government entitlements making poverty grow? they are. and we ve had a half a century of this war on poverty. we ve spent 15 trillion dollars on this thing. and we have a high rate today, almost as high as it was a half century ago. even when times are good, david, the poverty rate doesn t fall very much. it encourages all the things that keep you in poverty such as having out of wedlock births and things like that. the only time poverty levels fell were in the 90s when you had on the state level poverty reform, welfare reform. then on the federal level it worked. today we re spend ago trillion dollars a year. 126 different programs. seven cabinet agencies, six independent agencies all for naught, most of it. rick, that 1996 act was a thing of beauty created in a bipartisan manner with a democrat president, republican congress. don t we need another dose of that? you know, you can always look on how to improve welfare. let s not miss a key statistic. as you pointed out, it was 2
into this week is that 40% of american school children are on free or subsidized lunches. 40%. that doesn t make sense. the reality behind that number is that half of those probably really need those free or subsidized lunches. we re subsidizing kids who don t need that help and what happens in the process is that the really poor kids don t get the services they need. so i think we should overhaul our system and focus better services on the people who really need. morgan, what also happens in the process is that you develop this culture of dependency. welfare dependency becomes an addictive narcotic. i say that, fdr said that, bill clinton said that. this isn t just republicans saying this. this goes across the board. it can become dependency as a result of welfare can become a very dangerous narcotic for our entire society. i think we re actually putting the cart before the horse here. one of the reasons we re seeing such a record high poverty rate
when you start dropping it, yeah, there may be incentive to get that job, but i got to tell you something, we spend so much money on all sorts of different stupid government programs. i m all for helping the poor. to mike s points, we re not giving them money to stir the economy. we re giving them money because they re hungry. i have to say to lizzie that was the greatest speech i ve ever hear you make and i absolutely mean that sincerely. thank you. morgan, is there not a danger, however w giving money to people who become dependent on that gift? of course, there could be that danger down the road. but again, the reason we have this high poverty rate is because we have a weak economy and we don t have enough jobs. focus on the jobs. then we can take care of welfare. i ve said it on this program before in the past. i think there is a lot of room to reform welfare. we can get creative. but let s focus on the keeping right now. it seems the more spend on it, the more poor peopl
toward small businesses to create jobs and not what the government think it is can cherry pick in the way of green energy jobs. i m not for this it takes a government village to create jobs. i do think that we have been helping poor people and we should. the reason why that the welfare rolls also dropped in the late 90s, because we were in a bubble era of a boom. and the food stamps do help child poverty. i think keep them for those kids, absolutely. i think that sometimes people are very humiliated, those people who are taking food stamps and getting unemployment benefit, they don t want a government life line. they want a job on their own of the they just want an opportunity. but it s we can t make a blanket statement that all people on welfare are bad. but i think you can make a blanket statement that there is a tendency to become dependent on welfare once it begins. it s a very dangerous tendency. republicans and democrats have noted it happens. it happens across all levels of
is actually because we don t have jobs. we don t have enough jobs and many of the jobs we do have are very poorly paying jobs. so i would make the argument that entitlements right now are something that s keeping the poverty rate from going even higher. there are a handful of reports that back me up, including the census report which showed if it wasn t for unemployment insurance and social security, the poverty rate would actually be 8% higher than it currently is. so yes, do we need to take a whack at things like welfare down the road? yes. but we need to focus on jobs first. just spent hundreds of billions of on guess what, a jobs program. some of these jobs, by the way, cost $500,000. if you lookup wind mill farm, for example, which were extravagant expenses that cost taxpayers much too much money, why don t we apply some of those jobs to some of the welfare recipients? because giving a welfare recipient a job is the best way to get them off of it. as kennedy said, why not dire