Hello Herb7734,
It is good to hear from you.
Foreign aid is just a kickback machine for the looters. Donate materials and commodities if we feel it is in our countries interest to assist. Help engineer and build infrastructure. It’s hard to steal part of a dam or pier or highway and deposit it in an Elmer Fudd Acct.

Ineffective poverty programs?
Why those programs are effective ......poverty is thriving where those programs are targeting.

How about wealth programs for the poor.
Get rid of the victim mentality and adopt a victor mentality.

Incentives motivate. Scrap public education administrators and start from scratch. Pay the teachers and admin on results. Individual results. Not some subjective measurement. Make intelligence a “cool” trait. Encourage the individual.
Promote an ethical self interest. Make America Great Again.

The dirty little secret of the elites is that they are totally and completely dependent upon a slave class. They must have a slave class to support their looting. When feudal serfdom was no longer in vogue, they invented Marxist victimhood where they persuade people to abandon individual responsibility in favor of their own style of looting and blame it on "the rich". This is the heart of socialism - the institution of willing slavery.

Welcome back, Herb7734!!! It's nice to see you in the Gulch again!

In a setting where the individual creates his/her own success or failure, not everyone rises to the occasion to succeed or even tries. This is where there is the poor in the US.

Related: from the Imprimus link I posted,Rediscovering the Wisdom in American History.

"We are creatures with free wills and aspirations, not merely tumbleweeds at the mercy of large historical forces. Hope is a quality of soul, something that’s not quantifiable or explicable in strictly material terms. It is a consistent characteristic of this country that we have always sought to rise above or move beyond the conditions that are given to us at birth—something not true of every people. To be an American is to believe that the status we are born into is never the final word. We have a spirit of striving, a spirit of hope that goes back to our very beginnings"

The old saying also applies, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink"

My own experience with society's interfering with emancipating the poor from their status has two important incidents.

Years ago, my first ex-wife (may she rest in peace) was a teacher in a bad neighborhood in New York City. I was self-employed as a house-call physician for a while and made occasional visits to her classroom. One day, her class and others went on a field trip to Staten Island (a bus ride perhaps an hour away). I brought a half-gallon canteen full of water. After the children were outside playing for a while, I noticed that there was no opportunity for anyone to get a drink of water easily and ordered the children to stand in line and cup their hands and I would pour some water into each person's hands. They cooperated. Teachers later marveled at their obedience; I merely note that the teachers ignored their obvious needs and I didn't. Uncaring! The teachers union, permitting those idiots to oversee children, are part of the problem. Have you seen the practice questions for the PRAXIS test that is generally required to get a teacher's license? It's ridiculously easy. The unions want malleable idiots to be teachers, people easy ton control, people who will surrender union dues without dissent, children be damned.

More recently, I sent a DVD to the local prison in Maine hoping to reform pedophiles, aware that teaching children not to talk to strangers and locking up the child molesters though helpful aren't the only tactics to consider. It had conservative and libertarian principles. By way of "thanks," the Maine medical board insisted on my getting a mental-health evaluation to keep my medical license. I consider the response evidence that the Powers That Be want the disadvantaged to remain disadvantaged and the hated and disparaged to remain hated and disparaged. See http://www.harshman.name/brightwriter... for more information if you are interested.

And here I thought you were going to talk about san fransisco...Eden didn't have toilets yet so they shit on the streets...now ny is catching on...most of the poor are homeless cause they can't afford the taxes...take away all taxes, get the government out of businesses and Real Estate and BOOM!...no more poverty.

the govt's "war on Poverty" program has spent trillions of dollars on "poverty"...and has succeeded in creating more poverty...Obamacare was not designed to succeed, but to fail. so that govt could call for a total takeover...govt is not the solution...it is the problem...

In an objective sense, we have eliminated much of poverty. Our 'poor people living in shacks' are better off than the chief of a Paleolithic village. Agamemnon could not eat ice cream. The poor people of the future will live in mansions, but will still be poor relative to the rich people. It is all a question of technology.

Now, that being said, I agree with the other posts on this page about the misappropriation of our taxes.

Jan

We hear of tax havens overseas, fair share tax schemes, progressive taxation, and loan forgiveness. The critical concept to such slogans relies on equating fairness and balance. Fairness.. is an individual value judgment. Justice is societal, based in philosophical objectivity within and through unique circumstances though not from the "for me / for you" lens. If we want to have a balanced and just system of taxation, we must do away with this insane notion of "fairness" in favor of just tax practices. America ought to be the "tax haven" of the world.

In one word: because of the greed of the elite.

Their concern is to get their millions once close to power. Do you think they care about the constituents? The homeless masses in Silicon Valley, LA or San Francisco?

NAH!

The concern is only in the slogans that the sheeple buys wholesale.