easy.  Even Americans in the bottom 20 percent in income have higher real incomes than in the past and such staples of middle class life as microwave ovens and motor vehicles are now common among "the poor."

Slaves to the Welfare State:  Obviously not everyone in New Orleans is a slave to the welfare state.  But on balance its residents have drifted since 1927 into the entitlements mentality:  abandonment of personal responsibility and individual initiative.  The socialist welfare state is a form of slavery, or more accurately, a sort of neo-feudalism in which the individual has no rights independent of the figurative "piece of ground" to which the political state has assigned him.

Promoting Dependence:  Congress has moved closer to passing legislation to bail out homeowners who are in trouble with their mortgages.  Yet again, the taxpayers will be forced to pay for other people's mistakes. … President Bush has said he'll veto a bailout bill if Congress sends him one.  He should.  Many Americans need to unlearn their belief that government is a nanny to catch them when they fall, and learn to define the phrase "moral hazard."

S.F. parking meters retooled to aid homeless.  Rather than tossing loose change into a panhandler's empty cup, San Francisco officials want you instead to slide your spare quarters and nickels into a homeless meter. … A handful of cities around the country, including Denver and Baltimore, have installed homeless meters in recent years.  And while the programs haven't necessarily been lucrative, some cities have seen less panhandling as a result.

The Poverty Hype:  Low-income people have sources of income that don't show up as taxable income such as sales of property like homes, cars, insurance policies redeemed, or the drawing down of bank accounts.  They might be headed by retirees or those temporarily between jobs, and thus their low income total doesn't accurately reflect their long-term status.

Will Hillary's 'Secretary Of Poverty' Solve Problems Of The Poor?  "I believe we should appoint a cabinet level position that will be solely and fully devoted to ending poverty as we know it in America," she solemnly intoned. … The media largely ignored her proposal but her former rival John Edwards applauded it.

The Editor says...
You remember John Edwards — the champion of the poor, who pays $400 for a haircut.  And didn't Lyndon Johnson say he was going to end "poverty as we know it" about 44 years ago?  Even the liberals don't believe poverty can be eliminated, which may be why the news media brushed off the idea.  Let history be your guide: Did the creation of the Department of Education solve all the public education problems -- or make them worse?  What about the Department of Energy?

Clinton Vows To End Poverty.  [Ending poverty as we know it in America] seems to me to be a rather ambitious undertaking, especially when you consider America has spent upwards of four trillion dollars of taxpayer money in the "war on poverty" since it was declared by Lyndon Johnson in 1964.  The current poverty rate, by government standards is only slightly lower than it was in 1963, and that is only because the rate is an arbitrary figure set by government.

Hooverville?  Nah, Just Reuterville!  What seems to have happened here is that [Dana] Ford heard about the tent city and went there with the idea of writing a story about how the housing problem is making people homeless.  When she arrived, she found zero factual evidence to support her thesis, but she was attached to it so she wrote her story anyway, and made the lack of evidence a throwaway line in paragraph 5.  She then rested her story on the prediction of an "activist" that it is "just a matter of time" before Ford's journalism comes true.

A poor way to measure poverty.  The official poverty measure counts only monetary income.  It considers anti-poverty programs such as food stamps, housing assistance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, Medicaid and school lunches, among others, "in-kind benefits" — and hence not income.  So, despite everything these programs do to relieve poverty, they aren't counted as income when Washington measures the poverty rate.

End to homelessness.  [Baltimore] Mayor Sheila Dixon unveiled yesterday [1/17/2008] a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, a goal she said the city is moving toward with the recent establishment of a large well-run winter shelter and by setting aside 100 housing vouchers for homeless adults and children.  Dixon described the plan, which was created by a committee of city business and social service leaders, as a "blueprint for a society where homelessness no longer exists."

The Editor says...
I predict that every bum on the east coast is about to head for Baltimore.

Our taxes now pay for most Arizona births.  More than half of Arizona's babies are born under the state health plan for the poor — a positive trend, in the view of public-health experts, while others see it as a drain on taxpayers.  The trend follows recent policy changes that allow more individuals and families to qualify for free or low-cost care, as well as the ever-increasing costs of private health insurance.

The Editor says...
How could an increase in poverty be "a positive trend"?

Progressive?  No sooner had the Census Bureau released its annual survey showing the poverty rate for 2005 was unchanged at 12.6% while real median household income rose by 1.1 %, than than the Democrats started complaining about income inequality.

