War on Poverty Over: We Won!

For years and years, Democrats have asked us to let them raise taxes so they can take care of "the poor."  They want us to think they're all warm and fuzzy and altruistic, but it's just another scam.  It's a scam because there are no poor people in America!

How do I know this?  I have a friend whose church wanted to do something for the poor.  Church people collected clothes, washed and ironed them, hung them up by size, and invited people to come get all the free clothes they wanted.

They had a lot of clothes.  When my friend walked in, he was blown away; there was a thousand bucks worth of shoes in the front hall.  Clothes were all over the place, nice garments that had hardly been worn.  My friend figured maybe $10,000 worth at retail.  "And," he tells me, "people have a lot more clothes at home they couldn't bring to church because we ran out of space."  They filled the church with clothes they didn't need and had to stop bringing them.

Church women put out snacks, coffee, and coke.  They got ready to take care of the poor.  And what happened?  Nobody came.

That's right, not one poor person showed up to get free clothes.

They'd put out posters.  In case people didn't have cars, they listed the church phone number and told people they'd drive them to the church.  Leaflets were passed out all over town.  Nobody called.  Nobody came.

Nobody needed free clothes.  Why?  Because there aren't any really poor people in America.  We're a rich country.  The average American garbage grinder eats better than 2/3 of the world's population.

But why do we read so much about the poor?  That's simple - we set up a bureaucracy to fight poverty and we give the bureaucrats a lot of money.  The bureaucrats spend some of our money setting up web sites like http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/poverty06/pov06hi.html to tell us how hard they fight poverty.

That site says, "The official poverty rate in 2006 was 12.3 percent, down from 12.6 percent in 2005."  Poverty going down sounds good to us, but it's bad news to bureaucrats who need poverty to justify their budget.  They added, "In 2006, 36.5 million people were in poverty, not statistically different from 2005."  They admit poverty is going down, but they claim it's not statistically significant, so they still need our money.

They couldn't resist adding, "The poverty rate in 2006 was lower than in 1959, the first year for which poverty estimates are available."  Poverty is lower than when they started measuring it, but that doesn't stop them asking for more money.  The Health and Human Services budget is at http://www.hhs.gov/budget/docbudget.htm which has a link to "Budget in Brief" which gives a neat little table.  This budget is in millions, so they're talking about $682 billion dollars in 2006 and $697 billion in 2008:

The bulk of the budget goes on Medicare and Medicaid; about 10% goes for fighting poverty.  We the People spent $68 billion dollars fighting poverty in 2006.  But what do they mean by poor?  There's a document at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/datawh/nchsdefs/povertylev.htm which says:

Poverty statistics are based on definitions originally developed by the Social Security Administration.  These include a set of money income thresholds that vary by family size and composition.  Families or individuals with income below their appropriate thresholds are classified as below the poverty level.  These thresholds are updated annually by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to reflect changes in the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers (CPI-U).  For example, the average poverty threshold for a family of four was $17,603 in 2000 and $13,359 in 1990.

Here's where the scam comes to light.  The bureaucrats define poverty in terms of "a set of money income thresholds."  A family of four people with income less than $17,603 in 2000 was "poor."

That sounds scanty, but they don't tell you that government payments are not counted as income.  The $17,603 does not include food stamps, rent supplements, heating subsidies, free medical care, or the negative income tax (Earned Income Tax Credit).  If you include everything we give the poor, you'll find that they aren't poor even by the bureaucrat's own definition.  That's why nobody came to my friend's church for free clothing.

The bureaucrats know this, which is why they're so careful not to include anything they or any other charity gives the poor when counting who's poor and who's not.

According to Dictionary.com, poverty is, among other things, "The state of being poor; lack of the means of providing material needs or comforts."  When was the last time somebody literally starved to death in the United States?  1933, maybe?  This happens all the time in Africa - that is true poverty.

We went to war on poverty.  We won!  There aren't any poor people left.  There is income inequality - obviously, many Americans have less wealth than many other Americans.  But even the poorest American is richer than most citizens of Third World nations.  In the United States, there aren't any truly poor people left.

But the bureaucracy goes on forever.