We Spent $22 Trillion and We haven't budged on the Amount of Poor People in this Country?

I guess we lost the war on poverty because these numbers are staggering.

Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.

That is a LOT of money.

But today the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14 percent of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually shows that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years.

I guess people that are categorized as in poverty has changed since 1967.

According to government surveys, the typical family that Census identifies as poor has air conditioning, cable or satellite TV, and a computer in his home. Forty percent have a wide screen HDTV and another 40 percent have internet access. Three quarters of the poor own a car and roughly a third have two or more cars. (These numbers are not the result of the current bad economy pushing middle class families into poverty; instead, they reflect a steady improvement in living conditions among the poor for many decades.)

Those are some really nice items and I think part of it is because of our tax system. That earned income tax credit allows a poor person to get a big chunk of cash at tax time. Many of these people don't bank that money for a rainy day or buy an Vanguard S&P500 Index Fund or something. Instead they put a down-payment on a new car or truck or simply blow that money on a new LCD TV instead. I wonder how these numbers would look if the government just changed that lump sum tax credit to a monthly salary instead?

This part was interesting:

The intake of protein, vitamins and minerals by poor children is virtually identical with upper middle class kids. According to surveys by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the overwhelming majority of poor people report they were not hungry even for a single day during the prior year.

This is actually a good thing in my eyes. The greatest nation in the world should not have any citizen be hungry for any period of time. We should at least make sure that every American has a full belly day after day no matter what. I guess in this one thing you can say the war on poverty has one at least one battle.