The Problem with Obama's Father's Day Speech:  The problem of fatherless families is the problem of mothers as well as absent fathers.  Children born out of wedlock, after all, are born because a woman decides that a good father is not that important.  The prior irresponsibility is not these young men, but the young woman who decides to have sex with them, intending or assuming that society, rather than a husband, bear the costs of her pregnancy.

Anti-poverty vapors:  Everybody knows President Bush and the Republican Congress have chopped poverty spending to finance massive tax cuts for their wealthy friends. … Once again, what "everybody knows" turns out to be false.  Heritage Foundation budget analyst Brian Riedl actually looked at social spending under Republican control.  What he finds is as astonishing as it is counterintuitive:  Under the mean, nasty, coldhearted Republicans, expenditures on the poor have zoomed to record levels.  In 2004, 16.3 percent of the federal budget went to anti-poverty efforts.  This figure never has been higher.

One in 15 plays the banjo and chews tobacco.
One in 6 West Virginians is on food stamps.  About one in every six West Virginians gets food stamps, the highest level of participation in at least 30 years.  Amid rising food and fuel costs, the assistance is becoming worth less and less. … Last month, 274,487 state residents received food stamps.

Low-Tax States Cut Poverty Rates:  Study.  Fiscally prudent states appear to be winning the war on poverty, according to a recent study by the Goldwater Institute, which found low-tax and low-spending states are more successful at reducing poverty than their high-tax, high-spending counterparts.  The 10 states with the lowest tax burdens saw a 13.7 percent decline in poverty during the 1990s (more than double the national average), according to the study.  Meanwhile, the 10 states with the highest tax burdens suffered an average poverty rate increase of 3 percent.  The poverty rate dropped nationwide during the decade, the report notes.

Michigan may be first state to issue food stamps twice a month.  Michigan could become the first state in the nation to issue food stamps twice a month, making fresh produce and meat more available and giving grocery workers steadier hours.  The state's 1.2 million food stamp recipients — the highest number ever — now have their benefits added to a debit card within the first 10 days of the month.  They then spend those dollars early in the month, typically in poorer, urban areas where residents may have limited transportation.  Each recipient gets an average $88 a month.

Ohio food stamp recipients have doubled since 2001.  Nearly one in 10 Ohioans now receives food stamps, the highest number in the state's history.  Caseloads have almost doubled just since 2001, with 1.1 million residents now collecting benefits, according to the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services.

Homeless activists will always be with us?  On the face of it, hats off to Eric Montanez, age 21, who aims to feed the homeless.  But instincts are not enough.  Montanez was arrested — not for feeding the poor as such, but for feeding the poor in a public park.  Public parks are for the "public," but not for certain members of the public to turn into homes.  Houses are for homes.  Parks are ... Well, parks could be said to be for the "homeless," these days.  That's where many homeless people like to sleep.

She gave him burger; he gave her beating.  The homeless man, David Craig, 41, was outside of the fast-food chain after being told to leave a nearby liquor store.  MacLaren gave Craig the cheeseburger as he was lying down in a parking spot outside the restaurant.  Craig shouted he didn't want the burger, just money….

Orlando's homeless laws spark debate.  At Lake Eola park, there is much beauty to behold: robust palms, beds of cheery begonias, a cascading lake fountain, clusters of friendly egrets and swans, an amphitheater named in honor of Walt Disney.  Then there are the signs.  DO NOT LIE OR OTHERWISE BE IN A HORIZONTAL POSITION ON A PARK BENCH...

Ottawa's homeless fight for right to sleep in underpass.  A panhandlers' rights group in Ottawa is preparing a human rights complaint against the City of Ottawa after it put up a fence to stop them from sleeping in a downtown pedestrian underpass.

The Editor says...
What's this?  There's a "panhandlers' rights group in Ottawa"?  Who bankrolls an organization that promotes and defends Canada's parasites?

New York Times lowballs homeless numbers.  Estimates of the number of homeless have a long history of politics trumping accuracy.  When President Reagan was in office, the American media often quoted made-up figures from "advocates" along with the mantra that many of us were "one paycheck away" from living on the streets ourselves.  But yesterday [1/2/2007], the New York Times published a surprisingly low estimate of the number of homeless.  But this time, the estimate was for the number of homeless in France.

