The most sinister of all taxes is inflation. When you create money out of thin air to pay the bills, the value of the dollar goes down, and the poor and the middle class get hit with a higher cost of living. It is the most evil of all taxes. —Ron Paul
If you haven’t taken the time to learn econ and ensure your ideas don’t hurt people, you can’t claim to care about them. —Hannah Cox
It is not the poor who benefit the most from “the war on poverty” but the non-poor who benefit from employment in poverty programs. —Antony Davies
We have developed a poverty industry and a poverty bureaucracy. Both of them seek to perpetuate themselves, and yet the poverty rate remains the same year over year. The war on poverty is not dominated by the people who are poor but by the non-poor who benefit from employment in poverty programs. —Antony Davies
If the government had simply divided the 22 trillion dollars it spent on poverty since 1964 among all the poor people living in the United States since 1964, each person would’ve received more than $10,000 per year. —Antony Davies
In government, the worse an agency performs, the more money it can claim from a legislature. If state-run schools fail to educate children, then obviously they need more money… If the welfare state fails to reduce, or actually increases, poverty then obviously, say the bureaucrats, we need to expand welfare programs even further. —Thomas DiLorenzo, The Problem with Socialism
The greatest gains against poverty in the United States occurred when government was least involved. —Tom Woods
The only real cure for poverty is production. The way to maximize production is to maximize the incentives to production. —Henry Hazlitt
Government handouts actually perpetuate poverty by creating a culture of dependency. As welfare policy expert Robert Rector put it: The welfare system that has existed for the past thirty years may best be conceptualized as a system that offered each single mother with two children a “paycheck” of combined benefits worth an average of between $8,500 and $15,000, depending on the state. The mother had a contract with the government. She would continue to receive her “paycheck” as long as she fulfilled two conditions: 1. She must not work. 2. She must not marry an employed male.
Walter Williams: The greatest percentage of poverty is found in female-headed households. Over 70 percent of female-headed households are poor. A large percentage of poor people are children (17 percent); fully 85 percent of black children living in poverty reside in a female-headed household.
As early as 2010, 43% of all poor households owned their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio. Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. The typical poor American has more living space than the average non-poor individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. Ninety-seven percent of poor households have one or more color televisions — half of which are connected to cable, satellite or a streaming service. Some 82% of poor families have one or more smartphones. Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens and more than a third have an automatic dishwasher. Most poor families have a car or truck and 43% own two or more vehicles. —Walter Williams