In the United States—as in all of the world’s wealthier nations—ending poverty is not a matter of resources. Many economists, including Timothy Smeeding of the University of Wisconsin (and former director of the Institute for Research on Poverty) have argued that every developed nation has the financial wherewithal to eradicate poverty. In large part this is because post-industrial productivity has reached the point where to suggest a deficit in resources is laughably disingenuous. And despite the occasional political grandstanding against welfare, there is no policy, ideology or political party that is on the books as pro-starvation, pro-homelessness, pro-death or anti-dignity.
Yet, poverty continues to exist. In the U.S., for example, almost 15 percent of citizens (and almost 20 percent of children) live in poverty. Of those, slightly under 2 percent live on less than $2 per person per day.
The main problem is logistical. The current U.S. welfare systems take in trillions of dollars and provide fairly little utility on a dollar-for-dollar basis. There’s unhappiness on both sides of the political aisle—conservatives harrumph about “welfare queens” and liberals complain about the expensive drug testing required to collect welfare checks, for example. Welfare as it exists today is fragmented to the point of making effective oversight impossible, mired in red tape and inconsistent between cities, states and the federal government. And because of that, in the richest nation in the world, people starve.
http://www.newsweek.com/how-fix-pove...e-check-291583
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