Study shows 744,000 homeless people in U.S..  There were 744,000 homeless people in the United States in 2005, according to the first national estimate in a decade.  A little more than half were living in shelters, and nearly a quarter were chronically homeless, according to the report Wednesday [1/10/2007] by the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group.

30th Anniversary for the Homeless.  Thirty years ago, in the case of Lessard v. Schmidt, ... the Supreme Court ruled that mentally handicapped individuals who were not dangerous could not be held against their will in mental hospitals.  So those hospitals emptied, then closed, sending untold numbers of mentally handicapped folks onto the street.

Liberal or not, Austin ponders a ban on panhandling.  John Henry Smith insists he makes an honest living begging for money at intersections in the state's capital.  In a few hours, with his swollen left leg exposed, he can make $70 or $80.  "It helps to be sick," said the 49-year-old Lubbock native, who was shot in the leg 30 years ago.

Enough is enough,' San Francisco says of the homeless.  San Francisco — the liberal, left-coast city conservatives love to mock — could be undergoing a transformation when it comes to homeless people.  Although the city would still be a poor choice for a pep rally for the war in Iraq, indications are that residents have had it with aggressive panhandlers, street squatters and drug users.

Anti-Poverty Spending Grows.  Republicans claimed Congress is again serious about controlling spending, while Democrats asserted tax cuts and "cuts" in spending would hurt the poor and benefit the rich. … "Anti-poverty spending has grown 42 percent in the last four years and will continue to grow in future years," [Brian] Riedl said.  "We'll go from growth of 39 percent over the next five years to growth of 38 percent in these programs. … If that's slashing spending, we've gotten addicted to massive spending increases."

Los Angeles introduces $100 million effort to combat homelessness.  It was a special day for the "friends and neighbors" of the Los Angeles Mission, a center for transients near Skid Row, because lunch was being provided by the In-N-Out Burger chain.  The shelter's "friends and neighbors" are about 1,200 of the estimated 90,000 homeless people in Los Angeles County, the largest concentration of homeless in the nation.

A Whiff of Truth.  These poor people aren't on the street because of mean old conservatives, the economy or stingy taxpayers.  You could hand them a rent-free apartment and a simple job requiring no more than a few hours of their time per week and it wouldn't do any good.  The apartment would be trashed or abandoned within days, if not hours.  The job would be more than their shattered brains could handle.  Sick people are wandering our streets, whether the reasons are mental illness or addiction.

Grand jury sees $500 million in fraud.  Calling Los Angeles County child-care programs an "ATM for thieves," the county grand jury on Thursday [6/29/2006] said welfare recipients and their friends and relatives are defrauding taxpayers of $500 million a year, much more than previously estimated.  Failure of the county Department of Public Social Services to verify that welfare-to-work recipients qualify for child care has resulted in about half of the $1.1 billion CalWORKS child-care program being lost to fraud, jurors wrote in their report.

A dangerous obsession:  Part II.  Who are these minority of the world's population who own a majority of the world's wealth?  They are the population of the United States, Western Europe, Japan and a few other affluent countries.  How did these particular people come to possess so much more wealth than other people?  They did it the old-fashioned way.  They produced the wealth that they own.  You might as well ask why bees have so much more honey than other creatures.

A dangerous obsession:  Part III.  Any number of schemes for redistributing wealth have ended up redistributing poverty in a number of countries.  "Progressives" in the media and among academics and intellectuals claim to be interested in ending poverty but the production of more output is the only way to end poverty for millions of people.

A dangerous obsession:  Part IV.  Transferring wealth from 300 million Americans and spreading it out over more than two billion people in India and China is not going to do much.  But enabling more people in India or China to become more productive can help them and us — and has.  Multinational corporations are among the biggest spreaders of greater productivity to Third World countries and they usually pay higher wages than local employers.  But moral exhibitionists who are hot for the redistribution of other people's money are among the biggest critics of multinational corporations.

Housing costs push California's poverty rate to third highest.  California has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation after the cost of living is taken into account, according to a survey released today [5/11/2006] by the Public Policy Institute of California.  The official measure, which looks at income and the number of people in a family, says the state has the 15th highest poverty rate in the country, with 13.3 percent of its residents below the federal threshold.

The End of America As We Know It:  Despite the fact that we have a national debt that exceeds 9 trillion dollars, an amount that comes out to almost $30,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States — there are screams of outrage if the rate of growth in any of this country's entitlement programs is cut and there are massive pushes to hand out even more goodies, not to the poor, but to the middle-class.

