Getting yourself out of poverty may take a life time. Maybe even generational. If it’s your claim that people chose not to work because they could get more from the gov for not working, then who’s fault is it?

My first job out of school was for $8/hr and I had to drive 50 miles each way every day!! But it was a start. I knew I wouldn’t be there as a career but needed a bit of time on the resume. With that I got a better job, much better pay and commutte. And it snowballed from there. Along the way I had to deal with waaaaaay to much BS, insane bosses, conditions that today would be called pyschological torture (no exaggeration!), back stabbing co-workers, etc etc. But I kept at it knowing there was better things to come. That’s what a career is – the constant pursuit of doing better tomorrow than you did today.

Don’t cry about food stamps. When I was in HS I worked in a supermarket. I would see food stampers buy eggs and milk and bread on food stamps. Then buy cases of beer and soda, bags of chips and candy etc. paid for with a wad of cash to this day I have never held in my hands!! :-O

I stand by my previous statement:

The ["anti-poverty"] programs can at best be considered subsistence maintenance.

Name an anti-poverty program that is designed to turn poor people into rich people. I am unable to do so, perhaps some other reader can.

The food stamp program is classic subsistence maintenance. Incremental individual financial improvements result in incremental loss of food stamp benefits.

This is the Reagan approach, which ‘rewarded’ work by reducing welfare benefits dollar for dollar of earned income.

(Talk about exorbitant effective tax rates!)

And then conservatives were either dumbfounded or (more likely) considered it cultural failure when welfare recipients did the math and decided that working for ZERO marginal income was irrational.

Time and time again, the American people have proven themselves smarter than liberal politicians…and conservative ones too.

The point being that NO government program can EVER make someone “rich” who is currently poor. The INDIVIDUAL has to *work* at it. At best they can get a leg-up on the process but it may take them a life time of their own work to garner success. But it won’t happen waiting for yet another government program to get started.

Individual hard work is the ONLY way someone will achieve success even close to being “rich”. Not just for the gains from hardwork but the more important IMO lesson learned of the value of the achievement earned! IOW, someone who works for $1 million will appreciate it and manage it much more wisely than someone who is just given $1 million.

Indeed, the programs are designed so that recipients lose eligibility once they escape poverty, and long before they are able to become rich.

The programs can at best be considered subsistence maintenance.

And of course vast proportions of resources are skimmed off by government workers, so most of the expenditures to not reach the poor directly.

Not to mention that a considerable amount of the expenditure enriches the middle and higher classes.

Consider the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, ostensibly intended for the benefit of low and moderate income households.

CDBG money is distributed to local governments based on local population of low and moderate income households.

So when I lived in a town with a lot of CDBG money, it was mostly spent on subsidizing home purchase in targeted neighborhoods, and street work in the same targeted beighborhoods.

Since the low/mod residents of the targeted neighborhoods didn’t earn enough to be able to BUY homes, ALL of the CDBG home-buying subsidies went to newcomers who moved in from elsewhere, driving up property values (an explicit intention of the middle-class decisionmakers who allocated the funds) and displacing the low/mod existing residents of the targeted neighborhoods.

Since money is fungible, the CDBG funds spent on street work in the targeted neighborhoods merely replaced the funds which would have otherwise come from the town’s general fund…thereby allowing those not-spent general fund dollars to be used for other purposes in other neighborhoods.

So I strongly reject the premise that “War on Poverty” dollars are spent on the poor and consequently wasted.

No, the CDBG dollars (at a minimum) were spent for the benefit of the middle class, and the middle class got a high return on those dollars.

The poor lost bigtime, but calling those dollars money spent on the poor does not make them so.

I could have turned the $80K intil $120K+ over the next couple years since the markets ripped.

At least I had my fun for a while!

I didn’t notice your Nobel Prize winning lad reversing the bailout trend. Hell – he bought GM!

BTW, how much of that “greatest gap” do you blame the slackers for? Money just doesn’t fall out of the sky (wish it did). You have to go out and get it, not sit on your butt all day playing Xbox and WOW.