Poverty is defined by income rather than by standard of living. Government benefits don’t count as income. So, government could take the typical poverty-stricken family of four, put them up in the penthouse at the Ritz, feed them with free round-the-clock room service, chauffeur their kids to free public school in the hotel limo and give them free lunch at school, clothe them with with free stuff from the boutique in the lobby, give them unlimited pay-per-view TV and use of the fitness center and they would still be “poor” by government standards.
One note I found interesting some years back: Poor people spend, on average 1.5 times as much as the income they report. This is a government finding!
If “poverty” didn’t exist, Poverty Warriors (remember the War On Poverty?) would invent it. They don’t want to work themselves out of a job by ending poverty. That would be silly. No, they want to “serve” the poverty stricken. At least until they’re pension-eligible.
As is, poverty is defined in such a way as to ensure that there will always be “poor” people among us — job security for the bureaucrat class.
Fun With Numbers:
Let’s say that Jimmy Jones is in the lowest quintile (bottom 20%) income-wise. Jimmy invents a better mousetrap and sells the patent rights for millions of dollars. Suddenly, Jimmy is in the top quintile of earners and someone from the second quintile drops down into the lowest quintile to fill his place. The headline will read: “Rich Get Richer!”
Oh, and from the “Figures Lie and Liars Figure” department we learn that the the top “quintile” which is supposed to be one fifth of the population — has a lot more people in it than the lowest “quintile” does. This, of course, has the effect of exaggerating the differences between “rich” and “poor” incomes because politicians compare the top quintile’s income to that of the bottom quintile.
I remember back some years ago, (Carter administration?) they loosened the eligibility requirements for food stamps. This allowed more people to sign up. They then promptly pointed to the huge growth in Food Stamp recipients as proof positive that people were poorer than ever (except for the “rich,” of course) and that the Food Stamp program needed to be further expanded. This happened within the space of a year and a half or so.
I have to admit, I am, without fail, just a bit incensed when the folks in front of me at the supermarket pay for their T-bone or Porterhouse steaks and such with food stamps and then pay for their whiskey and cigarettes with the cash they didn’t need to spend on food.
If you subsidize something, you’ll get more of it. Government subsidizes poverty. Hence, we have more of it than we would without the subsidies.
Think of it this way, thanks to subsidies, more people can afford to be poor. Without the subsidies, they’d have to increase their incomes by getting jobs and such. But the pressure to do that is relieved by the subsidies we provide poor people. It makes “poverty” affordable to more people.