The storm over poverty:  NAACP President Bruce Gordon praised Bush's speech to the nation this week, but pushed for government to go further, to usher in utopia:  "Now what we need to see is whether he will use the George Bush-style conviction to eliminate poverty."  Eliminate poverty ... with a stroke of the pen?  Is it really that easy?

Myths of rich and poor:  There is a fundamental difference between seeking the truth and scoring points.  In politics, the truth is strictly optional and that also seems to be true in parts of the media.

Divorce:  The Cause of the Shrinking Middle Class.  The average middle class family cannot support two households (and two divorce attorneys) without falling out of the middle class.

Why Poverty Doesn't Rate.  A wealth of evidence shows that those who are counted as poor today have dramatically higher living standards than their counterparts in the 1960s, when the poverty rate was originally devised.

Immigration vs. gate-crashing.  For most of our history, there was a guarantee that immigrants would come here to work.  The alternative was starvation.  With today's welfare state, there's no such guarantee.  People can come here, not work and not starve because the welfare state guarantees that they can live off the rest of us.

The Welfare Debate We're Not Having:  It turns out — apparently to the surprise of many on the left — that working for a living is better than subsisting as a parasite on government handouts.

Is this any way to help the homeless?  Mary Baker and Ruth Neikirk love to cook.  What's more, they love to cook for poor people.  They do it frequently, preparing meals at home and bringing them to their church in Virginia. … The people they cook for love it too.  But there's a problem.  It was "criminal activity."  The Fairfax County health department points out that — horrors — Mary and Ruth are actually preparing food and serving it to people!  Without a license!

The Welfare-Reform Miracle.  Welfare caseloads have dropped 60 percent since the passage of welfare reform.  Was that just the result of a strong economy?  No.  Caseloads didn't decline significantly in any of the eight periods of economic expansion from the 1950s to the mid-1990s.  From 1953 to 1994, the number of families on welfare dropped in only five of those years, and dropped two years in a row only once.  By 2005, welfare caseloads had been declining for a stunning 11 straight years.  Work requirements, and the message sent by reform that dependence is unacceptable, got former recipients into the work force.

Self-reliance matters.  [One] example of admirable legislation that promotes self-reliance is the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.  The bill was initiated by conservative Republicans to replace the failed social program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children.  The new program — Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) — aimed to get poor parents off welfare and into paying jobs, thereby reducing child poverty and combating illegitimacy.  The results speak for themselves.

Clinton got it right on welfare reform.  Not everything has been reformed.  There is clearly more work to do.  The 1996 law affected only the basic welfare program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).  But dozens of other welfare entitlements, such as food stamps and Medicaid, still operate under the old rules.  And while the out-of-wedlock birth rate is no longer skyrocketing, it is still far too high — as are the poverty and social chaos it begets.

Why Welfare Reform Worked:  The 1996 law replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC) — traditional welfare — with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF).  Congress created AFDC in 1935 as part of the landmark Social Security Act, which also included unemployment insurance and old-age assistance.  In an era when few women worked, AFDC was intended to provide modest income support for widows and their children.  By the 1980s, it had evolved into something else:  guaranteed payments for single, often never-married mothers.  Critics argued that the program bred dependence, weakened self-reliance and rewarded out-of-wedlock births.

How Welfare Reform Worked:  Welfare reform celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, and celebrates seems the right word.  As most readers know, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) ended the much-despised Depression-era federal entitlement to cash benefits for needy single mothers, replacing it with short-term, work-oriented programs designed and run by individual states.  Its success has surprised just about everyone, supporters and naysayers alike.

The Entitlement Mess.  Congress is spending us into a hole.  We hear about the cost of earmarks and the Iraq war.  But what about "entitlements"?  That's the government's ironic term for programs that transfer money from people who earned it to people who didn't.  Entitlement?  How can you be entitled to someone else's money?  To finance "entitlement" programs, the government threatens force against the taxpayers who provide the money.

Apocalypse Not:  Welfare reforms's success is a lesson in modesty.  Welfare reform turned 10 this week, and more remarkable than its near-total success is the near-total amnesia that seems to have gripped its one-time opponents. … When Bill Clinton signed the bill ending a federal entitlement to welfare, a leading liberal newspaper called it "nasty," "atrocious" and "odious" — adding with typical nuance that "the children will suffer the most."

