“I am for doing good to the poor, but...I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed...that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
― Benjamin Franklin

No kidding! Here in Oregon, when I'm in the grocery line and someone ahead of me "pays" with their Oregon Trail Card (Welfare card), I'm SOOOOO tempted to shout "You're welcome!".

I would argue that poverty has gone way down, but for me the definition of poverty is living on less than 1,000 calories a day with a dirt floor hut with zero access to plumbing, electricity and basic medical services.. although I do know these conditions exist in the US, I know for a FACT 14% of the population of the US does not live like that. All we have done is gotten a skewed sense of what poverty actually is because we very, very rarely actually see true poverty.

The text of the article says true poverty has been going down since the war on poverty started.

Progressivism demands that society keeps doing the same thing over and over until something different happens, or the country implodes.