Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility

Assistance to the poor in this country suffers from three major problems:
1. It's designed to serve as a safety net instead of a ladder to self sufficiency. Programs should taper off as income improves instead of shut down entirely as soon as some arbitrary threshold has been passed. Those thresholds trap people at certain income levels because they can not afford to lose financial aid.
2. It is poorly funded and massive holes exist in the current safety net. Money should be saved by improving opportunities for the poor, not by forcing them to choose between medicine and food/heat/shelter.
3. We currently have a complicated and confusing patchwork of band aids instead a single comprehensive program designed to help people recover from personal disasters (major mental or physical illness/injury, loss of job, etc...).

I don't know where you get your numbers from and if they are on the correct context, but I can't argue with anything said in this document, granted I just skimmed through it quickly. I like that it distinguishes between equal opportunity and not provide for equal outcome. This is probably the biggest divide currently in our country: everybody believes they are entitled to a piece of the pie whether they worked for it...or not.

Mr. Surdi-Great share; you make some interesting points; would you be willing to share the source of the percentages you detailed? My perception is that some ambiguity lies with the words, "already working", "some way" and "very small percent" that a more detailed understanding of these statistics would resolve. That said (and having read the document), I can't disagree that there's a strong "political" side; three months to provide substantive answers to complex administrative problems might be overly optimistic.

Though I'm solidly "conservative" on most policies, I'm admittedly "Moderate" on most economic issues. Frankly, I believe there are many Americans who are limited in their ability to provide basic needs by factors not entirely within their immediate control, and advocate the use of tax revenues to help bridge the gap. However, I also believe (based on personal observations and readily apparent facts) that these programs are over or misused, and treat symptoms rather than provide cures.

The biggest issue with fiscal considerations is the sheer "weight" of the budget. When we consider our own personal finances, the answers are more easily arrived at owing to the fact that unlike the Government, we cannot simply "vote" ourselves more credit or more overdraft. Measures such as these might help "trim the hedges" and provide better insight into how money can be better applied...in my opinion.