Welfare reform at ten.  Welfare reform was associated with a sustained pause in the growth of illegitimacy, which does hurt children.  But it has not reversed the long-term trend toward more children born outside of marriage.

Curing poverty or using poverty?  People on the political left make a lot of noise about poverty and advocate all sorts of programs and policies to reduce it but they show incredibly little interest in how poverty has actually been reduced, whether in China or anywhere else.

Poverty IQ:  Po' vs. broke.  I'm delighted to hear people jawboning about poverty again, even if it took a couple of hurricanes to get us to do it.  But sometimes I wonder how many people know what poverty is.

Book Explains Why the Good Old Days Are Now.  Most Americans who are considered poor today have access to a quality of housing, food, heath care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the superrich Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers did not enjoy in their day.

The Nanny State of the Union:  The fact that such burgeoning government interventionism in state, community and private affairs is beyond the constitutional pale goes without saying. For the Founders, dependence on government in private and public life was to be avoided at all costs — such dependence, as they rightly saw it, being the root of bondage.

How Washington will spend your taxes in 2006.  Nearly half of the spending on low-income programs subsidizes state Medicaid programs that provide health services to poor families.  Other low-income spending includes:  Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), food stamps, housing subsidies, child-care subsidies, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and low-income tax credits.  Despite recent rhetoric about "cuts for poor," anti-poverty spending now tops 3 percent of GDP for the first time ever.

 Editor's Note:   People with low income pay little or nothing in taxes and do not need or deserve tax credits, especially if they receive other goods and services from the government.

Man pleads guilty to food stamp fraud.  A man charged in Florida with having ties to a terrorist organization pleaded guilty Friday [6/16/2006] to processing more than $1.4 million in phony food stamp transactions at a grocery store he once owned.  Hatem Fariz, 33, pleaded guilty to wire fraud and money laundering.  In exchange for his plea, federal prosecutors dropped eight other counts.

The Katrina experiment:  The common denominator of low-income-housing programs over these last 40 years is that they have been consistent failures.  Yet, despite this indisputable fact, today's social-policy gurus persist in search of the magic government low-income-housing program, rather than appreciating that the problem has been, and is today, government interference in private lives.

A Very Late Checkout.  After being flown [to New York City] for free back in September, [Theon] Johnson's been at the Holiday Inn since Super Bowl Sunday.  On April 21, the hotel served Johnson with three notices of occupancy termination, saying that it would begin court proceedings if he wasn't out by May 9.  He wasn't, so it did.  If the court boots him, Johnson could end up in one of the city's homeless shelters.  He's been broke for over a month now.  FEMA sent him $9,000 in housing aid, but he spent it all on booze, cigarettes, some clothes, and food — partying, mostly.  "I spent my money just the way I wanted, and I think [FEMA] should send me some more," he says.

The Editor cries out in frustration ...
Here's an example of a person who will be a freeloader and a sponge for the rest of his life.  If there's a government "No Fly" list at the airport, why isn't there a "No Handouts" list at the homeless shelters?  It would be cheaper to buy this man a one-way ticket to another country.  Or at least to Guam or Puerto Rico or somewhere other than a New York City hotel!

More about Hurricane Katrina and the rise of the welfare state.

Libertarianism and Poverty:  This essay outlines a libertarian approach to poverty.  No, it's not "Leave them in the gutter."  It's an approach that tries to be pragmatic and compassionate.

The 2005 Index of Dependency:  Benjamin Franklin wrote that "the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it," and observed that the growing welfare system in England removed "the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving [the poor] a dependence on somewhat else than a careful accumulation [of wealth] during youth and health.

Forging a healthy BOND:  "Each year government spends over $200 billion on means-tested aid to families with children; three-quarters of this aid flows to single-parent families," [Robert] Rector testified before Congress last February.  "Children raised without a father in the home are more likely to experience:  emotional and behavioral problems, school failure, drug and alcohol abuse, crime and incarceration."

Bunks for drunks.  An experimental social-service project rewards chronic alcoholics with room and board, no strings — or help — attached.

Apartments Welcome Homeless Alcoholics.  When Brian Steik lived on the streets, the government spent tens of thousands of dollars on emergency room visits and other services to keep the alcoholic alive.  Now social-service agencies are conducting an experiment:  Offering Steik and dozens of other homeless drinkers subsidized apartments where they can keep boozing at a fraction of the cost.

