Just bring in 100,000,000 more illegals and 3rd world "refuges". That will help the problem.

This should remind us that while lack of money is a symptom of poverty, poverty is not caused by a lack of money.

This gives one proof why so many remain on welfare. They can make more than being employed and earning a salary. Cut the amount waaaay down and I bet their get their bunns in high gear.

I have a friend who works in ER, and every day, people come in on welfare for treatment; they all have one or more cell phones, tattoos, body piercings, and they are all fat. When woman have babies for free, they demand a translater and a free bed to be near their babies that have health problems and have to stay at the hospital over an extended period of time. He said they take no responsibility at all, and they demand every thing. We need to vote conservative, people.

This is the amount spent, not how much these families receive. The paperwork is unbelievable, as well as the number of people hired to check on the people hired who do the work to support the people receiving benefits. Start with one dollar; by the time it makes it way through the federal and state bureaucracy to the person in need, it was been reduced to about 10 cents.

This is one of the reasons governors such as Perry in Texas request Medicaid be changed to block grants. You have federal workers writing the rules, then the state agencies have to figure out how to apply for the federal funds within the constraints of state laws. Then they dish those out to service providers, who hire people to provide services and services finally get to the people in need. You have 4 levels (at least) of oversight. Anyone who works in the field can suggest more efficient routing and monitoring.

Dang, I WORKED 40+ hours a week all last year and I didn't gross $60K.... Sounds like I would have done better financially to quit my job and go on welfare.

'This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year.'' - article. The perfect example of government waste. Guess where the difference is pocketed: costs from the humongous bureaucracy overseeing it all and WASTE and FRAUD.

Milton Friedman said it 30 years ago:

You can have open borders or a Modern Welfare state. Either Or. You cannot have both.

So where did all the money go?
You can assume the poor did not get most of it.

This should mean they are no longer poverty, unless of course, the bureaucrats kept the money. Could that have happened? /sic

Everybody in or near the 'hood knows that the EITC time of year is the time that the non-working or hardly working are flush with government cash. Cars, flat screens, jewelry, iphones, gold grills, laptops, all bought with the redistributed cash from the workers given to the takers with no strings attached. It's a culture, a way of life. It can't go on forever. The parasites eventually weaken and kill the host.

Layers upon layers of bureaucracy. Government programs only metastasize. This is exactly one of the big things we worry about with Obamadontcare!

So technically if they are consuming $60,000 they are no longer living in poverty.

It looks like the war on poverty is a real quagmire. Perhaps we should surrender now. It has been going on longer than Afghanistan./s I read another article in the weekly Standard by the same author saying that the US debt per person was $52,900 and going up fast. This welfare spending does not include Medicare and Social Security which people contribute to. This is causing more poverty not less. It is massively wasteful and should be banned completely for the federal govt. Politicians are like addicts, if they spend at all they will keep increasing spending uncontrollably till everything collapses. If a state collapses people can flee to another state. If the federation collapses there will be nowhere to flee!