Why Not Abolish the Welfare State?  Since 1965 we have spent $5 trillion on the War on Poverty, measured in 1992 constant dollars.  Yet the poverty rate is higher today than it was the year the War on Poverty began.  How can we spend so much and achieve so little?  One reason is that most of the money we spend doesn't go to poor people.  It goes to nonpoor people who work in the welfare-poverty industry.  Medicaid dollars go to doctors and hospitals; food stamp dollars go to the agricultural industry; housing subsidies go to landlords; and legal service dollars go to lawyers.

Since we're talking about race and class…  Since the days of the Great Society, the U.S. Government has thrown literally trillions of dollars at the poor.  It undoubtedly helped some and it indisputably hurt others.  The people it hurt most are poor blacks, helping to erode social and family bonds.  We are told, for example, that out-of-wedlock births are a uniform cultural phenomenon these days.  This is simply a lie.  Seventy percent of blacks are born out of wedlock, most of them poor. … Upper-income women overwhelmingly wait to get married before they have their kids.

Free Lunch:  Title I's formula for determining aid — and its recipe for fraud:  The process to qualify for a free lunch comes down to parents self-reporting their income on a form that is turned in to their local school.  Federal free-lunch program administrators argue that the program has little potential for abuse because "the worst that happens is a kid gets a free lunch."  Federal free-lunch data, however, are used as one of the main poverty indicators for school districts and are linked to many other local, state, and federal funding streams.  So any fraud in the free-lunch program is quickly multiplied.

Cronyism 101:  The Perks of Being "Disadvantaged".  The "Disadvantaged Business Enterprise" program, run by the U.S. Department of Transportation and adopted by states and cities across the country, is one of the most atrociously corrupt government endeavors in existence.  Opportunists of all colors have used the racial set-aside law to win billions of dollars worth of federal contracts for themselves and their friends under the guise of being "victims."

Work pays!  Those for whom indignation is a way of life often inform us of the fact that families or households in the top 10 or 20 percent in income make far more money than people in the bottom 10 or 20 percent in income.  What they almost never inform us of are how much money they are talking about and how many people in these different brackets actually work.

Liberals and class:  If this is a class-ridden society denying "access" to upward mobility to those at the bottom, why is it that immigrants can come here at the bottom and then rise to the top?  One obvious reason is that many poor immigrants come here with very different ambitions and values from that of poor Americans born into our welfare state and imbued with notions growing out of attitudes of dependency and resentments of other people's success.

Only in America.  What are we to make of people who preach pessimism and doom to people — telling them that they're poor because others are rich or telling blacks that they'll never make it because of societal racism?  What are we to make of politicians, media pundits and college professors who preach the politics of envy — telling people lies that the rich became rich off the backs of the poor?

Liberal emotion vs. Conservative logic:  It takes a lot more integrity, character, and courage to be a conservative than it does to be a liberal.  That's because at its most basic level, liberalism is nothing more than childlike emotionalism applied to adult issues. … Look at Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty," which did nothing to reduce the poverty rate despite the trillions that were spent; however, it did help drive the illegitimacy rate among black Americans from 22 percent in 1960 to 70% in 2005.

Ammunition for poverty pimps:  Since President Johnson's War on Poverty, controlling for inflation, the nation has spent $9 trillion on about 80 anti-poverty programs.  To put that figure in perspective, last year's U.S. GDP was $11 trillion; $9 trillion exceeds the GDP of any nation except the U.S.  Hurricanes Katrina and Rita uncovered the result of the War on Poverty — dependency and self-destructive behavior.

Welfare State Continues to Grow:  When President Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty more than 30 years ago, he announced it was an investment that would repay its cost to society many times over.  Since that time, the United States has "invested" $7.95 trillion (in constant 1999 dollars) in programs that provide cash, food, housing, and medical and social services to poor and low-income Americans.  By contrast, the cost to the United States of fighting World War II was $3.2 trillion (also in 1999 dollars).  The cost of the War on Poverty has been more than twice the price tag for defeating Germany and Japan in World War II, after adjusting for inflation.

Pushing a formula for getting poor.  No one can devise a formula for getting rich.  But I can devise a formula for getting poor.  Don't work.  Convince yourself that your life reflects the decisions of others and not yours.  Be the perennial victim.  This is the toll that the welfare state has taken on blacks.  It introduced a culture of poverty.

More class warfare.  A key element of the John Kerry-John Edwards campaign is an us-versus-them theme, where "us" are the poor and middle class and "them" are the greedy rich.  Edwards famously characterized this dichotomy as "Two Americas" during his run for the Democratic nomination.  The clear implication of the Democrats' message is that the rest of us would somehow be better off if the rich were worse off.

We really are better off.  The media's reporting about poverty is misleading too.  It's true that the official poverty rate has risen lately.  Some people do line up at food banks.  But what Americans call poverty is totally different from what it's meant through most of history.  A "poor" man at a food bank told me he had "the normal things":  cable TV, a microwave — the "normal things" that not even rich people used to have.

Silence on Welfare Reform:  What may be most striking about the current welfare debate may be the remarkable absence of journalistic interest in the topic.  In fact, the news media's silence speaks volumes, testifying to the emergence of a broad new consensus surrounding a law that was vilified by opponents when it was originally passed.

Illegitimacy is the Major Cause of Child Poverty.

Welfare reform fantasyland:  Finally, the federal government has stopped subsidizing families to keep fathers out of the household.  It only took a half-century and millions of broken families but the government finally got it.  But there are 70 other federal welfare programs.

Is It Wrong to Require Work in Exchange for a Welfare Check?:  "It's too bad that Congressman Rangel sees getting something for nothing as being more noble than having to put in an honest day's work for it," said Project 21 member Michael King.  "As opposed to sitting on their hands and doing nothing, residents are asked to give a portion of one day in exchange for receiving housing.  What's the problem?  Oh, I forget — this gives Congressman Rangel and his compatriots something else to point to at election time."

Make Welfare Mothers Work:  In the spring of 1994, the last full year of welfare as we knew it, 112,000 Massachusetts families were on the dole.  In the spring of 2001, the caseload stands at 41,500 — a reduction of 63 percent.  So spectacular has the success of welfare reform been that it is easy to forget how bitterly — and with what moral posturing — it was opposed.

Daring to Question The Welfare State:  Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, in an interview with Financial Times, said, "Able-bodied adults should save enough on a regular basis so that they can provide for their own retirement and, for that matter, health and medical needs." Shocking!

Poor Before Welfare.  Before the rise of the welfare state, Americans of all classes shared a deep aversion to dependence on either private organized charity or governmental relief.  Indeed, there was a great stigma in the folk culture attached to any form of what might be called hierarchical relief (relief in which those who control the purse strings are higher on the socio-economic scale than the recipients).

What is poor?  Many poor people today own appliances that were considered luxuries when I grew up, and some would still be considered luxuries today.  For example, 91% of those in the lowest 10% of households — all of whom are officially poor — own color TVs; 74% own microwave ovens; 55% own VCRs; 47% own clothes dryers; 42% own stereos; 23% own dishwashers; 21% own computers; and 19% own garbage disposals.

 Editor's Note:   The "poor" seem to always have money for cigarettes, beer and lottery tickets.  Even the poorest of the poor sometimes buy wine.

 Excellent:   Understanding Poverty in America:  For most Americans, the word "poverty" suggests destitution:  an inability to provide a family with nutritious food, clothing, and reasonable shelter.  But only a small number of the 35 million persons classified as "poor" by the Census Bureau fit that description.  While real material hardship certainly does occur, it is limited in scope and severity.  Most of America's "poor" live in material conditions that would be judged as comfortable or well-off just a few generations ago.

The productive vs. the unproductive:  Today, more than 98 percent of American homes have a telephone, electricity and a flush toilet.  More than 70 percent of Americans own a car, a VCR, a microwave, air conditioning, cable TV, and a washer and dryer.  In 1900, no homes had the modern conveniences of today.  Today's poor Americans have choices that yesterday's millionaires could have only dreamt of, such as cell phones, computers and color television sets.

$9 Trillion Didn't End Poverty — What to Do?  Nine Trillion dollars has been spent fighting the "war on poverty".  Yet, as the Census Bureau just reported, poverty in America is up.  So what do the candidates propose we do?  Isn't it time that one of the candidates admit we cannot spend our way out of poverty?

Liberal Activists Demand "Meaningful" Welfare Reform:  A "who's who" of liberal activists descended on Washington, D.C., March 25, [2002] to publicize their anti-poverty plan.  They want poverty reduction to be the main focus of welfare reauthorization, and they plan to say it loudly — with protests.

Jacko and Snoop Dogg's America.  Michael Jackson's father is blaming — what else? — American "racism" for his ghoulish son's persistent legal and personal problems.

 Editor's Note:   The article above is replete with charts and footnotes, as well as a number of surprising statistics.  For example, ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.  Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.  Seventy-three percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a third have an automatic dishwasher.

Government, Poverty and Self-Reliance:  One of the saddest chapters in American history is one from our own times, and it's the well-documented tragedy of what decades of federal programs have done to black families in our inner cities.  Charles Murray's pivotal book, "Losing Ground," told that story in a compelling way and sparked huge changes in federal welfare policy.  So much destruction of lives might have been avoided if the presidents and congresses of the 1960s and 1970s had been of the same mind as President Andrew Johnson was when he vetoed a bill to extend the Freedman's Bureau in 1866.  In his veto message, he noted, "A system for the support of indigent persons in the United States was never contemplated by the authors of the Constitution; nor can any good reason be advanced why, as a permanent establishment, it should be founded for one class or color of our people more than another."

The Black Family:  40 Years of Lies.  Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers.  Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty.  They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children.

Self-inflicted poverty:  Did you learn that the United States is rich because we have bountiful natural resources?  That has to be nonsense.  Africa and South America are probably the richest continents in natural resources but are home to the world's most miserably poor people.  On the other hand, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and England are poor in natural resources, but their people are among the world's richest.

Poverty That Defies Aid.  Between 1960 and 2005, foreign aid worth more than $450 billion, inflation adjusted, poured into Africa.  Result?  Between 1975 and 2000, African gross domestic product per capita declined at an average annual 0.59 percent rate. … Foreign aid to Africa has also enabled government officials to embezzle large amounts of money and misspend much on loss-making projects.

This is real poverty...
Poor Haitians Resort to Eating Dirt.  About 80 percent of people in Haiti live on less than $2 a day and a tiny elite controls the economy.

The Cos again.  Yesterday's gross material poverty among blacks is all but gone.  In all too many cases, it has been replaced by the worse kind of poverty — poverty of the spirit.

Vanderbilt professor who was born into poverty calls for end to affirmative action:  Carol Swain grew up in a poor black family of 12 children, a family that had to carry water up a steep hill to their rural Virginia shack to run the washing machine or take baths.  Years later, she is an award-winning political scientist — and an author whose name and opinions probably will become more familiar in the next few months.

Sweden to rein in generous welfare.  Sweden was poised to enact controversial cutbacks to its generous unemployment benefits system as early as last night [12/21/2006], bringing thousands of people on to the streets in defence of the country's long tradition of a welfare safety net.

Poverty Does Not Cause Crime.  In all my years covering court, I don't ever recall a defence lawyer claiming that his or her client committed a particular crime because of poverty.  All sorts of explanations crop up during sentencing submissions, including addiction, mental illness, childhood abuse and abysmal coping skills.  Defence lawyers, however, do not pin their hopes for a light sentence on the poverty-causes-crime argument.  It's untrue and judges won't buy it.



How many trillions of dollars have been spent on Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty?"

Estimates below are from what appear to be reliable sources, as opposed to anonymous bloggers, letters to the editor, and other wild guesses by unknown authors.

5 trillion:  Robert Sirico, 1995.
5 trillion:  John C. Goodman, Gerald W. Reed, Peter S. Ferrara, 1994.
5.1 trillion:  Robert Rector, 1993.
5.3 trillion:  Institute for Public Accuracy, 1999.
5.4 trillion:  William F. Lauber, 1995.
5.4 trillion:  John C. Goodman, 1996.
5.4 trillion:  Michael Tanner, 1996.
5.4 trillion:  Alice Klimkoski, 2007.
5.429739 trillion:  Jan Brauner, 2005.
6.6 trillion:  George F. Will, 2005.
6.6 trillion:  Rush Limbaugh.
6.98 trillion:  Leon Felkins, 2001.
7 trillion:  Anthony Salas.
7 trillion:  Adam Young, 2002.
8.9 trillion:  Jenifer Zeigler, 2004.
9 trillion:  Michael Hampton, 2006.
9 trillion:  Walter Williams, 2005.
9.1 trillion:  Harry Browne.
8 to 10 trillion:  Jerome R. Corsi and Kenneth Blackwell, 2006.
10 trillion:  Steven Malanga, 2004.
10 trillion:  Jerry De Angelis, 2006.
11 trillion:  Robert Rector, 2007.
Over 11 trillion:  Bill Steigerwald, 2007.

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